Emerson on Plutarch's Morals

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 15 pages

Fifteen pages by a writer who appears nowhere else in this section: Ralph Waldo Emerson's introduction to Plutarch's Morals, written for the five-volume Goodwin edition of 1871 and reprinted here from the Boston printing of 1878. It is included because Plutarch is one of the ancient authors this series treats as a witness, and because Emerson is unusually good on why he is worth reading.

The observation he opens with is the one worth having. It is remarkable, he writes, that of an author so familiar as Plutarch — familiar not only to scholars but to all reading men, and whose history is so easily gathered from his own works — no accurate memoir should have come down to us, not even the dates of his birth and death. Strange that the writer of so many illustrious biographies should wait so long for his own. Emerson then works through what was believed about him and dismantles most of it: that he tutored Trajan, dedicated a book to him, was consul at Rome and governor of Greece — none of which is true, and none of which, he adds, a man of Plutarch's real superiority ever needed.

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