34 – Ancient Rome and America’s Founding Fathers

Welcome to the Toans on Podcast. I'm Garrett Ryan and my guest today is Karl Richard, professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Karl has written several books on how Roman history and Roman literature influenced the American Founding Fathers, which is our topic today. So Karl, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's my great pleasure. So to start with the beginning, how classical was education in the colonial America? The classics were the center of education. You did have primary education often run by the schools for a year or two, just to teach basic literacy. And both boys and girls were involved in that. But once you got beyond that level, the next level was the grammar school. And grammar referred to Greek and Latin grammar, not English grammar. And that was just for boys. And not the poorest boys, you know, these were tuition, you know, these were not public schools by and large. And you studied the classics there. And then a few percent of the males then went on to college where you had usually another three years out of four that were dedicated to Greek and Latin. So I mean, the educational system was heavily classical. Right. Following a very long European tradition, where it's just the absolute center of what you're learning. And so which ancient authors of Greek and Latin are most often being read in these schools? Well, in the case of Greek Homer and the New Testament, where the staples, in the case of Latin, Virgil and Cicero were the most common author study. And Latin's always much more prominent than Greek, right? Yeah, we speak of Greek and Latin together. But it was largely Latin, just a smattering of Greek. And often you find that as time went on, the founders tended to lose their Greek. They much much because more time has been on Latin, they tended to keep a facility in that much longer. Of course, Jefferson's the exception there. He kept his Greek out throughout his life. And John Adams complains actually about some of Jefferson's letters. He says, "Larred, large, what can I do with so much Greek?" That's actually a good segue to talking about Adams and Jefferson. So these are men from very different parts of the colonies, of course. Adams from New England, Jefferson from Virginia. And who have very different kinds of classifications. Could you maybe discuss the questical formation of these two men, Adams and Jefferson? And how they differed? Well, the classical curriculum was very similar, not only between North and South, but really throughout the Western world. So I think there's more similarity than difference. I think maybe one of the differences was in the grammar school education. There were fewer schools in the South because it was a more rural area. And so you tend to get tutors more. And so Jefferson had tutors as opposed to Adams going to an actual grammar school. But even then, they're learning pretty much the same things. Jefferson went to William and Mary. Adams went to Harvard. But again, they're studying the same authors. So really not that much difference, surprisingly. Not only between North and South, but even across the Western world. There was this standard classical curriculum that everybody studied. It's very different from today. I mean, today we think in terms of, if you get a university degree, you major in a particular subject and you take electives. No, they had a much more of a sense of this is what you need to learn to be an educated person and everybody needs to learn. I was reading a bit recently about Shakespeare's education actually at the new school in Stratford. And he was reading much the same things I realized that the founders would have been reading. The same Latin authors, the most part, and the much the same sequence. And the same Stephen Renaissance Florence for that matter. It's just a half millennium of the same basic authors in the same way. And so I said, at that point, it's more a matter of personal predilection or personal choice where Adams kind of loved Cicero, doesn't he? It's his own favorite author. Yeah. And they tended to supplement, especially as they went on, tended to supplement what they learned in school. And so you find, for instance, many of the founders reading the historians because they were interested in history. And so they were supplementing, especially in the Latin area, they're supplementing Virgil and Cicero with Levy and Tacitus and people like that. So I guess the individuality comes in and with their reading outside of school. Jefferson's undue usual in his love of Greek. Yeah. Yeah, he thought it was, he said it was the greatest language ever developed, basically. Yeah. I've had teachers tell me the same, but it is some work. So I guess we could see the understand their rationale. So what lessons beyond just the grammar? Where students are supposed to take from this education, this very classical education? Well, the teaching of it was very, I hate to say it, but very kind of unimaginative, just wrote learning. And so they weren't really, and a lot of these grammar school masters were just part time people because they didn't pay very well. And many of them were going on to careers