Plutarch was a Greek biographer and moralist who provided the New England Transcendentalists with source material illustrating heroic conduct and ethical conduct.
Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated Plutarch’s Stoicism, and his early journals and sermons contain numerous references to Plutarch’s
Lives.
Amos Bronson Alcott commended Plutarch’s
Morals as strikingly contemporary and noble. The
Fruitlands library owned copies of both the
Lives and the
Morals. The influence of Plutarch on the Transcendentalists is a reminder that the Transcendentalists were interested not only in mystical influxes of divinity and rapture in nature but also in behavior and character.