Plutarch wrote for his own improvement and pleasure, and that of his close friends, Roman senators and Greek landowners at the beginning of the second century of our era. Yet the charm of his style and the breadth of his vision of a past which had already become classical in his own day has won him admiring readers from his contemporaries to the present. Leonardo Bruni and Niccolò Machiavelli, Rabelais and Montaigne, Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche have found inspiration in his biographies. Plutarch’s greatest attraction has been his ability to use historical figures to contemplate the play of human qualities in action, to reveal the specific cast vices and virtues assume in the contingent world of political leadership and strife.