# Representative Men — Character guide

> Key figures in Representative Men by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

- [Plato](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/plato.md): 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 biograph
- [Emanuel Swedenborg](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/swedenborg.md): 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 wor
- [William Shakespeare](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/shakespeare.md): 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 bette
- [Napoleon Bonaparte](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/napoleon.md): 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 
- [Michel de Montaigne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/montaigne.md): 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
- [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/goethe.md): 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 
- [Socrates](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/socrates.md): 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 schola
- [Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/mirabeau.md): 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 f
- [Francis Bacon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/bacon.md): 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
- [Geoffrey Chaucer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/chaucer.md): English poet, mentioned as a precursor to Shakespeare in poetic tradition.
- [Martin Luther](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/luther.md): German theologian and reformer, cited as a figure of moral and religious force.
- [Ben Jonson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/ben_jonson.md): English playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, mentioned in literary context.
- [Homer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/homer.md): Ancient Greek epic poet, referenced as the archetype of poetic genius.
- [Dante Alighieri](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/dante.md): Italian poet, mentioned as a model of visionary writing.
- [Isaac Newton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/newton.md): English physicist and mathematician, referenced as a symbol of scientific discovery.
- [Michelangelo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/michelangelo.md): Italian Renaissance artist, referenced as a model of creative power.
- [Saadi Shirazi](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/saadi.md): Persian poet, mentioned as a representative of Eastern wisdom.
- [Étienne Dumont](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/dumont.md): Swiss writer and editor of Mirabeau's works, cited as a collaborator.
- [Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/representative_men_se/characters/lord_elgin.md): British diplomat who brought the Elgin Marbles to England, referenced briefly.

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