Why Plutarch reads him
Plutarch reads Publius Valerius Publicola as a founder of the free Roman state — one of the men who helped expel the last king and then, as repeated consul, gave the young Republic the institutions and the popular confidence it needed to survive its first dangerous years. The platform reads him, with Plutarch, as the Roman counterpart to Solon: a founder who built a constitution not by seizing power but by visibly subordinating himself to the people's trust.
Character: the man who courted the people's confidence
Plutarch's portrait turns on Publicola's care for appearances of equality — his understanding that a new free state lives or dies by whether the people believe their leaders will not become new kings. When suspicion gathered that he meant to make himself master, he tore down his own imposing house and lowered the fasces (the rods symbolising authority) before the assembled people, signalling that the magistrate's power belonged to them. The platform reads this as the heart of Plutarch's interest: Publicola earned the name Publicola, "friend of the people," by the deliberate, visible humility through which a founder converts personal authority into public trust.
The political significance
Publicola's significance is institutional. Plutarch credits him with laws that gave citizens the right of appeal against magistrates, that opened office and protected the people from arbitrary power — the early framework of the libertas the Republic would prize for five centuries. The platform reads him within its founding cluster as a builder of the durable republican order, the Roman who did at Rome something close to what Solon did at Athens: lay the legal and institutional ground of a free state and refuse to make himself its master.
The lesson Plutarch draws
Plutarch pairs Publicola with Solon — two founders of free constitutions, each measured against the other in the synkrisis. The platform reads the lesson under virtue in public life: that the founder of a republic must not only build good institutions but be seen to place himself beneath them, since the trust on which a free state rests is won by the visible renunciation of the power one could have seized. Publicola is Plutarch's study of the founder as the people's servant.