Classic Kirk Essays
What Did Americans Inherit from the Ancients?
From the Appendix to America’s British Culture (1993).
It was British scholars and schoolmasters who imparted to the Americans of the thirteen colonies a knowledge of classical languages and literature, Greek and Roman history and politics and law. A translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans often stood on an American’s bookshelf alongside the Bible; and the character of leading Americans was formed by both books. The influence of Greek and Roman literature upon the people of British North America is well described in Richard M. Gummere’s book The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition. Second only to great English literature’s influence upon yesteryear’s Americans, classical philosophy and drama and rhetoric helped to shape American thought and mores.
Although those Americans who attended British universities, or the few American colleges established during the colonial era, acquired a good mastery of Ciceronian Latin often, and a tolerable acquaintance with ancient Greek, in general Americans read Plato and Aristotle, Plutarch and Livy, Sophocles and Seneca, in the great English translations published during the Tudor reigns, as the English commenced settling North America. Thus an English flavor permeated even the literary legacy Americans received from the ancient world.
Just what is this classical patrimony that much influenced both the thought and the action of the people of the thirteen colonies, and that was cherished in the United States well into the twentieth century? To Europeans living west of the Elbe or south of the Danube, the remains of classical civilization are visible even today: intelligent observers are aware of a continuity extending over many generations. Englishmen can look upon Roman masonry at York, Chester, Colchester, and even today’s London. For that matter, Roman ruins survive from the Atlantic shore of the Iberian peninsula all the way to the Euphrates, or from Scotland to Morocco. People who speak Romance tongues cannot be altogether unaware of the Roman past, nor can Greeks forget their distant cultural ancestors. But in North America, neither monuments of antiquity nor the roots of language can evoke memories of civilizations broken, yet somehow working through Americans in ghostly fashion. Nevertheless, Americans pay public homage to long-dead Greeks and Romans. Why is the public architecture of the District of Columbia still dominated by classical columns and domes? Why do Americans still pay some lip service to the disciplines of the humanities, the sources of which may be traced back to Greece six centuries before Christ?
It should be confessed that in some respects our debt to the ancients is not quite so great as certain historians and professors of politics would have us believe. The “lamp of experience” that Patrick Henry held high was not, in any positive and immediate fashion about 1775, the political experience of the Greeks and the Romans. That political and social experience “by which my feet are guided” (in Henry’s famous phrase) was the British experience and the experience of British subjects in the colonies. Then as now, the great mass of men and women were guided by received custom and convention, not by Hebraic or Greek or Latin texts. Only the well-schooled, in any literate culture, are much influenced in their conduct by learned writings of yesteryear. Although Patrick Henry read much, he was not moved mightily by intellectual abstractions.
In the Bicentennial years, a good deal was said about the Greek roots of American democracy, the model of the Roman Republic for Americans, and that sort of thing. (Too little was said about the Hebraic and Hellenic patrimony of moral order.)
In truth America’s political institutions owe next to nothing to the ancient world–although American modes of thinking about politics indeed were influenced, two centuries ago, by Greek and Roman philosophers long dead.
One learns much about constitutions from reading Plato and Aristotle and Polybius; constitutions monarchic, aristocratic, democratic; about oligarchies and timocracies; about tyrannies and kingships; about the polity, that blending of types of government. The educated Americans of the generation to which the Framers of the Constitution belonged studied the books of the Greeks and the Romans. But those books could not teach the Americans very much about constitutions that might be applied practically to the infant Republic of the United States.
For the people of the thirteen colonies had known almost from the first English settlements the institutions of representative government; while the ancient world had known nothing of that sort. Representative government, indeed, was what the War of Independence had been about. Only through some system of representation could a far-spreading United States of America be conceivable. Even the most redoubtable Anti-Federalist did not fancy that the American Republic could consist of a league of infant city-states; a Congress there must be, and that Congress must be a representative assembly.
For Greek politics in ancient times were the politics of city-states for the most part compact in territory, limited in population; and in the Greek democracies the entire body of male citizens was able to assemble in a forum for making public decisions of the gravest sort–sometimes foolish decisions with ghastly consequences. The United States, on the contrary, was a vast expanse of territory in which the few cities, in 1787, counted for little. And the Americans, unlike the Greeks, had the printing press to inform their democratic society. Many other differences existed.
