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

by Thomas E. Ricks

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.6 To the west in the Federal City stands the Lincoln Memorial, which resembles the Parthenon of Athens, turned sideways, and the Jefferson Memorial, which borrows from Rome’s Pantheon. Reach into your wallet, take out a one-dollar bill, and on the reverse side you will see three Latin phrases: On the left, annuit coeptis (more or less, “our undertakings are favored”) and novus ordo seclorum (“new order of the ages”), and on the right, the more familiar E pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”). Ironically, on the obverse side is the image of George Washington, the only one of our first four presidents not to read Latin.