in the ministry, and they're just spending a year or two to make some money. There were some really good grammar school masters, but they're rare because it wasn't a very highly paid position. And they're so focused on the language that I don't think most of them are really trying to impart a message. But I think the founders did derive a message. And that is that republics could be gloriously successful, which we kind of take for granted that the republic can form as a viable form of government, but they really didn't. And at the time that they were growing up, Monarch, he was the norm. And you had to go back several thousand years to the Greek and Roman republics to I mean, you have some republics in Renaissance Italy, and there are a few in the modern world, but really to go back to the most glorious examples, you had to go back to Greece and Rome. And so reading about that, I think did have an effect on them in that when the revolutionary period arises, there is in the back of their mind the possibility that we could create a republic that would be viable, not only viable, but glorious, like those of Greece and Rome. And I think that's critical because if they didn't have any kind of model for our republic or any sense that it was viable, they never would have undertook the revolution. And I mentioned historians, they learned from Herodotus and the Persian more that this handful of undisciplined republics were able to defeat the strongest, most centralized monarchy in the world, the Persian monarchy. And they derived during the revolution, they derived the inspiration from that that we can do the same thing. You know, everybody is saying we have no chance because Britain is the, by far the most powerful country in the world, most powerful government. And we're just a collection of republics, which is held to be a weak form of government. But we don't think so. We think we, the Greeks gave us an example that we can prevail. So despite the best efforts of their teachers, or worst efforts of their teachers, they did find things in these texts that were inspirational and even a model for what they were going to do with their newly independent country. Yeah. And in particular, how did this Roman concept of Libertas inform the revolutionary slogan, Liberty? Well, of course, this is a controversial subject among historians. There's no question that they derived from the Greeks and the Romans. Some ideas about Liberty being freed from external control as a society, but also as an individual that independence is very important aspect of freedom. On the other hand, historians will often, and political scientists will often point out that the founders had a more individualistic idea of liberty than the ancients did. You know, the ancients living in these relatively small communal societies constantly at Bore. They really didn't have the luxury of being the individualists that we modern people do, I think. But I wouldn't take that too far. I mean, the founders, I think, were more individualistic than the ancients. But they also didn't just emphasize rights, they emphasize duties, which is very classical. So I think the founders are on the liberty scale, I guess. They're somewhere between the ancients and the moderns. They have a foot in both worlds, I think. Right. Which is appropriate, I guess, for what they're coming from. Yeah, that's interesting, I guess, that that libertas, even if the realm is kind of a vague idea, right? There's some combination of ancestral usage and dislike of some guy who is being oppressive. It's almost a negative thing to define an opposition to whoever seems to be the king or the dictator or whoever else is starting the political stage at the moment. And so I guess moving on that it's same line. Why were the American revolutionaries so drawn to the figure of Kato the Younger? Well, they really looked at the Roman Republic as the greatest model for antiquity of what they were trying to establish. Athens was considered to be too democratic, too unstable. Sparta was considered to be too militaristic, too totalitarian. And so Rome was their greatest model for antiquity. And so then they became really obsessed with, I think the period in history that they studied the most out of all of history was the late Roman Republic because they felt almost desperate to learn what caused the demise of our ideological ancestor because we're trying to avoid that demise. And so we do to prevent that demise. So they were very focused on that period. I mentioned Cicero earlier. He's one of their great heroes, but also Kato the Younger. And these were martyrs, men who died trying to hold the Roman Republic together. And so that made them sort of tragic heroes. In the case of Kato, the most popular play of the entire 18th century on both sides of the Atlantic was Joseph Addison's Kato. And this was extremely popular play, which sort of anglicized, if you will, the classics that is someone, and I know we'll probably get to him later, but someone like George Washington who did not have a classical education, he would have, but his father died when he was only 11 and that's scuttled all the plans that he had. I think they were going to sit him to Europe and have