In ancient times and in modern, the central problem of political constitutions has been this: how to reconcile the claims of authority with the claims of freedom. In any tolerable society, there must exist a permanent authority that maintains order and enforces the laws. Also, in any tolerable society, individuals and voluntary groups ought to enjoy considerable freedom. If authority (whether a government or some other general authority) claims too much, despotism may come to pass. If too much is claimed for personal freedom, anarchy may result. The states of the ancient world never wholly succeeded, in their constitutions, in satisfactorily balancing authority and liberty.
Anyone who studies history seriously is liable to be disheartened by the repeated disastrous failures of human attempts to achieve a tolerable measure of order and justice and freedom, for any great length of time. Sir Ernest Barker, an eminent English professor of politics, commented on the views of that great historian of law Sir Henry Maine: “History has with Maine, what it tends to have with many of us, a way of numbing generous emotions. All things have happened already; nothing much came of them before; nothing much can be expected of them now.”
Maine, writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, knew from his studies in ancient law how the democratic republics of classical Greece failed. A hundred years before Maine wrote, the authors of the Federalist Papers, and the other Framers of the American Constitution, had perceived that Americans could not find in the history of the Greek city-states any satisfactory model of a good constitution.
Study of Greek and Latin literature, and of the ancient world’s history and politics, loomed much larger in American education during the latter half of the eighteenth century than it does in American education today. Most of the Framers at one time or another, in translation or in the original Greek or Latin, had read such ancient authors as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch–philosophers and historians who described the constitutions of the Greek and Roman civilizations. But from such study the American leaders of the War of Independence and the constitution-making era learned, by their own account, chiefly what political blunders of ancient times ought to be avoided by the Republic of the United States. For the Greek city-states of the sixth and fifth and fourth centuries before Christ never succeeded in developing enduring constitutions that would give them order and justice and freedom. Civil war within those city-states was the rule, rather than the exception, class against class, family against family, faction against faction. And when half of those cities went to war against the other half, in the ruinous Peloponnesian struggle, during the last three decades of the fifth century why—Greek civilization never wholly recovered from that disaster.
Leading Americans did study closely the old Greek constitutions. In his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (published in 1787, on the eve of America’s Great Convention), John Adams examines critically twelve ancient democratic republics, three ancient aristocratic republics, and three ancient monarchial republics–and finds them all inferior to the political system of the new Republic of the United States. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, the authors of the Federalist Papers, often referred to “the turbulent democracies of ancient Greece” (Madison’s phrase) and to other ancient constitutions. In general, those three American statesmen found the political systems of Greece and Rome “as unfit for the imitation, as they are repugnant to the genius of America” (again, Madison’s phrase). Old James Monroe, long after he had been president of the United States, wrote his little book The People, the Sovereigns, finding the ancient constitutions of Athens, Sparta, and Carthage woefully defective when contrasted with the Constitution of the United States, in which the sovereign people conferred power upon governors. The American Framers and the early statesmen of the Republic, whether Federalists or Republicans, were no admirers of classical political structures.
Eighteenth-century Americans did respect Solon, the lawgiver of Athens in the sixth century before Christ. But Solon’s good constitution for his native city had lasted merely some thirty years before a tyrant seized power in Athens. Nor did ancient political theory, as distinct from institutions, often obtain American approbation: John Adams wrote that he had learned from reading Plato two things only: “First, that Franklin’s ideas of exempting husbandmen and mariners, &c., from the depredations of war, were borrowed from him; and second, that sneezing is a cure for the hiccough.”
Ancient Greek culture indeed did help to shape education in America, but Greek constitutions had next to no part in shaping the Constitution of the United States, nor the constitutions of the several states–except so far as Greek constitutional flaws suggested what Framers at Philadelphia and elsewhere ought not to adopt.
The Roman Republic was taken somewhat more seriously by leading Americans in the 1780s. The English word constitution is derived from the Latin constitutio, signifying a collection of laws or ordinances made by a Roman emperor. American boys at any decent school in the eighteenth century studied the orations and the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the defender of the Roman Republic in its declining years. The Roman term “Senate” was applied by the American Framers to the more select house of the legislative branch of their federal government–although the method for selecting senators in America would be very different from what it had been in Rome.
