WorkPlutarch

Parallel Lives

Plutarch (c. 46 CE–after 119 CE) · c. 100 CE

InferredFuller invokes Pericles and Phocion as the exemplary great men who represent what the Greek people should be at their best.

AnalyzedQuotedReadMentioned

Documented 1832–1844

Letters • Books • Notebooks

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence

III. Self-Directed2records

IV. Transcendentalist

V. New York2records

VI. Europe

✦. Memoirs (1852)

1810

1820

1832

1836

1844

1846

1850

1832—

Letter to James F. Clarke

mentioned

“his feelings are as false as those of Alcibiades- and of his also vanity is the spring”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. VI. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Inferred Fuller invokes Alcibiades as a type of false, vain feelings; Hudspeth identified him as the Athenian general who switched allegiance to Sparta and back, and her knowledge most plausibly derives from Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades or Thucydides' History,

1832—

Letter to Unknown

p175

analyzed · read

“His feelings are as false as those of Alcibiades.”

Fuller, Margaret. Letter 75 (January 1832). In The Letters of Margaret Fuller, Vol. I: 1817-1838, edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Inferred Hudspeth identified Alcibiades (c. 450–404 BCE) as an Athenian general, politician, and friend of Socrates, whose character and life are most likely known to Fuller through Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades in the Parallel Lives.

1843—

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

read

“what the people should be, as Pericles and Phocion what the Greek people should be.”

Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1844.

Inferred Fuller invokes Pericles and Phocion as the exemplary great men who represent what the Greek people should be at their best.

1844—

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Boston: Little and Brown; New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1844. Chapter IV, 1844

“Mariana”

quoted · read

“Mariana had the kind of spirit, which, in a better cause, had made the Roman matron truly say of her death wound, "It is not painful, Foetus.”

Fuller, Margaret. Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems. Edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860. · p262

Inferred Fuller alludes to "the Roman matron" who said of her death wound, "It is not painful, Foetus." This likely refers to Porcia, wife of Brutus, who wounded herself in the thigh to prove her courage (Plutarch, Life of Brutus; Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Act 2, scene 1).

Undated

Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.

n.d.—

Notebook 1842

mentionedManuscript page

“In Plutarch's Alcibiades we find / the name Sousa-Mithras (Lilian-Sonne),”

Fuller, Margaret. "Notebook 1842." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (90); Box 6.

Inferred This reference to Plutarch's Alcibiades is nested inside Fuller's reading notes from Creuzer's Symbolik (R01); Creuzer cites it as a source for the Mithras name 'Sousa-Mithras.' The title is inferred as the Life of Alcibiades within Parallel Lives because Creuzer names it explicitly.