a big classical education. And he never got that. And I think he always regretted that. He admired those who did have that education. And he made sure that his stepson Jack Custis had that education. But he couldn't read Greek and Latin, but he loved to go to the theater. And he was an avid theater goer and his favorite play was Addison's Kato. And so he's a perfect example of that of how someone who wasn't classically educated could be influenced by the classics in an indirect way. Because who's Addison's source? I mean, Addison's basic source was Plutarch. Plutarch's life of Caesar and Kato and so on. So there's this big play that everybody knows. And Washington would often quote lines from the play. And he wasn't the kind of person who usually quoted literary references. But he saw the play so many times that he almost had it memorized. He knew lines from it. And he had it presented at Valley Forge to inspire his men, his soldiers. So you have the fact that Kato was a martyr to the Republican cause and wrong that made him a hero. And then he's kind of popularized by Addison in this famous play. And wasn't Addison's play the source of some very famous revolutionary era slogans and lines as well. Yeah, give me liberty or give me death from Patrick Henry. That was adapted from the play. And Nathan Hale, I have regret that I have one life to give for my country. These are paraphrases of lines from the play. Huh. I didn't know that until I read your book actually that these, they're so central, you know, this single source. And moving from here was to villains, you know, the great, you know, the great villain for the founding fathers among the classical, classical history is Julia Caesar. And why is he their archetypal tyrant? Well, again, they're fascinated by the late Republic. And what caused the Roman Republic to collapse and how can we prevent that? And so Caesar is obviously a crucial figure in the destruction of their model, the Roman Republic. So obviously he's going to get a lot of negative attention because they're basically asking one another and asking themselves, how can we prevent a season from arising in the United States? And they become, I would say almost paranoid about this. And they, they, during the revolution, of course, there are a bit paranoid about British conspiracies against our liberty, which if you look back on it, it's really kind of absurd. I mean, these tax, these taxes were very small. The taxes the British wanted to impose the stamp tax much smaller than the one in England. I mean, the English people were being taxed to the Hilt. I kind of, you know, this is not a politically correct maybe, but I kind of feel sorry for the British. I wouldn't take that too far, but a little bit because here they fight this war, this French and Indian war, partly for America. You know, they're fighting the French and America and so on. And after, and the British debt doubled during the revolution during the French and Indian war, they're desperately in debt. I think they're, they're debt to GDP ratio was 150%. Oh, well, they owed, they owed 50% more than they made in a year. And so they're, they're raising taxes in Britain to try to deal with this. And it seemed reasonable to them that these columnists, these moatures who haven't had to pay anything that they should pay some very modest taxes. And so they're, they're kind of confused and a bit resentful at the attitude of the columnist. On the other hand, the founders, as I said, a bit paranoid, oh, the British are trying to enslave us. And this continues in the Republican period and they start looking at each other as being the potential pirates. Who is the Caesar? You know, they Jefferson says Hamilton is Caesar. Hamilton said, no, you're Caesar. It's like a name calling on the playground and they all agree that Barra is Caesar. So yeah, I mean, they're kind of obsessed with it. It kind of reminds me of today that the way people use Hitler, you know, people say, well, my opponent is a Hitler or would be Hitler or they're Nazis or whatever. That's kind of what it was like. Everybody was saying the other guy, the opponent was the Caesar and you got to watch out for him. I'm just, I'm just using power to try to protect all of us from the Caesar. He, he's the dangerous one. It is very familiar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we still have conspiracy theories today. So we can't really be too critical of the founders for, for that. Yeah, that's a nice comparison. He's this immediately recognizable villain Caesar, you know, what he means, not necessarily all that clear, but he's the bad guy, whatever stages appearing on almost like Napoleon, I guess, a bit later. And the funny thing is if you read Plutarch, Caesar doesn't come off too badly. I think he comes off worse in Setonius. I actually had led a colloquium where I had to pick readings about the founders, heroes and villains and, and for Caesar, one of the rings I chose was Plutarch. And some of the participants came back and said, we don't understand why founders thought he was such a bad guy. Plutarch didn't think he was that bad. Yeah. Yeah. It is remarkable. He kind of becomes this, almost a stereotype. he loses his