For the American constitutional delegates at Philadelphia, the most interesting feature of the Roman Republican constitution was its system of checks upon the power of men in high public authority, and its balancing of power among different public offices. The Americans had learned of these devices from the History by Polybius, a Greek statesman who had lived long in Rome–under compulsion. The two Roman consuls, or executives; the Roman Senate, made up of rich and powerful men who had served in several important offices before being made senators; the Roman assembly, or gathering of the common people-–these three bodies exercised separate powers. And the Roman constitution (an “unwritten” one) included other provisions for preventing any one class from putting down other classes, and for preserving the republican form of government. Praised by Polybius as the best constitution of his age, this Roman constitutional system was bound up with a beneficial body of civil law, and with “the high old Roman virtue” – the traditional Roman morality, with its demand for the performance of duties and for determined courage.
The actual forms of checks and balances that the Americans incorporated into their Constitution in 1787 were derived from English precedent and from American colonial experience, rather than directly from the Roman model. Instances from the history of the Roman Republic, nevertheless, often were cited by the Framers and by other leading Americans of that time as reinforcement for the American concept and reality of political checks and balances. And the Americans’ vision of a great and growing republic owed much to the annals of the Roman Republic.
In consequence of the long civil wars of Roman factions in the first century before Christ, the Republic fell, to be supplanted by the Roman empire. This Roman experience, and the decadence that oppressed Roman civilization as the centuries elapsed, were much in the minds of American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century. The grim consequences of political centralization under the Empire did something to discourage the notion of an American government that would be central rather than federal–much as the Greeks’ disunity was remarked by some delegates as a warning against leaving the American Republic a mere confederation. Besides, Roman struggles of class against class reminded Americans that they must seek to reconcile different classes through their own constitutional structure.
Thus Rome’s political and moral example was a cautionary lesson to Americans of the early Republic. Gibbon’s grand history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been published between 1776 and 1783, the period of the American Revolution, and its details were vivid in the minds of the delegates at Philadelphia.
Yet it will not do to make too much of the influence of the Roman constitution upon the Constitution of the United States, two thousand years after Polybius wrote in praise of Roman character and institutions. The more immediate and practical examples of constitutional success were the British and the colonial American political structures; and the American Republic was joined with Britain and with her own colonial past by a continuity of culture that much exceeded the Americans’ link with old Rome, so distant and so remote in time.
In ancient times and in modern, the central problem of political constitutions has been this: how to reconcile the claims of authority with the claims of freedom. In any tolerable society, there must exist a permanent authority that maintains order and enforces the laws. Also, in any tolerable society, individuals and voluntary groups ought to enjoy considerable freedom. If authority (whether a government or some other general authority) claims too much, despotism may come to pass. If too much is claimed for personal freedom, anarchy may result. The states of the ancient world never wholly succeeded, in their constitutions, in satisfactorily balancing authority and liberty.
It was the aspiration of the delegates at Philadelphia, in 1787, to reconcile the need for a strong federal government with the demand for much personal liberty and for guarantees of state and local powers. They could not find in the history of the ancient world any model that might achieve this purpose. In 1866, nine decades after the Great Convention at Philadelphia, Orestes Brownson–one of the more interesting of America’s political thinkers–would write in his book The American Republic that America’s mission under God was to realize the true idea of the political state or nation; to give flesh to that concept of the commonwealth “which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. . . . The Greek and Roman republics asserted the state to the detriment of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same, or assert individual freedom to the detriment of the state. The American Republic has been instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each with advantage to the other.”
Certainly such a high ambition, surpassing the political achievements of the ancient world, was the spirit of 1787 at Philadelphia.
If, then, the Greeks and the Romans bequeathed to America no political institutions–why, what is America’s inheritance from the ancient world? Primarily, that patrimony is a body of great literature. The poets, the philosophers, the rhetoricians, the historians, the biographers, the satirists, the dramatists of the ancient world move us still; their aphorisms are embedded in our schooling, their descriptions of the human condition tell us what is tragic and what pathetic. Aye, the theologians of the late centuries of the Graeco-Roman culture move us, too; for Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great were men of the classical culture, and so were other Fathers of the Church, West and East.
