All of the first four presidents possessed copies of Plutarch’s Lives, as did most educated people of the time. Adams, Jefferson, and Madison cited him frequently. John Adams once mourned to a friend that “we are so bigoted to Thucidies Livy, Plutarch and Tacitus, Hume Robertson and Gibbon that we read little else.”5 There is no equivalent book today with which familiarity would be assumed by all members of a political elite.
