Mirrors of Antiquity: The Roman Republic and Civic Idealism in the United States

No, Really, Are We Rome? (Ortega, 2021)

 

Finley Peter Dunne’s (1906) barroom whit, Mr. Dooley, described the importance of ancient Greece and Rome on the American imagination with as much clarity as the authors of the Constitution and the subsequent political scientists they inspired:

I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnessy, because it ain’t like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me th’ people fightin’, getting’ dhrunk, makin’ love, getting’ married, owin’ th’ grocery man an’ bein’ without hardcoal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure...histhry is a post-mortem examination. It tells ye what a counthry died iv. But I’d like to know what it lived iv. (p. 271)

 

Cullen Murphy, author of Are We Rome? (2007), expresses much the same assurance as Mr. Dooley, in a recite Atlantic op-ed (2021), “Ever since Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the prospect of a Rome-inflected apocalypse has cast its chilling spell. […] The comparison can, of course, be facile. […] Still, I am not immune to preoccupation with the Roman past.” Certainly, the secondary civic curriculums of the United States have primed students to think with Roman analogies. Few textbooks can escape commenting upon the authors of the Constitution’s fascination with the principles of the Roman Republic: the separation of powers, rule of law, and limited representational government. The architects of government during the Early Republic equally held up the visage of Republican Rome when denouncing the dangers of the mob and praising the importance of civic duty, honor, and the common good. Most importantly, though, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington, amongst others, emphasized a threat American civic textbooks have complacently dropped: tyranny. While analogies to the Roman Republic can, as Mr. Dooley described, at times seem like a post-mortem exercise, the influence of the classical world—and the perceived fate of republics—upon the citizens of the United States should not be underemphasized.

Civic Textbooks and the Roman Republic

            A wide array of civics textbooks link the Roman Republic to the foundational principles of governance in the United States. First published in 1917, Magruder’s American Government is amongst the oldest continuously published American civics textbooks and has frequently been argued to be the most widely adopted curriculum in the United States (R. A. Banaszak, 1993; M. Mark, 1997). In the 2016 edition of the textbook, the Roman Republic immediately follows a section titled “Athens: The First Democracy” and is used to introduce students to the idea of res publica, which “introduce[d] the concept of representation” and featured the elections of some public officials by patricians and plebians (D. M. Shea, 2016, p. 20). Most importantly, the textbook continues, “Senators were elected by the citizenry. The patricians dominated that body, but, over time, an increasing number of plebeians were elected to the Senate and to a number of lesser assemblies” (D. M. Shea, 2016, p. 20). Power, according to Magruder’s, was shared in the Roman Republic between two consuls, who controlled foreign policy and the military, and the Senate, which chose the consuls (D. M. Shea, 2016, p. 20). B. Ginsberg, et. al., present a similar narrative in their We the People (2017) with a more explicit connection between the authors of the Constitution and the Roman Republic:

If the Declaration of Independence drew its philosophical inspiration from John Locke, the Constitution drew upon the thoughts of the French political philosopher Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu (1689-1755). In Montesquieu’s view, the powers of government must be divided in order to prevent any one group or institution from exercising tyrannical control over the nation. Montesquieu recommended a tripartite division, placing the executive, legislative, and judicial powers in different governmental bodies. He claimed that such a tripartite division had worked very well in the Roman Republic and in Britain. (p. 52)

 

A similar Montesquieu-based connection between the separation of powers for the prevention of tyranny and the authors of the Constitution can be found in textbooks by J. Q. Wilson, et. al., (2017), L. E. Ford, et. al., (2017), and W. T. Bianco and David T. Canon (2017). Civic textbooks, therefore, have preserved—and perhaps reified—the connection between the Roman Republic and structural aspects adopted by the architects to of governance in the American Early Republic.  

            That conclusion is born out through S. Burstein’s (1996) analysis of the authors of the Constitution classical fixations. Perhaps best summarized by Burstein’s (1996) citation of Benjamin Franklin, who lamented at the Constitutional Convention that “prayer would be more useful than the delegates’ repeated references to ancient history” (p. 31). Less cynically, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both quoted John Locke, who wrote that reading Thucydides and Tacitus was akin to “reading the History of my own Times and my own Life” (Burstein, 1996, p. 35). According to Burstein, the lesson that John Locke taught Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams was simple and clear: Republican Rome was able to “thrive on virtue, the willingness of the citizens ‘to subordinate personal considerations to the good of their communities’” (Burstein, 1996, p. 35). Bernard Bailyn (1967), a leading intellectual historian of the American Revolution, though, cautions from reading too greatly into the citations of the Constitution’s intellectual progenitors. Indeed, he called them so much “window dressing” (Bailyn, 1967, p. 24). Indeed, Thomas Jefferson and Charles Pickney both agreed—on this and little else—that antiquity was best utilized as a source of mistakes that led to decline and tyranny (Burstein, 1996, p. 36). James Madison probably constructed one of the most thorough surveys of ancient democracies for lessons in crafting the Constitution in his Federalist 18, 38, and 63. The latter was particularly influential in advocating the Roman Republic’s Senate as superior to Athens’ less structured democracy (Burstein, 1996, p. 36). As Madison wrote, “What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard (a Senate) against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing on the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next” (Burstein, 1996, p. 37). Similarly, John Adam’s Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States drew from the Roman Republic the dangers of an unvirtuous citizenry, the politicization of self-interested factions, and the ease with which democracy could slip into tyranny from the histories of Rome’s Polybius (Burstein, 1996, p. 37). C. F. Mullet (1939, p. 104) encouraged students of the American Constitution to consider ancient philosophers cited by the founders as “honorary” authors of governance in the United States. Certainly, civics education in the United States continues to do so.

