In the city states that had survived the rise of the princely territorial state, such as Venice, Geneva, and Germany’s free Imperial cities, the entire constitutional framework was designed to keep rule by one person at bay. They accordingly chose their ancient heroes from among staunchly republican figures who had never abused their military command to threaten the collective rule of the Senatorial elite (Gottdank 1999: 55-63). Scipio Africanus was thus the hero of seventeenth - and eighteenth-century Venice but he was in general popular with republicans and writers opposing absolute monarchy from a corporatist position. For the Abbe Castel de Saint-Pierre, whose writings attacked Louis XIV and everything he stood for, Scipio was the greatest hero in Roman history, while Caesar ranks scarcely better than Catiline, the only difference being that Caesar succeeded where Catiline failed (Grell 1995: 1088). Later in the eighteenth century, this view of Caesar as the great republican anti-model was reinforced on the other side of the Atlantic by the American colonists fighting for independence from Britain. They were convinced that ‘‘the purpose of history was the prevention of tyranny’’ (Richard 1994: 85), and took as their models Cato of Utica, Brutus, Cassius, and Cicero, who had died fighting for the survival of the republic. Detesting all leaders who had destroyed the republic for their own gain, they reserved their particular wrath for Caesar, whose corruption had supposedly destroyed Roman freedom and virtue, quite, as in their view, the corrupt George III (1760-1820) was bent on suppressing the colonists (Schild 2007).
The anti-monarchical fervor aside, the Americans were, however, only following models provided by the British themselves. Distancing themselves from Stuart Augustanism, the elites of Hanoverian Britain, where power was concentrated in the aristocracy and Parliament, considered the Roman Republic a model rather than the Roman Empire. Appropriating the Roman discourse of amicitia, libertas and virtus for the purposes of the Whig oligarchy, Britain’s landed classes identified with Rome’s senatorial elite, highlighting the republic’s liberty and domestic peace safeguarded by patrician rule while denouncing both rebellious populism epitomized by the Gracchi or Caesar, and Imperial slavery established by Caesar (again), recently reborn in Ludovican France, and averted in 1688 (P. Ayres 1997: 3-12). Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato, which closely followed Plutarch’s lives of Caesar and Cato, and upheld the ideal of republican virtue rather than praising the messy reality of republican politics, was a prime example of this view, and the fact that it was also a favorite of the American ‘‘founding fathers’’ is testimony to the similarities of political language on either side of the Atlantic (Richard 1994: 57). Taking its inspiration from Italian republican writings of the sixteenth century, this Atlantic Republicanism identified with pre-Caesarian Rome and the ancient city states of Greece, and abhorred the egalitarianism of the French Revolution (E. Burke 1987). The demon-ization of Caesar by Britain’s ruling Whig elite, however, made him attractive for opponents of the status quo when the Whig oligarchy itself was beginning to look frail around 1740. More radical Tories such as the historian Nathaniel Hooke then unmasked Cicero and Cato as hypocrites defending the rule of the privileged few behind a rhetorical facade of civic virtues, and reassessed Tiberius Gracchus and Julius Caesar as the true standard-bearers of the real people, thus attacking Walpole’s oligarchy in the shape of the Roman senatorial oligarchy (P. Ayres 1997: 20-1).
World History
