Does reading about a great man actually change you, or is the whole exercise just larping?
Plutarch answers that question himself, in the Life of Pericles. He says that a statue or a poem can delight us without making us want to become the sculptor or the poet.
But virtue works differently.
The moment we admire a virtuous act, Plutarch argues, we already want to perform it ourselves.
Napoleon spent much of his youth, especially at military academy, reading Plutarch’s Lives. He read about Alexander and Caesar, searching the past for inspiration and lessons.
His classmate Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne remembered the intensity of the habit:
“Napoleon would run to the library, where he read with great eagerness books of history, particularly Polybius and Plutarch.”
The Corsican patriot Pasquale Paoli went further, telling Napoleon plainly that Plutarch had made him who he was:
“There is nothing modern in you, you are entirely out of Plutarch.”
Napoleon read constantly, and most of what he read was biography of the greatest men of the ancient world. He treated Plutarch and the other classics as inspiration, then as manuals on power, strategy, and leadership.