Why Plutarch reads him
Plutarch reads Fabius Maximus as the study of steadiness — the Roman who saved his republic, in its gravest crisis, not by winning battles but by refusing to fight them. After Hannibal destroyed Roman army after Roman army, Fabius adopted the strategy that bears his name: shadow the enemy, deny him battle, wear him down, and endure the public fury that such patience provokes. The platform reads him, with Plutarch, as the case of the leader whose hardest virtue is the courage to be thought a coward for the good of his country.
Character: patience as courage
Plutarch's portrait turns the conventional idea of courage inside out. Fabius' restraint was not timidity but a higher form of fortitude — the steadiness to hold an unpopular course under relentless pressure, to bear mockery (he was called "Hannibal's paedagogue," led about by the enemy) and the impatience of his own officers, because he had judged correctly what the situation required. The platform reads this as central to Plutarch's interest in leadership and character: the discipline to do the right and undramatic thing, and to absorb the blame for it, is a rarer virtue than the appetite for glory.
The political significance
Fabius' delay bought Rome the time to recover from the catastrophe of Cannae and to survive Hannibal's presence in Italy. The platform reads his significance as the demonstration that a republic's survival can depend on a leader willing to subordinate his own reputation to its need — and reads the contrast with the younger Scipio, whose bolder offensive strategy eventually won the war, as the genuine tension it was. Plutarch does not pretend Fabian caution was simply right; he shows a wise old strategy and a brilliant young one in real disagreement, and lets the reader weigh them.
The lesson Plutarch draws
Plutarch pairs Fabius with Pericles — two leaders of caution and steadiness who restrained their cities' rasher impulses. The platform reads the lesson as one of the most useful the Lives offer to public life: that the leader's task is sometimes to resist the people's craving for decisive action, that patience can be the truest courage, and that the willingness to be unpopular for the common good is among the marks of real statesmanship. Fabius gave the language a word — Fabian — for exactly this kind of strategic patience.