Duty, Honor, and the Mob

            Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1819, “what was the government which the virtues of Cicero were so zealous to restore and the ambition of Caesar to subvert[?] Certainly, not good government, since they [the Romans] never had is from the rape of the Sabines to the ravages of the Caesars” (Burstein, 1996, p. 39). The classics, particularly those pertaining to Republican Rome, to the authors of the Constitution, were often read for the lessons they provided on what not to do rather than on what to do. Critical to the prevention of tyranny—beyond the systemic division and balancing of power discussed above—was the preservation of government by the virtuous and honorable. J. Freeman’s Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (2001) details how the elected “republican courtiers” of George Washington’s administration established a national political culture that transformed the virtue described by “classical ‘founders’ [such] as Solon, Cato, Cicero, and Cincinnatus” into a cult of honor (p. 6). To be honorable republicans, Americans denounced “their corrupt European forebears” and embraced egalitarianism, democracy, representation, straightforwardness, and the “virtuous spirit of public minded practice” (Freeman, 2001, p. 7). The effete, aristocratic pomp and extravagance of European governance was to be abandoned in favor of a fantasy of austere Republican Rome, were Republican Romans to favor the plain sobriety of Quakers (Freeman, 2001, p. 8).  

            Of course, the honorable political elites elected to the service of the republic were different—in their own imaginings at least—from that other scourge of Republican Rome, the mob. In the Early Republic described by Freeman, the mob were landless laborers, backcountry farmers in danger of devolution, and, increasingly, non-Protestant Anglo-Scottish immigrants (Freeman, 2001, pp. 199-261). During the democratizing fervor of Andrew Jackson’s accent, the mob shifted to Irish and German immigrants (R. M. Smith, 1997, pp. 197-242). After the Civil War, the mob included Chinese and Japanese Americans, Black Americans, and immigrants from Southern Europe (R. M. Smith, 1997, pp. 410-469). While the classical allusions may have dwindled in the 20^th century, the mob continues to haunt the political rhetoric and civic identity of the United States. Perhaps, nothing demonstrates the legacy of Republican Rome in American political thought than the positivity of a protest and the negativity of a riot in contemporary narratives of discourse (K. C. Jackson, 2020).  

The Ever-Present Threat of Tyranny

            C. Murphy (2007) argued that the United States had, like the Roman Republic, fallen to imperial hubris. That, like Rome after the Carthaginian Campaigns, the United States after the Second World War had allowed democratic ideals to be eroded by the power of imperial grandeur. As he noted, “The country was mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, fear and suspicion of foreigners were on the rise; and public functions of all kinds (maintaining highways, operating prisons, providing security) were being privatized. All of that had echoes of Rome’s long story” (Murphy, 2021). In updating his hypothesis to 2021, Murphy concluded that he would add “the debasement of truth, the cruelty and moral squalor of many leaders, the corruption of basic institutions” to his analogy (2021). These, though, as B. Kiernan (2009) and J. Burbank and F. Cooper (2010) were the principal reasons why Romans chose to abandon the Republic in favor of the tyranny of the Empire. The Empire provided, at least in the beginning, stability that enabled the citizens to experience prosperity. As the founders of republicanism in the United States realized, the greatest threat of tyranny came not from without, but from within. Whether a professional standing military, Thomas Jefferson’s fear, or the appeasement of the mob, Alexander Hamilton’s fear, the founding generation understood that like Romans, Americans might one day elect tyranny to secure stability and the promise of prosperity.

            Perhaps, then, the real purpose of including the Roman Republic in the civics curriculum is about more than the reading habits of eighteenth century British colonial gentlemen but is about the narrative of citizens in a democracy electing tyranny. The Roman Republic served as an abject lesson in the promise and pitfalls of republican government and inspiration for a virtuous citizenry. Rome flourished after the fall of the Republic and the Empire pushed governance beyond anything the world had seen. As the founders of the United States would have glumly noted, prosperity brought wealth, wealth delivered decadence, and decadence promoted corruption. Can the student, forearmed with a civics education, heed Rome’s warning?   

References

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