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

by Thomas E. Ricks

for the Revolutionary generation, Rome stood well in front of Athens, with the Greek world pushed to the background, seen sometimes as a bit obscure and impractical. “It is impossible to read in Thucydides, his account of the factions and confusions throughout all Greece, . . . without horror,” John Adams wrote.12