Does not the preceding paragraph omit the patrimony of justice and law that has come down to our time for Greece, and more especially from Roman, sources? No, I am not ignoring that great inheritance; I am merely pointing out that this is a literary, rather than an institutional, legacy, especially when one refers to the laws of the United States and of other countries basically English in their legal institutions. British and American jurisprudence was much influenced, formerly at least, by the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero; and British judges, reading Roman law surreptitiously despite repeated fulminations from the Crown, were not immune from the doctrines of Gaius, Ulpian, and the Corpus Juris. But obviously the juridical system of the United States is not copied directly from the Roman system of courts and procedures, any more that the Constitution of the United States is an embodiment of Greek political philosophy.
So it is through books of one sort or another that the ancient world moves us moderns. Once upon a time, well-educated men and women could read those books in the original Latin or Greek; but in the present century, and more particularly during the past seven decades, the proportion of people well acquainted with the classical languages has declined fearfully. In translation, however, the books of the greater writers of ancient times continue to work upon minds and consciences, if not so strongly as such writers did two centuries ago, when the Americans accepted “a more perfect Union.”
Why is it that educational authorities, down to this writer’s own youthful years, believed the teaching of the great literature of Greece and Rome highly important for the enlargement of wisdom and virtue, mind and character? Why was it that the British pattern of schooling, developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and continued little altered at the better schools down to recent decades, consisted in large part of careful study of Plato and Aristotle, the Greek dramatists and historians, Cicero, Vergil, Horace, Livy, Tacitus, Seneca, Plutarch? Why was it that well into the nineteenth century, even in wild Connaught, hedge schoolmasters like Yeats’ Red Hanrahan went about with an inkpot hanging on a chain round the neck, a heavy copy of Vergil in a coat pocket, teaching Latin poetry to little barefoot Papist boys? Were the educational authorities of yesteryear absurdly mistaken about the importance of the ancient writers? Have today’s educational authorities mercifully rescued the rising generation from servitude to the dead hand of the past, that the young may rejoice in the blessings of the new discipline of computer science?
On the contrary, the classical disciplines in schooling were immensely important, and for centuries successful. Their purpose was to bring about order in the soul and order in the commonwealth.
First, the poets and the philosophers of antiquity examined keenly the human condition. What are we mortals, and what are we to do in the short span of man’s existence? Such ultimate questions were taken up boldly by both Greek and Roman writers of genius. People of the modern age were able to profit much from these discourses and disputations of some two thousand years ago, because the very remoteness in time of the ancient poets and philosophers emancipated modern readers from the tyranny of present-day passions and complexities. The Greeks and the Romans did not possess the Hebrews’ treasures of the Book and the Law; but they possessed insights into human nature and even into physical nature–the theory of atoms, for instance–that people near the end of the twentieth century account for. Once this writer said to the Earl of Crawford, a considerable classical scholar, that the ancient Greeks knew everything important. “Yes,” he replied, “and the question is, ‘How did they know it?'” Knowledge of ancient insight and speculation is the way to acquire a philosophical habit of mind.
Second, the literature of the ancient world was employed to form good character among the rising generation. Plutarch’s heroes were exemplars for the men who framed the Constitution of the United States. In my own case, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius have influenced me more strongly than has any other treatise, of any age, in any language. The high old Roman virtues were inculcated among the literate of many lands, century upon century: one might write an essay, I suppose, upon how the audacious character of the Polish nobility, say, down to very recent years, was formed in Roman molds, Latin being the language of the educated in Poland until well into the eighteenth century. Or one might trace the strong influence of Roman models upon the Spaniards–Iberia having been more Roman than Italy, in imperial times–and through the Spaniards, upon the upper classes of Latin America. Cicero’s Offices became in medieval times a manual for the duties of the leaders of men; and although presumably no candidate for the presidency of these United States, in recent years, kept on his bedside table the Offices, nevertheless in subtle ways that book and the manuals of the Stoics still linger as exhortations to, or restraints upon, public men in this land–linger in ghostly fashion, transmuted through later writers or embedded in political customs. One may add that the very recent concern for restoring in American public schooling some measures to form good character has revived in certain quarters an interest in classical moral philosophy, as distinguished from religious instruction.
