When John Adams enlisted Aristotle, Cicero, and Polybius in his fight against the Stamp Act of 1765, and when John Dickinson rallied farmers two years later against the Townshend Acts with quotations of Sallust, there began the great period of the use of classical models in political discourse that would conclude with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863.
Though Adams in 1811 claimed that the classical revival in nineteenth-century Europe was caused not by Napoleon but by the American Revolution (‘‘That great event turned the thoughts and studies of men of learning to the ancient Greeks, their language, their antiquities, their forms of government’’ [Adair and Schutz 1966: 177]), and though one can trust Howard Mumford Jones’s statement that both sides in the Revolution quoted the classics, one must not overstate the role of classical authors in the creation of the Constitution. The ‘‘classick pages’’ provided sources of propaganda, historical precedents, the theory and practice of a republic, and ancient heroes for the emulation of Roman virtue (Jones 1952: 227-72), even if Enlightenment philosophers selected the portions or interpretations of the ancients that supported their own theories. Thus the Founders’ views of the mixed governments of Sparta and the Roman Republic contained an Enlightenment skepticism toward government, notions of separation of powers (as opposed to classes), and representative democracy, concepts unknown to the ancients. Indeed, though the personal library whose classical texts comprised more than 5 per cent of the total was rare in Colonial times, the Fathers were so steeped in classical lore that, in H. S. Commager’s words, ‘‘it would have required explanation had the generation of the
Founding Fathers turned their attention elsewhere’’ (Commager 1975: 130). Gordon Wood’s assertion that ‘‘Such classicism was not merely a scholarly ornament of educated Americans; it helped to shape their values and their ideals of behavior’’ (Wood 1969: 49) does not vitiate Bernard Bailyn’s view that the real engine of the revolution was the European Enlightenment, English common law, and the writings of radical Whigs (Bailyn 1967: 23-6).
Citation of classical thought or example was so de rigueur for any public performance or publication that the commonplace books of Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and many others show classical quotations aplenty. By far the most popular author was Plutarch, the favorites of his lives being Phocion, Timoleon, Cicero, Demosthenes, and especially Cato. After Plutarch, the favored reading was Polybius, Cicero, and the great historians. To read of the sacrifice and noble ideals in these works (Patrick Henry’s ‘‘Lamp of Experience’’) gave the Founders a sense of common purpose with the ancients in the struggle for human freedom that was cut off at Philippi. The ancient authors gave their American readers the intellectual tools to think about government and a sense of the historical inevitability of their political experiment (Wood 1969: 8). Said John Adams, ‘‘When I read them I seem to be only reading the History of my own Times and my own Life’’ (Cappon 1959: 295).
The Founders, attempting to throw off a monarch’s yoke, did not need the ancients to tell them about the evils of tyranny, yet John Adams thought a careful reading of the classics would instill such hatred of tyrants and immunity to mob rule that stability would be assured. Lacing the Federalist Papers with classical quotations and signing their contributions with classical pseudonyms, they understood, as Adams and Jefferson said later, that America was in a unique position to understand and enact these theories because it was the only nation since Greece and Rome that was untouched by feudalism. Commager noted the paradox of lawgivers who ‘‘were busy changing everything,’’ scrutinizing ancient political theory for models of citizen participation and institutional stability, order, and reason (Commager 1975: 136).
