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

by Thomas E. Ricks

The great English Romantic poets—Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Coleridge—all went Greek, each in his own way. “We are all Greeks,” Shelley mandated. “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.”22 Shelley was not correct in this, but accuracy was not the point of such passionate enthusiasm.