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

by Thomas E. Ricks

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.

Our “Senate” meets in “The Capitol”—both references to ancient Rome.

Most of its members are either “Republicans,” a name derived from Latin, or “Democrats,” a word of Greek origin.

The early Americans also nodded to the ancient world in naming their settlements. In upstate New York, it is possible to drive in one day from Troy to Utica to Rome to Syracuse to Ithaca, while passing through Cicero, Hector, Ovid, Solon, Scipio Center, Cincinnatus, Camillus, Romulus, Marcellus, and even Sempronius, who didn’t exist—he

Desertions became a major problem. He ordered the building of a huge gallows, towering nearly forty feet, as a warning to his men. “I am determined, if I can be justified in the proceeding, to hang two or three on it, as an example to others,” he wrote.

Cicero’s, in an echo of Xenophon, that “of all sources of wealth, farming is the best, the most agreeable, the most profitable, the most noble.”72

More than any of the other early presidents, George Washington learned in early life the pain of loss, humiliation, and hardship. It is axiomatic among military historians that commanders learn more from defeat than from victory, but this is especially true of Washington.

Reviewing his experiences, he could have distilled them into some general maxims along these lines: Know yourself, and know those you are fighting. This is a more complex proposition than it may seem, as it requires introspection, strategic thinking, and reliable intelligence. Study the terrain and make it your friend. As circumstances change, be ready to change views and abandon assumptions. Listen to dissenters and know how to weigh alternatives.

He would carry this knowledge with him all his life. He had developed a new appreciation for the French, warning a comrade that “the policy of the French is so subtle, that not a friendly Indian will we have on the continent, if we do not soon dislodge them from the Ohio.”73 This was a matter not just of manpower but also of military intelligence—a European force in the dense forests of North America that moved without having local allies to act as scouts was operating almost blind.

Most of all, he had seen that he himself could recover from stinging personal defeat—and also, perhaps, that the key goal of a general is sometimes not to win but merely to keep his army alive.

Plutarch always balances his praise of great men by emphasizing one great shortcoming. In Cicero’s case, this was vanity. “He was always excessively pleased with his own praise, and continued to the very last to be passionately fond of glory; which often interfered with the prosecution of his wisest resolutions.”14 Adams would also exhibit this flaw.

Cicero famously began his first speech against Catiline with striking urgency: “How far wilt thou, O Catiline! abuse our patience?” There was no throat clearing here, none of the customary preliminaries. He grabbed his audience by beginning almost with the climax of a speech. “How long shall thy Madness outbrave our justice?”

Soon after he finished college, Adams traded the glories of studying Enlightenment thinking for the drudgery of teaching school in a small town.

One measure of the significance of a new idea is the degree to which it spurs new thinking in other areas. Truly big ideas provoke paradigm shifts.47 Hutton’s thinking about the age of the world appears to be related to Adam Smith’s on economics and even more to James Watt’s work on steam engines.

The Scottish presence became an essential aspect of the colonial American economy.

“Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,” he asserted. “For Plato makes him one of his Collocutors merely to cover his own whimsies under the mantle of his name.”80

Epicurus does not seem to appear in either of the commonplace books, literary or legal, which raises the question of when Jefferson first encountered the philosopher who would influence him so deeply.

Laertius’ work concludes with a long and enthusiastic discussion of Epicurus that quotes this philosopher extensively. “Pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily,” Epicurus states in a letter that Laertius quotes. But, he continues, “we are not speaking of the pleasures of a debauched man, . . . but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from confusion.”88

The last of those authors bears pausing to consider, because the works of Montesquieu constituted a bridge between the Enlightenment and the classical world.

In this discussion of checks and balances, Witherspoon may have planted the seeds of the all-important tenth of Madison’s Federalist Papers, written nearly two decades later, in which Madison explains how interests can balance each other in a government expressly designed to curb excessive power in any one person or branch. At the same time, Madison appears to have disregarded or discarded Witherspoon’s view that “the Roman Empire fell of its own weight,” a warning against nations growing too large.

There are several different Thomas Jeffersons—the Latinate lawyer, the flowery wooer of other men’s wives, the slave owner looking to increase his profits, the direct and powerful stylist of the Declaration. He is often a bit pompous, maintaining his distance both socially and emotionally.

He ended with an absolute statement: “the god who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.”25

As one literary historian puts it, “Jefferson’s literary tastes and preferences are, for their time, thoroughly conventional and unexceptional.”6

Yet there is, among Jefferson’s diverse writings, one great, shining exception: The Declaration of Independence. The English writer and wit G. K. Chesterton lauded it, accurately, as “perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.”10

The second paragraph is probably the key passage of writing in all of American history. In it, Jefferson sets forth the beliefs of these people who are declaring themselves a new nation upon the Earth. We can all recall how it begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The last five words of that sentence sweep aside millennia of unequal births and preordained lives and define these new Americans as a people who subscribe to a revolutionary belief. In the context of the late 1700s, it is even a bit pugnacious: Do you think you are better than us? In this new nation, all people—or at least all white men—would have equal standing before the law. That was a Hutton-like leap of the imagination.

As Pauline Maier observes, part of the power of this section of the Declaration is that it’s more about “what we ought to be” rather than “what we are.”37 As such, it continues to speak to us now, issuing a challenge across more than two centuries.

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.

In his youth, he had been interested in Caesar and had read a bit about him. Later, as an adult, he sought to model his public persona upon Cato—upright, honest, patriotic, self-sacrificing, and a bit remote.

Finally, after the war, he would play his greatest role, the commander who relinquished power and returned to his farm, an American Cincinnatus.

Effective tactics are helpful to have, but without a strategy, they can be useless, like a powerful car without a steering wheel.

This is a commander who is learning. Washington was not just consuming intelligence, but also generating it with how he used forces in the field.

It is a cliché, and a bad one, that generals try to “fight the last war”—that is, do what worked the last time out. That does not give them enough credit. Rather, they tend to fight the war they would like to fight or the one that they expected to fight. But neither of those responses is usually sufficient.

My career transition from Amazon Consumer Finance to AWS finance. LT is ‘fighting the last war’ I.e. using strategies that were once helpful in a certain context within a new environment.

At thirty-six years old, Madison was relatively young. He was not an impressive speaker. Short and frail, standing not much higher than five feet and weighing not much more than a hundred pounds, he was not physically imposing. He was not even a notable writer—there are few memorable phrases from his pen that we remember today.

Jefferson was surprised to find that the classical authors were not as popular in France as they were in the New World. “No body here reads them,” he reported to Madison, with some exaggeration.37

He was, in his heart, not an advocate of a strong central government, telling one of his former law clerks that “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.”44

Alexander Hamilton had wanted a far more aristocratic or monarchical system, with presidents and senators selected for life terms.

The lesson of this history, he concluded, is that “it emphatically illustrates the tendency of federal bodies, rather to anarchy among the members than to tyranny in the head.”59