Character guide

Plato

major

Also known as The great-eyed Plato

Emerson presents Plato as a patrician Athenian who abandoned war for Socrates, then spent ten years as his scholar before carrying that fire into Egypt, Italy, and the Academy. What fascinates Emerson is not the biography — Plato left none — but the way his writings have preempted every school, church, and poet, making him seem not ancient but perpetually modern. He matters because he embodies the philosopher type at its fullest: a man whose intellect is always moral, and whose poetic gift serves an ulterior purpose.

Emanuel Swedenborg

major

Also known as Swedenborg

To his contemporaries Swedenborg looked like a visionary and an elixir of moonbeams, yet Emerson insists he led the most real life of any man then living. He was a scholar from childhood, a favorite of Charles XII, a working scientist of mines and smelting works — until 1743, when his illumination began and he abandoned science for voluminous theological writing at his own expense. He matters because he represents the mystic type: a man of large calibre whose eccentricity and madness, like Pascal's or Newton's, help us more than balanced mediocre minds.

William Shakespeare

major

Also known as Shakespeare, V Shakespeare

Emerson places Shakespeare among the poets who console men for the meannesses of labor and traffic, feeding thought and imagination from an intellectual kingdom. He is a Platonist when he writes that nature is made better by no mean but nature makes that mean, and Hamlet is a pure Platonist — yet the sheer magnitude of Shakespeare's proper genius keeps him from being classed as merely the most eminent of that school. He matters because he shows the poet type at its most contemplative and least institutional: a mind that soars where Plato only theorized.

Napoleon Bonaparte

major

Also known as Napoleon, Bonaparte, the pernicious Napoleon

Emerson describes Napoleon as a pattern democrat who superadded insight and generalization to mineral and animal force, so that men saw the natural and intellectual powers combined as if sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher. He was a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, embarrassed by no scruples, with a hand of iron immediately connected to his head. He matters because he represents the man of the world — the popular external life and aims of the nineteenth century — and the question of what such force, without moral aim, can finally build.

Michel de Montaigne

major

Also known as Montaigne, our Saint Michel de Montaigne

Emerson treats Montaigne as one of those rare persons who, in their character and actions, answer questions we have not skill to put — a man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought and sees things in true light and large relations. His service is indirect: he is great because he is what he is from nature, and never reminds us of others, satisfying expectation and falling into place. He matters because he represents the skeptic type, showing how a man in his place is constructive, fertile, and magnetic, making his own channels like a river making its shores.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

major

Also known as Goethe, VII Goethe

Emerson sets Goethe against Napoleon as the representative of the century's inner life: where Bonaparte embodies its popular external aims, Goethe embodies its poet, a man impossible at any earlier time. He appears when general culture has spread and smoothed down all sharp individual traits, when there is no poet but scores of poetic writers, no Columbus but hundreds of post-captains with transit-telescope and barometer. He matters because he shows what the scholar or writer can still be in an age without heroes — and whether such a man can carry the power and duties of literature without the heroic frame that once sustained it.

Socrates

supporting

Emerson treats Socrates as the hinge on which Plato's whole biography turns: a young patrician with a taste for war meets this teacher in his twentieth year, is dissuaded from the sword, and stays ten years as his scholar until Socrates dies. That relationship matters less for what Socrates taught than for what he made possible — the interior life Emerson insists is the only biography worth having. When Socrates is gone, Plato leaves Athens, and the book's real subject, how a mind becomes Europe, begins.

Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

supporting

Also known as Mirabeau

Emerson uses Mirabeau to test a theory: that the truly great are not those who labor into a higher sphere of thought but those who simply open their eyes and see. Against men who must make painful corrections and watch for error, Mirabeau stands as the type who is what he is from nature and never reminds us of anyone else. His place in the book's argument is to show that service from superior men is indirect — a quality conveyed, not a lesson sold — and that a man in his rightful place is constructive, fertile, and magnetic, like a river making its own shores.

Francis Bacon

supporting

Also known as Bacon, Lord Bacon

Bacon enters Emerson's argument as proof that great men serve us pictorially and representatively rather than by direct gift — each one connected by secret liking to some district of nature he converts to human use, like the inventors of fire, iron, or decimal notation. Against the boy's belief that a teacher can sell him wisdom, Bacon stands for the slower, endogenous unfolding of the mind, where what is learned is delightful in the doing and the effect remains. He matters to the book's middle arc because he lets Emerson show how a philosopher becomes an institution: not by handing over truth, but by making an easy way for all through unknown and impossible confusions.

Geoffrey Chaucer

minor

Also known as Chaucer

English poet, mentioned as a precursor to Shakespeare in poetic tradition.

Martin Luther

minor

Also known as Luther, the good Luther

German theologian and reformer, cited as a figure of moral and religious force.

Ben Jonson

minor

Also known as Ben Jonson, Jonson

English playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, mentioned in literary context.

Homer

minor

Ancient Greek epic poet, referenced as the archetype of poetic genius.

Dante Alighieri

minor

Also known as Dante

Italian poet, mentioned as a model of visionary writing.

Isaac Newton

minor

Also known as Newton, Sir Isaac Newton

English physicist and mathematician, referenced as a symbol of scientific discovery.

Michelangelo

minor

Italian Renaissance artist, referenced as a model of creative power.

Saadi Shirazi

minor

Also known as Saadi

Persian poet, mentioned as a representative of Eastern wisdom.

Étienne Dumont

minor

Also known as Dumont

Swiss writer and editor of Mirabeau's works, cited as a collaborator.

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin

minor

Also known as Lord Elgin

British diplomat who brought the Elgin Marbles to England, referenced briefly.

John Locke

minor

Also known as Locke

English philosopher whose ideas on government and knowledge are referenced.

Cicero

minor

Roman orator and statesman, cited as an example of eloquence.

Voltaire

minor

French Enlightenment writer, mentioned as a skeptic and wit.

Lord Byron

minor

Also known as Byron, Lord Byron

English Romantic poet, cited as a figure of passionate individualism.

Plutarch

minor

Greek biographer, mentioned as a source of heroic lives.

Pericles

minor

Athenian statesman, cited as an example of political leadership.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

minor

Also known as Talleyrand

French diplomat, mentioned in connection with Napoleon's era.

Jakob Böhme

minor

Also known as Behmen, Jacob Behmen

German mystic, referenced as a precursor to Swedenborg.

Novalis

minor

Also known as The ardent and holy Novalis, Novalis

German Romantic poet and philosopher, mentioned as a mystic writer.

Jesus Christ

minor

Also known as the good Jesus, Jesus, the Lord Jesus Christ, Christ

Central figure of Christianity, referenced as a moral and spiritual exemplar.

Hamlet

minor

Shakespearean character, cited as a type of reflective genius.

Manu

minor

Also known as Menu

Hindu lawgiver, referenced as an ancient source of moral order.

François Christophe de Kellermann

minor

Also known as Kellermann

French general, mentioned in the context of Napoleon's battles.

Sir Walter Raleigh

minor

Also known as Sir Walter Raleigh

English explorer and writer, mentioned as a figure of adventure.