Alexander Hamilton, 20 years old, Washington's Aide de Camp, stayed up reading late into the night at Valley Forge.
Especially Plutarch's biographies of the state founders of antiquity.
One quote he copied from Plutarch's bio of Romulus:
"We must readily believe, that both from their nature and the divine constitution virtuous souls are exalted from men into heroes, from heroes into demigods, and after that... they are raised to consummate felicity and enrolled amongst the gods not by the vote of a people but by the just and established order of nature."