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
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