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

by Thomas E. Ricks

Tobias Lear (Harvard, 1783), reported to President Adams that Washington went out like a Roman: “His last scene corresponded with the whole tenor of his life.—Not a groan, nor a Complaint escaped him in extreme distress.—With perfect resignation, and in full possession of his reason, he closed his well spent life.”