Podcast: Meir Soloveichik on Ten Portraits of Jewish Statesmanship

Podcast: Meir Soloveichik

The 1st-century Roman essayist and philosopher Plutarch is perhaps most famous today for his stylized, paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. In Plutarch’s parallel lives, Alexander, who conquered the Mediterranean world, is compared to Julius Caesar, who did the same a few hundred years later. Alcibiades and Coriolanus are paired together to show how spiritedness and martial virtue, when not tempered by political judgment, can wreak havoc.

Plutarch’s lives are moral portraits; their task is the moral formation of the reader, civic education, and the inculcation of virtue. They inspired Shakespeare’s portraits of Coriolanus, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Casca. The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau likewise drew inspiration from them in, for example, his treatise Emile. And the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once called Plutarch’s parallel lives “a bible for heroes.”