The poets and the philosophers of antiquity examined keenly the human condition. What are we mortals, and what are we to do in the short span of man’s existence? Such ultimate questions were taken up boldly by both Greek and Roman writers of genius. People of the modern age were able to profit much from these discourses and disputations of some two thousand years ago, because the very remoteness in time of the ancient poets and philosophers emancipated modern readers from the tyranny of present-day passions and complexities.
Third, the classical literature of jurisprudence and law obviously is a very important part of our patrimony from Greece and Rome. The theory of justice which prevailed in the West generally until the Russian Revolution, and which still prevails after a fashion in Western Europe and the Americas, has its roots in Aristotle’s doctrine of “to each his own,” and in Aristotle’s observation that it is unjust to treat unequal things equally. The Ciceronian teaching of natural law, though much assailed and battered since the closing years of the eighteenth century, still has vitality–if sometimes in curiously distorted forms. And of course Justinian’s Corpus Juris reconquered Europe, gradually, for Romanitas–long after Rome had fallen, and spreading its power even after the fall of Constantinople. And incorporated into canon law, Roman legal principles still function within the framework of the Catholic Church and are studied in this metamorphosed form today, in the law schools of Central and Southern Europe most notable.
One might go on to describe other great ways in which the civilization dominant in the Mediterranean world, more than two millennia gone, still works among us. But time runs on, runs on. I have emphasized strongly our classical literary patrimony, and have denied that we enjoy much inheritance from Greece and Rome in our political institutions. But I do not mean to argue that no Roman influence survives in social–as distinguished from political–institutions, even to this day.
In Italy, and to some degree in Spain, it still is possible to find functioning, especially in old-fashioned towns and villages, remnants of social usages that apparently have survived many centuries of devastation and radical social alteration–even of vast demographic changes. But when I refer to social institutions, I mean something larger and more widespread than remnants of ancient folkways.
Nay, I mean, rather, to give an eminent example, the institution of the family, still most close-knit in the south of Europe, but transplanted to northern Europe also, and across the Atlantic. The Roman state never forgot that the family was the footing of all civil social order; the state was solicitous for the family’s well-being–if, at the end, unsuccessful in its protections. This function of safeguarding and upholding the family passed from the dying Roman state to the emerging universal church, gradually, but most notably during the reign of Gregory the Great. Thus the Church, in medieval times and in modern, labored skillfully to nurture family loves and family duties: the institutions of classical Rome transmuted into the institutions of Christian Rome. “Rome is the power that withholds,” John Henry Newman wrote–the power, in ancient times and even in our own day, which restrains men and women from the indulgence of those appetites which, given their head, would shatter the human race. The strong family has been such an institution of restraint, life-giving restraint. No-fault divorce nowadays is only one of the socially destructive assaults upon the traditional family that, in the name of emancipation, would make us all into orphans. When that restraining power of Rome is broken, Newman declared, there will come the Anti-Christ. But such prophecies are not Delphic or Curnaean.
The Roman state never forgot that the family was the footing of all civil social order; the state was solicitous for the family’s well-being–if, at the end, unsuccessful in its protections. This function of safeguarding and upholding the family passed from the dying Roman state to the emerging universal church, gradually, but most notably during the reign of Gregory the Great.
However that may be, the institution of the family comes to us in part through Rome; yet through Roman principles absorbed into Britain, and reinforced by British social experience. This filtering is true of nearly all of America’s classical patrimony: Americans know it through British eyes. Fulbert of Chartres, in medieval times, declared that we moderns–that is, the people of his own age–are dwarfs standing upon the shoulders of giants: we see farther than do the giants, but merely because we are mounted upon their shoulders. Those giants are the wise men of classical and early Christian epochs. From them Americans have inherited the order of the soul and the order of the commonwealth. If we think to liberate ourselves from the past by leaping off those giants’ shoulders–why, we tumble into the ditch of unreason. If we ignore the subtle wisdom of the classical past and the British past, we are left with a thin evanescent culture, a mere film upon the surface of the deep well of the past. Those who refuse to drink of that well may be drowned in it.
Copyright © The Russell Kirk Legacy, LLC
