In this contribution I will present three very different passages from Plutarch’s vast oeuvre: The Consolation to his wife about the death of his beloved daughter, his picture of torture for the souls of the wicked as a retribution for their evil deeds in life in De sera numinis vindicta, and - on a more scientific note - Plutarch’s considerations about the mechanics of death in De facie in orbe lunae. These texts, if placed next to each other, show Plutarch as a versatile writer whose argumentations, even about matters of life and death, are bound to specific argumentative contexts: at times he treats afterlife with a pastoral note in soteriological contexts, at times with a more anthropological and even cosmological focus.