How Confessions drew on Plutarch's Lives
A documented line of influence: Jean-Jacques Rousseau demonstrably engaged Plutarch’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch · c. 110
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1782
EnlightenmentRelevance
8/10
On Confessions’s page
- Rousseau hands you the source himself: in the Confessions he credits boyhood reading of Plutarch's Lives with shaping his "free and republican spirit"
- "I became the man whose life I read," he writes — the ancient biographies became a template for his own selfhood
- Read Plutarch first and you meet the heroes Rousseau measured himself against, the noble-Roman ideal that runs under his whole self-portrait
On Plutarch's Lives’s page
- The book that made the man — Rousseau, in his own Confessions, names childhood reading of Plutarch's Lives as the thing that "formed that independent and republican spirit, that proud untamable character"
- He puts it plainly: "I became the man whose life I read"
- Plutarch's parade of Greek and Roman statesmen didn't just inform Rousseau — by his own account it manufactured the self who would write the Confessions