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

by Thomas E. Ricks

But for the Revolutionary generation, virtue was the essential element of public life. Back then, it actually was masculine. It meant putting the common good before one’s own interests.

They did on occasion look with admiration on the Greeks, but when they did, it was more often toward Sparta than Athens. They saw the Spartans as plainspoken, simple, free, and stable, while they disparaged the Athenians as turbulent, factionalized, and flighty.

One of their major themes was the necessity of being skeptical of the exercise of state power.

First, on whether the new nation could subsist on “public virtue,” relying on the self-restraint of those in power to act for the common good and not their personal interest, a proposition that would be tested almost instantly during the War for Independence.

Second, on party politics, which the classical writers taught them to regard as unnatural and abhorrent. Their misunderstanding of partisanship, or “faction,”

as they tended to call it, nearly wrecked the new republic in the 1790s. Third, and most troubling, was their acceptance of human bondage, which would prove disastrous to the nation they designed. Often seeing it a natural part of the social order, they wrote it into the fundamental law of the nation, and so sustained a system that was de...

Americans, and especially Southerners, were fond of noting that both the Greeks and Romans embraced systems of slavery. But in leaning on classical justifications, they neglected the fact that their system of slavery tended to be harsher than ancient forms.

The Greeks and Romans held that being enslaved was a matter of misfortune. The people they owned had a variety of colors and nationalities.

In the New World, slavery became more pernicious, with those enslaved defined as less than human.

In leading combat operations, slow and steady thinking, followed with energetic execution, often is more effective than a series of hasty moves that tend to exhaust a force and expose it to attack.

Indeed, Washington came closer to the Roman example than his peers precisely because he was a man of deeds, not of words.

He also may have sensed that eighteenth-century “virtue” was essentially male—the root of the word is vir, the Latin word for man.29 To be virtuous was to be a public man with a reputation for selflessness.

It is one thing to know what to do, but quite another to get other people to do it. New presidents often make the mistake, for example, of paying too much attention to formulating policy and not enough to implementing it.

It is an error because what was distinctive about the Enlightenment was not a system of political thought or a set of new philosophical notions. Rather, the Enlightenment was more a process than a result.52 Its core was a cast of mind, or to revive a useful term from the mid-twentieth century, a frame of reference.

Enlightened types tended to place their faith in progress, freedom, and the improvability of mankind. As the intellectual historian Caroline Winterer put it, “To be enlightened was to be filled with hope.”

In other words, they thought it possible to use reason and observation to discern the eternal laws of nature and then to use that understanding to aid human progress.

“It is right that the people confer the political authority upon whomsoever they will.”

Romanticism, by privileging the heart above the head, excuses illogical thinking and exalts unreasonable passion.

One measure of the significance of a new idea is the degree to which it spurs new thinking in other areas.

“What makes free states last a shorter time than others is that both the misfortunes and the successes they encounter almost always cause them to lose their freedom,”

“A wise republic should hazard nothing that exposes it to either good or bad fortune. The only good to which it should aspire is the perpetuation of its condition.”

The paradox of Washington is that this least classically educated of the first four presidents was also the most Roman of them in character, and was seen as such by his contemporaries.

Such conclusions miss the point that wars are more than just a string of battles, and that battles sometimes are not the decisive factor in conflict.

This is the conflation of two distinctly different approaches: a war of posts and a Fabian strategy. In the former, one fights defensive battles from fortresses; in the latter, one avoids battle altogether and seeks to defeat an enemy by wearing him out.

Winning battles does not necessarily win wars. Indeed, losing a battle can sometimes be an advantage, because a tactical setback can sometimes result in a strategic gain, if by engaging the enemy one slows his movement, distracts him from other targets, or just wears him down.

The foremost task of a general is to understand the nature of the war he or she faces—which often turns out to be a third way, neither the one preferred nor the one expected.

Sometimes victory goes simply to the commander who fails least.

“At the birth of societies, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that form the leaders of republics.”

“Constant experience shows us, that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it. . . . To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things, power should be a check to power.”56

The notion of a “loyal opposition” is that part of the process of good governance is organized questioning and criticism by those out of power, who in turn maintain deference to the larger state.

Populism tends to look good from a distance, but close up it can be frightening.

you cannot control the people, perhaps you can control their language, and thus how they think and speak.

As psychiatrists know, sometimes what people don’t talk about is as important as what they do.