First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

Hamilton long had been growing impatient with classical analogies and models. In Federalist 6, for example, Daniel Shays was as much on Hamilton’s mind as the Greco-Roman world was. He was dismissive of both. Of the latter, he wrote, “Sparta was little better than a well regulated camp; and Rome was never sated of carnage and conquest.”74