Plato, in Laws and Politicus, noted that the three simple types of government inevitably degenerate - monarchy (rule by the one) into tyranny, aristocracy (rule by the few) into oligarchy, and democracy (rule by all) into ochlocracy (mob rule) - so he recommends a mixture of the three (Laws, 756e-757a, 832c; Politicus, 291d-e, 303c). Aristotle put mixed government at the core of his Politics (3.7), and Polybius (Histories 6.5-18) recommended giving equal amounts of power to each branch of government. The ideal of mixed government was endorsed by the Aristotelian Aquinas, John Calvin, Florentines like Macchiavelli and Guicciardini, who preferred the Spartan system to Athenian mobocracy, and Montesquieu. The American patriots focused on historical accounts of the democratic movement in Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries and the Roman Republic of the sixth through the first centuries bc. The admired Greek figures were Solon, Themistocles, Xenophon, and Demosthenes, as portrayed in Plutarch or Charles Rollin’s Ancient History (1729). Admirable Romans were Cato the Younger, Brutus, Cassius, and Cicero, but most of all Cincinnatus, the embodiment of public service and civic virtue. The figures the Fathers disliked were Roman emperors and Greek tyrants like Alexander, Cleon, Catiline, Sulla, and Marc Antony, but most of all Julius Caesar (the Founders feared standing armies in part because Julius Caesar had used them to destroy the Roman Republic). Though the mixed constitution of the Spartan Lycurgus offered a model of longevity, harmony, and justice, Jefferson considered the Spartans ‘‘military monks’’ (Jefferson 1907: 15:482) and Adams despised their sharing of property. Athenian democracy may have produced a Pericles, but it also gave forth the demagogue Cleon (according to Thucydides, who was exiled by him) and it condemned Socrates, the mentor of Plato and Xenophon. The foremost proponent of mixed government was John Adams, who, drawing heavily on Cicero, Republic 2.23-30 in his ‘‘Thoughts on Government,’’ described the process of trial and error that was Rome’s ascent over time from a degenerate monarchy to a stable republic that was the model of mixed government. Constitutionalists in general agreed, preferring Rome’s rule of the one (consuls), the few (senate), and the many (tribunate). Moreover, the pure virtue and frugality of the Roman agrarian life (Adam Smith supported the maintenance of the rural economy to keep the citizenry virtuous against mere mercantilism) prepared them for greatness.
In considering federalism, the Fathers looked to ancient Amphictyonic Leagues (associations of neighboring states pledged to the maintenance of a particular local temple), but even here there were differing views. Of the Delian Amphictyonic League, for instance, Hamilton and Madison (Federalist 6 and 18) thought it ruined by decentralization, while Monroe faulted its overly ambitious members. Hamilton thought the Achaean League insufficiently centralized, while Adams and Dickinson thought it subverted by outside (Roman) power and Madison thought it doomed by decentralization.
Throughout this period, the greatest champion of classical literature was Thomas Jefferson. As a boy he had studied 15 hours a day and carried his Greek grammar with him everywhere. As an old man he found that ‘‘the classick pages fill up the vacuum of ennui’’ (Jefferson 1907: 15:209). Homer was his ideal:
When young any composition pleases which unites a little sense, some imagination, and some rhythm, in doses however small. But as we advance in life these things fall off one by one, and I suspect we are left at last with only Homer and Virgil, perhaps with Homer alone. (Jefferson 1907: 18:448)
Jefferson admired Demosthenes’ Phillipics for their passion against tyranny, and he hated the Asiatic elaboration of Cicero, preferring the simplicity of the speeches that Sallust and Livy put in the mouths of Scipio Africanus, Cato, and Caesar. He championed Aristotle to Adams, but his Declaration of Independence favors natural rights and the social compact against Aristotle’s organic theory of the state’s origin. Jefferson also loved Tacitus’ criticism of the Roman emperors. When he founded his university at Charlottesville, he put into practice his view that classics was the basis of all learning: regardless of his field of study, no student could be admitted to his Palladian precincts without Greek and Latin.
Of all the figures in American history, the most classicized is George Washington. As Cato called Cicero the father of his country, so Washington to this day is known as the father of his. Hamilton called him the American Fabius, Fisher Ames called him
Epaminondas, and his biographer Parson Weems compared him to Numa, Aristides, Epictetus, Regulus, Severus, Scipio, Fabius, Marcellus, Hannibal, Cincinnatus, Cato, and Socrates. Horatio Greenough portrayed him partially nude in Roman garb (too little garb for official taste, as it happened) as Phidian Zeus set in the Capitol (1847), shocking the chairman of the committee that commissioned it. Canova portrayed Washington as a Roman soldier (1818), and Ceracchi gave him a Roman hairstyle (ca. 1786). Washington, like Cincinnatus, was a gentleman farmer who enjoyed not only the work but also the reflection-inducing tranquility of the rural life. Nevertheless both men answered their country’s call, and when given absolute control of the armies, won great victories and then showed the magnitude of their characters by giving up their total power. Washington had barely given up control of the Continental Armies when he was called back from the farm to preside over the Constitutional Convention and then to become the first president of the United States. The association was enduring: Byron called him ‘‘the Cincinnatus of the West’’ (‘‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’’ 1814: 168), and he was depicted as Cincinnatus by Charles Wilson Peale (1776) and John Trumbull (1780). John J. Barralet painted him surrendering power to Columbia, with Cincinnatus’ ox and a plow in the background (1799; Wills 1984).
World History
