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

by Thomas E. Ricks

Before that Tuesday night in November 2016, I had thought I understood my country. But the result of that election shocked me. Clearly, many of my fellow citizens had an understanding of our nation profoundly different from mine.

We are a nation fundamentally dedicated to equal standing before the law, yet also have developed a political system in which one of the two major parties always seems to have offered a home to white supremacists, up to the present day.

Finally I examine James Madison, whose classicism was leavened by a greater cosmopolitanism and an understanding of the limits to which one could rely on what the Romans called virtue, by which they meant public-mindedness.

Finally I’ll explore the moral and intellectual void that opened as classical ideals yielded in the nineteenth to the rise of religious evangelism and commercial culture, and consider if we might develop a new sense of public-spiritedness in our own time.

“Synthesis demands regard for complexity,” Peter Gay cautioned in his colossal two-volume history of the Enlightenment.

One of the more powerful commentaries on America was the arch question Samuel Johnson posed in 1777: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”4 It is a question that still hangs in the air more than two centuries later.

They grew into distinctly dissimilar men: Washington a stiff-necked soldier; Adams a brilliant, honest, self-absorbed crank; Jefferson a dreamer of liberty who lived in hypocritical luxury off the sweat of captive humans; Madison already with one foot in the next generation, perhaps more of an American than a Virginian, and an unapologetic politician. Like Alexander Hamilton, he was more skeptical than his elders of the verities of the Enlightenment, with its core faith in human improvement.

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 ancient world was present in their lives in ways that, because they gave the country its shape, echo down the corridors of time, mainly in ghostly ways that people today tend not to notice. 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.5 Just east of the Capitol building, our Supreme Court convenes in a marbled 1935 imitation of a Roman temple, with great bronze doors at the entrance weighing twenty-six thousand pounds apiece.

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.

the generation that made the French Revolution owned a remarkably similar bookshelf, with Cicero again in the lead.21

but came back again and again to that crucial period of the decline of the Republic.

What gripped their minds, what they knew in detail, and what formed their view of the whole of the ancient world,” the historian Bernard Bailyn concludes in his classic study of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, “was the political history of Rome from the conquests in the east and the civil wars in the early first century bc to the establishment of the empire on the ruins of the republic at the end of the second century ad.”26 It was not just their core narrative, it was their lodestar. Alexander Hamilton, for instance, flatly asserted in the thirty-fourth of the Federalist Papers that “the Roman Republic attained to the utmost height of human greatness.”27

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. A particularly malign aspect of this was the racial justification for American slavery. The Greeks and Romans held that being enslaved was a matter of misfortune. The people they owned had a variety of colors and nationalities. “Roman slavery was a nonracist and fluid system where the places from which slaves came varied considerably from one period to another,” concludes one historian.42 Roman slavery could be very cruel, but generally, states legal historian David Bederman, it was “not as harsh and exploitative as its modern analogues.”

“Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known.”7 Prudent, considerate, careful, determined, honest, and inflexible: Jefferson did not quite say so, but he was describing Washington as the American Cato, the eighteenth century’s embodiment of virtue, the very ideal of what a public man should be.

To become an American Cato, Washington would need to become a man of recognized great virtue. Despite his lack of education, he understood that for someone of his time and place, attainment of public virtue was the highest goal one could have in life.28 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.

Young George Washington had something to prove, and he saw how to do it.

Even more significant, he was learning how to read the land, especially on the frontier, a skill that would serve him all his life, but most notably as a military commander.

His enormous force of will, perhaps his most significant quality as an adult, was beginning to emerge. As Plutarch wrote of Cato, “He was resolute in his purposes, much beyond the strength of his age, to go through with whatever he undertook.”

Any large-scale military movement can be difficult. Retreating after a defeat is always hard, and often is the point when a force suffers some of its heaviest personnel losses through attacks from pursuers or simple desertion. But perhaps the most challenging of all retreats is withdrawing at night through hostile, wooded, mountainous territory after a severe setback. The harrowing experience can easily shatter an army.

Which would prove more influential in American history, Washington’s practical education on the frontier or the study by Adams, Jefferson, and Madison of classical history, philosophy, and rhetoric? It is impossible to say. The answer is probably that both were essential. His college-educated comrades learned what was needed to found and design a new kind of nation; Washington, in a different but equally daunting school, learned what was necessary to liberate it and lead it toward stability.

