The most political question
If the use of power is governed by character, then the formation of character is the most political of all questions — and the platform reads it as the question Plutarch spent his life answering. He did not write to entertain or merely to record; he wrote to educate the men who would hold power, and the Lives and the political essays of the Moralia are, taken together, a curriculum for the statesman. The platform reads education through history as the practical purpose behind the whole Plutarchan project.
What the statesman must learn
The platform reads the curriculum as aimed at three things above all. Self-command: the discipline to govern one's own anger, fear and ambition, without which no one can durably govern others — Pericles is the model. Judgement: the trained capacity to know what a situation requires, which caution and daring each ruin out of season, as Nicias and Crassus show. And the love of the right kind of honour: the channelling of philotimia toward genuine service rather than mere pre-eminence, the difference between the statesman and the demagogue. These are not skills to be taught by rule; they are dispositions to be formed by example and reflection.
How Plutarch teaches them
The platform reads Plutarch's method as the deliberate use of the historical example. The student of statesmanship does not memorise principles; he lives, through the Lives, among the great men of the past — measuring himself against their virtues, learning from their failures, building a stock of cases against which to test his own judgement. The Moralia supplements this with direct counsel: the essays on statecraft, on listening, on the education of rulers, on whether the old man should still serve. The Lives form the judgement by example; the Moralia instructs it by precept. Together they are a education in practical wisdom.
The long classroom
The platform reads the European history of statesmanship as Plutarch's classroom. The Renaissance prince, the English commonwealthman, the American founder schooled himself on the Lives because he understood, as Plutarch did, that office tests character and that character must be prepared. The essay on why Plutarch still matters asks whether that education can still work; this one argues that it was, and remains, the deepest purpose of his art — the formation of the people fit to be trusted with power.