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

by Thomas E. Ricks

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