110 Spitz, J.-F. 1995. La liberté républicaine. Paris.
111 Spitz, J.-F. 2000. L’amour de l’égalité. Essai sur la critique de l’égalitarisme républicain 1770-1830. Paris.
112 Talleyrand, C.M. 1791. ‘Rapport sur l’instruction publique, fait au nom du Comité de constitution, à l’Assemblée nationale, 10th, 11th, et 19 September 1791’. In Une éducation pour la démocratie. Textes et projets de l’époque révolutionnaire. Ed. Baczko, B. Geneva, Droz, 2000.
113 Trabulsi, J.A.D. 2009. L’Antique et le Contemporain: études de tradition classique et d’historiographie moderne de l’Antiquité. Besançon.
114 Venturi, F. 1970. Utopia e riforma nell’illuminismo. Turin.
115 Viarre, S. 1991. ‘Saint-Just et la république romaine.’ In Chevallier, R., ed. La révolution française et l’Antiquité. Tours, 351–368.
116 Volney, C.-F. 1799. Leçons d’histoire prononcées à l’Ecole normale en l’an III de la République française (1795). Paris.
117 Voltaire, F.M. 1741. La mort de César (1st ed. 1736). Paris.
118 Wright, K. 1997. A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably. Stanford.
CHAPTER 5 A Roman Revolution: Classical Republicanism in the Creation of the American Republic
Eran Shalev
5.1 Introduction
Years before the American Revolution a young John Adams read the history of British North America in Roman narratives. Even ‘immortal Rome’, he wrote at the age of 20 in a letter to a friend, ‘was at first but an insignificant village…but by degrees it rose to a stupendous Height’. When Rome sunk into debauchery, the young Adams concluded, it became ‘easy prey to Barbarians’. Similarly, when England, currently ‘the greatest Nation upon the globe’ will decline, ‘the great seat of Empire’ may transfer ‘into America’ (Letter to Nathan Webb, 12 October 1755; see Taylor 1977, vol 1: 5). Years later, as a representative to the revolutionary First Continental Congress, Adams was willing to bring his and the Roman worlds even closer yet. He believed that that body’s delegates’ reaction to the horrid, and false, news of the bombardment of Boston in September 1774 – they vigorously chanted ‘War! War! War!’ – would ‘have done honour to the oratory of a Briton or a Roman’ (Letter to Abigail Adams, 18 September 1774; Smith 1976, vol. 1: 80). Reflecting on the American Revolution from his retirement in 1805, the second president of the United States ‘read the history of all ages and nations in every page’ of a Roman history he was studying at the time. Indeed, it was ‘especially the history of our country for forty years past’ that John Adams could recognise and discover in the Roman annals. If one would only ‘change the names’, then ‘every anecdote will be applicable to us’ (see Richard 1994: 84).
Adams was anything but unique in his reflections. Indeed, throughout their revolution Americans incessantly compared their compatriots to revered Romans, their enemies to malicious Romans, and saw their new nation as a reincarnation of Republican Rome. So powerful was this mode of thought that many contemporaries wished they would get a chance to re-experience that revered history, while others feared that classical history, especially the decline and dissolution of the ancient polities, particularly the Roman Empire, would repeat itself in America. Occasionally, when the stakes were especially high, they thought they were, as Edmund Pendleton, president of the Virginia Convention, put it in 1776, ‘treading upon the Republican ground’ of Rome (see Gummere 1963: 18).
5.2 Classical Conditioning
The generation of American revolutionaries found the classics so appealing because they perceived the ancient republics as the origin and embodiment of some of the most powerful ideals they cherished, namely the ideological bundle modern scholarship understood under the common framework of ‘the republican synthesis’ (see Shalhope 1972; 1982; cf. Chapter 28). Indeed, many revolutionaries envisioned a society and government based on virtue and disinterested citizenship, the main sources of classical republicanism (Fink 1962; Pocock 1975 (2003)). Unsurprisingly, a powerful ideal of many of the Revolution’s leaders and their followers was not a democracy (a government still associated with the rule of the mob), but rather an organic hierarchy led by patricians who would embody the classical virtues (Adams 2001). It is thus Republican Rome more than any other classical polity that dominated their historical and political imaginations and it was Rome that revolutionaries ‘saw as the noblest achievement of free men aspiring to govern themselves’ (Schlesinger 1986: 5). It was Rome, not a Greek polis, that appealed to the republican political sensibilities of patriots and thus it was Rome that they envisioned while erecting their own republic on western shores.1
The world of classical antiquity was becoming meaningful after 1750 to ever-growing numbers of North Americans. American elites have always been preoccupied with the classics, their formal education based on a strict and uniform curriculum that stressed Latin (and Greek and Hebrew to a lesser extent), derived from the admission requirements of contemporary colleges, of which there were nine in 1776 and 25 by 1800. Students graduating from grammar school would be expected to read Cicero and Virgil in Latin, and the New Testament in Greek, if they wished to be admitted to college. The years spent in college deepened the familiarity of generations of Americans with antiquity and its languages (Cremin 1970). The holdings of public and private libraries reflected these cultural interests; catalogues consistently show between 10 and 12% of classical materials, both of originals and of translations (Reinhold 1984: 29). Yet even Americans who were not privileged enough to enjoy the benefit of years of rigid classical studies could still develop formidable knowledge and a sense of familiarity with the world of antiquity. Men such as George Washington and Patrick Henry never learned Latin; nonetheless, they and many of their like were able to make Rome and its history meaningful to their private and public lives to a remarkable degree.
Late eighteenth-century reading Americans developed a ‘vernacular classical’ canon of modern histories of antiquity and translations from the Latin and Greek; that category ‘was rapidly encroaching on the cultural reverence for ancient texts in Greek and Latin’ (Winterer 2001: 26). Obviously, such ‘vernacular classicism’ vastly extended the potential number of participants in the classical discourse to Americans who could read English but were not proficient in Latin or Greek. Additionally, a classical visual culture emerged during those decades, through which they were introduced to classical pictorial representations and symbolisms by way of paintings, broadsides, coins, paper currency, seals, almanacs, magazines, bowls, banners, wallpaper, furniture and fashion (Winterer 2005). The venues in which they were bombarded with classical themes expanded as well and by the late eighteenth century included salons, coffee-houses, literary societies and clubs, theatres and public orations (see Shields 2000). The rise of such discursive institutions converged with the permeation of antique forms into the sphere of art, architecture and nomenclature. Indeed, historians of the classical tradition in America seem to agree that the novel oral, visual and printed modes of communication in early America ‘broadly diffused’ the classical tradition in late eighteenth-century America, a tradition which, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, had a ‘palpable presence’ (Winterer 2004: 29). When imperial tensions began escalating after the mid-1760s, this widespread and ever growing familiarity with classical antiquity could be quickly transformed into an overtly political and most effective revolutionary language.
5.3 Virtuous Politics
From the early days of the Revolution, American patriots evaluated and defined public action in light of the lessons of antiquity, particularly of Rome. With the connection