Plutarch

In John Quincy Adams, Plutarch appears as one of the ancient historians at the curricular core of the early American “education for citizenship.” The book frames the study of ancient history — Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, Sallust, and Thucydides — not as a discrete subject like geography but as “a lens through which to examine and understand the life around you.” For Adams’s generation, the classics were a way of seeing, not a body of facts to memorize.

Context: Plutarch (c. 46–120 CE) was a Greek-born essayist and biographer whose Parallel Lives pairs Greek and Roman statesmen and generals to draw out moral character. The Lives were a foundational text for the Enlightenment and the American founders, prized for teaching virtue and statesmanship through biography.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — listed among the ancient historians (Cicero, Tacitus, Sallust, Thucydides) that formed the classical “lens” of education for citizenship