#classical influence

Past postings have made the case that two reasoned traditions affected the thinking of the founding generation of Americans especially among the educated class. Of course, these perspectives did not just appear in 1787.  They had a history in which one of the traditions stretches all the way back to the earliest English settlers making their way across the Atlantic and the other found its beginning in Europe during the 1700s.  

The first was the Calvinist religious view that promoted a covenant principle – the origin of the federalist thinking that played such a central role in devising the American constitutional framework both at the national and state levels.  The second was the importation of Enlightenment ideas that promoted reasoned, observably based evidence in the pursuit of truth.  

It also introduced the approach summarily described as the social contract (or as Daniel Elazar calls it, social compact) theory.  That is the promotion of a choice option – as opposed to a force or accident option – in the designing and implementing of a constitutional arrangement for a new polity or polities in the case of the US federal union.

But major influences did not stop there.  One other source, according to the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Thomas E. Ricks,[1] was the influence from long ago, the classical writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  This influence can be easily detected in the writings of the founding fathers.  

One common experience among these founders was the perennialism that characterized their education.  Higher education of the time was securely defined by that curricular philosophy; a philosophy that, to this day. emphasizes the works of the classical scholars from ancient Greece such as Plato, Aristotle, and from ancient Rome such as Cicero.  Ricks begins his presently cited work with,

The classical world was far closer to the makers of the American Revolution and the founders of the United States than it is today … It was present in their lives … Colonial classicism was not just about ideas. It was part of the culture, a way of looking at the world and a set of values.  The more one looks around early America for the influence of ancient Greek and Roman history and literature, the more one finds.[2]

The influence went beyond academic awe but verged on and surpassed a romantic attachment.

         These founders decorated their abodes with statues of ancient thinkers, designed their public buildings using classical architectural plans, and even named their cities for ancient cities or thinkers – there is Troy or Cicero, for example.

         They were especially taken with the ancient concern for the quality or word, “virtue.”  They saw it as not just what young women should preserve, but as an irreplaceable character trait for public officials to have – an unvirtuous office holder was automatically unworthy of the position and when found out should be removed from any position of trust.  

What did it, virtue, mean in this context?  Simply, that anyone entrusted with public responsibilities – which under a compact-al arrangement meant, to some degree, any citizen – had to put the common good above any private interest.  This served as the cement or some sort of lynchpin upon which a governing system held together.  It also reflects what this blog has offered as a definition for federal liberty, the right to do what one should do.

And this, Ricks claims, served as a binding sense among the founders throughout the Revolutionary period.  One piece of evidence supporting such a claim is that after reviewing some 120,000 documents of that time, – a study Ricks cites – the word “virtue” outnumbers the word “freedom” as virtue appears some six thousand times.

And as one looks closer to the classical influence, one finds by a healthy amounts of references, that the Roman effect, as opposed to the Greek effect, was found to be more practical in their recorded advice over political and governing matters. The Greeks were not totally dismissed. They were cited more as background and in that, Sparta took on a more privileged position than Athens. Athenians were judged to be too factionalized, turbulent, and flighty.

Of special admiration, the founders took a liking to the Roman, Cicero.  By one measure, he was five times the hero that Aristotle was.  And that preference extended to European thinkers, especially the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and was also noted among the intellectual leaders of the French Revolution.

Of special interest was the reflections American founders bestowed on the downfall of the Roman Republic during the first century BC.  That became those governing factors that the founders zeroed in on in their decisions concerning the various elements of the republican structures they were designing in the late 1700s.

Ricks in his review of that history, informs his readers of the particular names from the Roman experience upon which the founders focused.  The heroes include, of course, Cicero, but also Livy, Plutarch, Sallust, Tacitus.  As villains that one can easily cite were Catiline and Julius Caesar.  And these names were not just familiar to the elites of America but also those of Europe.  

Two English writers of that time, in the late 1700s, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, shared their thoughts over that ancient time in their weekly essays, collectively known as the Cato Letters (Cato was a Roman soldier and senator). Apparently, these writers influenced the debate in America of that time as they were frequently cited by Americans concerning political principles and theory.  The Letters provided initial promotion of such rights as free speech.

At some future point, this blog will pick up on the effects classical literature had on this group of – one can safely characterize – nouveau riche Americans. This seems relevant to how these founders came about their ideals.  Yes, they were members of that age’s elite class, but they did not inherit their standing from long established family wealth; they were surely not the product of some aristocratic class.  

According to Ricks, of the ninety-nine signers of either the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution, only eight of them had fathers who attended college.  They, in other words, were for the most part first or second-generation men of means who owed their success to the opportunities America offered.  And in that, one can, to some degree, ascertain they had firsthand knowledge and empathy for the common American of their times.  It also gave them insights as to what truly constituted human nature.

[1] Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles:  What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (New York, NY:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2020).

Draped Evening Dress, ca. 1935

Owned by Millicent Rogers 

Designed by Valentina

Classical Inspired Gathered China Silk Evening Gown, ca. 1880s

Attributed to Liberty of London

The travelers