"In order to do all this we give the life stories of great men, the first great writer of which, Plutarch, has left us a wonderful store-house of great ideas and examples, showing how the life of the individual is the life of the state, and that where private standards are high or low, public morality is upheld or falls; thus it would be possible to trace much of the gradual break-down of the Roman military colonies to the example of "Mark Antony," and two such lives as those of Cato the Censor and Alcibiades will do much to teach future generations what good or evil one man can do for his times."

~"P.N.E.U. Principles As Illustrated by Teaching," The Parents' Review, 1899

Why Read Plutarch?

by George Grant

Note: This article is excerpted from the Ambleside Online website and linked here or use the link at the end to read it in its entirety.

Ambleside Online used the article by permission of George Grant of the King's Meadow Study Center.

The First "Book of Virtues"

"It was the primary textbook of the Greek and Roman world for generations of students throughout Christendom. It was the historical source for many of Shakespeare's finest plays. It forever set the pattern for the biographical arts. It was the inspiration for many of the ideas of the American political pioneers--evidenced by liberal quotations in the articles, speeches, and sermons of Samuel Adams, Peyton Randolph, Patrick Henry, Samuel Davies, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Henry Lee, John Jay, George Mason, Gouverneur Morris, and Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, after the Bible it was the most frequently referenced source during the Founding era. For these and a myriad of other reasons, Plutarch's Lives is one of the most vital and consequential of all the ancient classics.

Written sometime during the tumultuous days of the second century, it was organized as a series of parallel biographies--alternating between famous Greeks and Romans. A character from the Golden Age like Pericles, Alcibiades, Lycurgus, Alexander, and Solon is compared with one from the Splendorous Age like Cicero, Brutus, Cato, Anthony, and Caesar. Plutarch's aim was primarily didactic and so the Lives abound with lessons about honor, valor, wisdom, temperance, and duty. It was a paean to moral paganism. It was the original "Book of Virtues."

Interestingly, the various profiles are notorious for their mixture of fact and fiction, history and myth, verity and gossip. Plutarch was a lover of tradition, and his prime concern was to both memorialize past glories and to reassert them as living ideals. Thus, whether an event actually occurred was of little consequence to him--what mattered was how the lessons from those events had passed into the cultural consciousness. "When a story is so celebrated and is vouched for by so many authorities," he commented in his profile of Croesus, "I cannot agree that it should be rejected because of the so called rules of chronology." And again, in his biography of Theseus, he wrote, "May I therefore succeed in purifying fable, making her submit to reason and take on the semblance of history. But where she obstinately disdains to make herself credible and refuses to admit any element of probability I shall pray for kindly readers and such as receive with indulgence the tales of antiquity."

Thus did Plutarch become the father of that modern branch of the theological arts we oddly call "Political Science." And thus did he forge the cardinal model for all succeeding disciplines of the "Divinities" such as "Sociology," "Psychology," "History," and the "Social Sciences." Indeed, the tenured place of "Moral Philosophy" in Western thought owes more to Plutarch than almost any other single artisan--at least in form if not in substance.

Alas, this seminal work seems to have passed out of educational and literary fashion. Though there are a few paperback editions that collect selected portions of the work, such anthologies do violence to Plutarch's intended comparative structure. Once an indispensable part of every secondary and collegiate curriculum, reprinted in innumerable inexpensive formats, it is now only available in America in just one rather expensive unabridged single-volume edition. Despite these encumbrances The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans ought to find its way into every family's library--as it once did.

Is it any wonder why we moderns demonstrate such moral, political, and social substantivelessness? When our thinking is utterly cut off from our culture's historical roots and our intellectual diets are limited to imbecilic contemporary kitsch, who can wonder why we show few proclivities toward discernment.

If we are to comprehend the political discussions of the American founders --much less the vital discourses of the Protestant reformers, the social teachings of the Medieval scholastics, and the cultural innovations of the Enlightenment pioneers--it is essential that we reincorporate Plutarch's important work into our educational canon."

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