SOURCE: Kimball, Roger. “Plutarch and the Issue of Character.” New Criterion 19, no. 4 (December 2000): 4-12.

In the following essay, Kimball speculates about some of the possible reasons why Plutarch is not widely read today.

What Histories can be found … that please and instruct like the Lives of Plutarch? … I am of the same Opinion with that Author, who said, that if he was constrained to fling all the Books of the Antients into the Sea, PLUTARCH should be the last drowned.

—Montesquieu, quoted by Oliver Goldsmith

Using history as a mirror I try by whatever means I can to improve my own life and to model it by the standard of all that is best in those whose lives I write. As a result I feel as though I were conversing and indeed living with them; by means of history I receive each one of them in turn, welcome...