In her novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar imagined the future Roman emperor Hadrian as a young soldier in the Roman army traveling with a new volume of Plutarch in his rucksack. That novel first appeared in French in 1951 and appeared in English in 1954, and before and since, novelists have imagined their characters reading Plutarch. Two American examples will suffice.

In 1916, Booth Tarkington, in his amusing novel, Seventeen, had a middle-aged man, Mr. Parcher, trying to enjoy a quiet summer evening at home reading Plutarch’s Lives. Alas, in those days before air-conditioning, he has the windows of his study open, and outside on the porch a teenage boy and girl are engaged in awkward courting, their callow blather a distraction Mr. Parcher finds beyond irritating. In 1965, Louis L’Amour, in his Western novel, To Tame a Land, had his protagonist, young Ryan Tyler, reading and re-reading Plutarch’s Lives, sometimes by a campfire under the stars and the Teton mountains looming nearby.

All well and good, but who was Plutarch, and why would anyone take his books camping in Wyoming or be curling up with them in the den on a balmy summer evening? Born maybe fifteen years after the death of Christ, Plutarch came from a well-off family in central Greece, and for many years he served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi. In his mid-thirties he was in Rome lecturing on philosophy, his talks being in Greek, since his Latin was far from fluent.

A gifted and prolific writer, he composed seventy-eight essays on a wide range of topics. Were he writing today, he would have a newspaper column or a blog. His essays fill fourteen Books and have long gone under the general title of Moralia (in Greek, Ethika), and it could be a Book of the Moralia that Yourcenar’s Hadrian was reading.

While Plutarch’s essays address ancient Greek philosophy, they also talk about politics and history, oracles and music, the face on the moon and appropriate conversation at banquets. In Book 11 of his Moralia, Plutarch challenged the reputation of a venerable Greek author, Herodotus, the first great writer of Greek history. Although Cicero had called Herodotus “the Father of History,” Plutarch took objection, finding errors in Herodotus’ history, and so Plutarch wrote about Herodotus’ mistakes, attributing them to malice, and dubbed him “the Father of Lies.” Yet, Plutarch had a lighter side, and in Book 6 of the Moralia we learn once again that human nature never changes. Plutarch tells us that in what we know as the fifth century before Christ, when a barber asked King Archelaus of Macedon how he would like his hair cut, the king replied, “In silence.”

However, Plutarch is best known as a biographer. After circulating in manuscripts for centuries, in the late fifteenth century Plutarch’s Parallel Lives was one of the first books to be published on a then new invention, the printing press. Plutarch’s Lives provides twenty-three pairs of biographies, comparing a famous ancient Greek with a famous ancient Roman. His purpose was the reader’s personal edification, so that by comparing and learning from the successes and failures of, say, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, someone could develop a better character.

Once Plutarch’s Lives appeared in print, vernacular translations followed. An English translation from 1579 became a favorite book of William Shakespeare, and he used it when writing Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens. That influence of Plutarch on Shakespeare was not lost on Harry S. Truman. According to David McCullough’s biography of him, when Truman had difficult days as a United States Senator, he confided in his wife that he would rather go away somewhere and read Plutarch and Shakespeare “over and over and over.”

That desire to read his biographies and essays again and again was what Plutarch had in mind. In particular, the life lessons in the Parallel Lives give much food for thought, the word best suiting how to appreciate them being “rumination.” Louis L’Amour knew that aspect of Plutarch’s Lives, and he had his youthful hero, Ryan Tyler, mulling over Plutarch in the Wild West, and in the tame Midwest of Booth Tarkington’s fiction, Mr. Parcher’s idea of a pleasant evening includes settling into his easy chair for another go at Plutarch’s Lives.

There is something for every thoughtful person to let sink in when reading Plutarch’s Lives. It says a lot about past generations that they would spend time considering, for instance, how an orator like Demosthenes dealt with the threat to Athens from Alexander the Great and how Cicero as an orator faced the threat to Rome posed by Julius Caesar. Their eloquence and political courage came with the cost of their lives; could it have gone otherwise?

When printed in one volume, Plutarch’s Lives is a thick book, three or four inches thick. To make Plutarch’s work handier, Penguin Books publishes a series of paperback translations that group his Lives by category. So, for example, Penguin has The Age of Alexander and Fall of the Roman Republic, but while it is convenient to have more portable versions of Plutarch’s Lives, these collections dismantle Plutarch’s structure of parallel lives.

Meanwhile, in 2019 Princeton University Press produced a bilingual edition of a selection of essays from Plutarch’s Moralia. Under the clever title of How to be a Leader, readers can get in one slim volume the Greek text and an English translation on facing pages. Until now, the only such bilingual editions were in the Loeb Classical Library series, where the Moralia runs to fifteen volumes.

In 1951, the publishers of a series of books called the Classics Club asked Edith Hamilton to write the introduction to a new translation of fifteen of Plutarch’s Lives and ten essays from his Moralia. In 1957, Hamilton included that introduction as a chapter in her book, The Echo of Greece. She began by quoting a prayer by an eleventh-century Byzantine bishop: “If, Lord, thou art willing in thy grace to save any pagans from the wrath of God, I pray thee humbly to save Plato and Plutarch.” Needless to say, how the Lord judges the souls of those good men who never heard the Good News remains up to Him, but it will always be worthwhile seeing why Christians from medieval times onwards have been drawn to Plutarch.