Cicero was born in 106 bc in Arpinum, a small town in the hills about seventy-five miles southeast of Rome, a bit short of Monte Cassino. There was little indication that he was destined for greatness. He was a plebian, the son of a rustic “nobody,” as Trollope puts it.12 Cicero would become what the Romans called a “new man,” one who would become ennobled by eventually holding high office.

What kind of country had Rome become?

In the 1730s, Alexander Pope pondered in his Essay on Man how a passionate spirit can go either very right or spectacularly wrong: The fiery Soul abhor’d in Catiline In Decius charms, in Curtius is divine, The same Ambition can destroy or save, And makes a Patriot as it makes a Knave.29

ignis fatuus [will-o’-the-wisp]

the public duties of the individual, what a person owes to his or her society. Here

For all its inclusiveness, one subject that is absent from the book’s twelve areas of learning is religion. Christianity simply did not loom as large in colonial America as it would a century later, or indeed does now in much of the United States. As

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. Immanuel Kant, when asked in 1784 to define “enlightenment,” called it a “true reform in ways of thinking.”53 To be sure, there were commonalities in what was thought about. 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.”54 The opposite of enlightenment, states her predecessor Carl Becker, was “superstition, intolerance, tyranny.”

An observation by the novelist Anthony Trollope also applies to Adams: “Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his weakness. . . . He was very great while he spoke of his country, which he did so often; but he was almost as little when he spoke of himself—which he did as often.”84

The plantation had an impressive library, containing most of the ancient masters and many contemporary authors, but Fithian devotes more space in his diary to recording the family’s multiple illnesses, languorous outings, and sumptuous meals of rockfish, crab, fruit, ham, and beef, accompanied by wine, grog, port, and porter.

There are few better ways to study a literary passage than to write it out in one’s own hand, feeling each word and following the flow of thought.

House of Burgesses

Jefferson appears to draw a subtle distinction between Small and some of the other faculty members. The Scotsman, the only non-cleric on the faculty, was “a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, & an enlarged and liberal mind.”16 In that last phrase, Jefferson hints at the Scottish empiricism he likely learned from Small.

Jefferson copied into his book Bolingbroke’s irreligious observation that while Christ did not offer a complete system of ethics, the ancient world did: “A system thus collected from the writings of ancient heathen moralists, of Tully [Cicero], of Seneca, of Epictetus, and others, would be more full, more entire, more coherent, and more clearly deduced from unquestionable principles of knowledge.”73 Jefferson would come to own some thirteen volumes by Bolingbroke and hail Bolingbroke’s style as of “the highest order.”

But the founders read quite widely in other works by Xenophon, especially the Memorabilia, his memoir of Socrates. Jefferson greatly preferred Xenophon’s account of Socrates to Plato’s.

“The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.”

Montesquieu

The Spirit of Laws

One can only wonder if Jefferson was influenced by Socrates’ admonition, reported by Xenophon, that a dwelling should be designed so that “each room invited just what was suited to it.”70 A dome, unknown to the Greeks but the characteristic form of Roman architecture, eventually would top the home he designed.71

Heed the Roman example, he urged his listeners: Oppose oppression, disdain luxury, and remain united and patriotic.

This was about as succinct a summary of the radical American position as was possible: The American people had no need for a king to stand between them and God. Rather they had a God-given right to liberty.

We should leave behind our “expressions of servility,” Jefferson contended, and show the king we are not seeking his favors but reminding him of our rights.

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.

Jefferson then delivers the sum of this indictment. The American people have weighed the character of the king and found him wanting. He just is not good enough for them. “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Reading this, one can almost hear the applause of the Scottish political philosophers.

In the last sentence, the signers “pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour.” In other words: We will not back down. Our virtue is at stake.

If the best measure of a general is the ability to grasp the nature of the war he or she faces and then to make changes, Washington was among the greatest the United States ever had.

Washington would distance himself emotionally from Reed, yet continued to work with him—a sign of his understanding that, given the stakes in the war, he could not let personal feelings, no matter how well founded, interfere with the task at hand. This was Washington the stoic.

the defender was facing an invader from overseas who had to cross land and sea barriers in order to bring in additional supplies and troops.68 Those hurdles made attacking the invader’s supply lines and exhausting his troops an especially productive approach. Supplies were harder for him to find, and replacements had to come from afar.

It was the single largest engagement of the war, and one of the worst for the Americans, who seemed not to have scouted the ground on which they fought, an inexplicable military blunder.

The only thing worse than not being protected at all was to first be protected and thus encouraged to shed one’s neutral or ambiguous stance, and then to lose that protection and so be exposed to retaliation by the rebels.