personal characteristics. I think of like Caesar in in Lucans, Farsalia where he is this, you know, almost supernatural villain who has nothing to do with or a little to do with the historical Caesar. Maybe he's a better sort of comparison how they saw him. - Right. - So it turned again to the good guys. To which Roman heroes was George Washington assimilated? - Well, we mentioned Kato and one of the things I forgot to mention about that play was that Washington was faced with a sort of mutiny, not so much a mutiny against him, but a mutiny against Congress by his own officers at New Burden, New York at the end of the Revolutionary War. And they were there was some money that wrote an anonymous circular to all the other officers 'cause they hadn't been paid in years. Congress didn't have the money to pay them because Congress couldn't tax under the articles of Confederation, the original Constitution. Congress can only beg money from the states. And the states, somebody did a study and they found that the states only gave Congress about a quarter of what it asked for. So they had no money to pay the officers for years. And not all of these guys are rich. Some of them are just, you know, barely middle class. And so this was a big deal. And so they finally, they won the Revolution basically and they just need to finish the treaty. And his officer said, well, to heck with this, I mean, they're still not paying us. So someone wrote an anonymous circular to the other officers saying, we should threaten Congress with the use of force that'll get their attention. And Washington read this anonymous circular that was being passed out. And he called a meeting of the officers. And interestingly enough, he uses the same three tactics that Kato uses in his, in the play to squelch a mutiny of his own, which is basically, first of all, he criticizes the anonymous author of the circular, the way that Kato criticized the rebels. And then secondly, he appeals to their Republican honor. He said, you won all of this fame. And fame was just, it's another classical element in all this that the thirst for fame, you know, was huge. You've won all this fame for your Republican self-sacrifice. Don't ruin it. You know, if you threaten Congress, there goes all your reputation, your honor, your fame. And that's exactly what Kato told the rebels. And then finally, the appeal to personal sympathy. You know, Kato's much more heavy-handed in the play. He tells him, look at all the things I did. You know, he's very, very straightforward about it. Washington is much more subtle because, you know, he has these Christian notions of humility. So he can't come out and say, this is what I did for you in greats. Instead, he does something which I think is more clever because it's a tiny bit more subtle. Is that he's reading a letter that was written by a kind of explaining what they're trying to do for the officers. And he squints and finally he says, I'm sorry, I need my spectacles and he takes his spectacles out and he puts them on. And he says, I'm sorry, he said, but I had grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country. And after that, there was weeping. And he had them in the palm of his hand. So it's the same tactics that the Kato uses in the play. The other person, I think that's very important. Another role model, it's very important of Washington since an artist. Everybody, Americans, British, all portrayed Washington as this since an artist figure, someone who fights for his Republic, not for personal power, but for the good of the people. And then once he's won the war, he retires to the plow, which sort of puts Washington in a sense, a mountain burning being a bucolic play. Although Washington is not pulling the plow, slaves are doing that, but it's not getting into that, but the mess up the analogy. But everybody looked at Washington this way, not just Americans, but even many British people. And Washington recognized this. And Washington cared deeply as most of the founders did about his fame, and his reputation, his honor. And so he tries to reinforce this analogy. He tries to fit the analogy to reinforce it. And so an interesting thing, he never offers to resign, even after the worst disasters, because he wants to follow Sysenaticism model, Sysenaticism never offered to resign. He just won the war and then resign. So Washington waists until victory has occurred and then makes a big display of, I am now resigning and returning to the plow and so on. And this was very effective, Lord Byron and his ode to Napoleon actually ends by saying, and I'm not gonna quote it, 'cause I don't remember the words, but he basically says there's only one who, aside from Sysenatus, I only wanted the modern world, I guess, who has done this, who has surrendered all this power and its Washington. And so he was successful in Gary Will's wrote a book called Sysenatus about Washington and this whole analogy. And he makes a very interesting statement. He says that Washington was famous, not as a Caesar who achieved many military victories because Washington really did. He had more defeats than he had victories, but he won fame as a Sysenatus relinquishing power, which is interesting. I mean, most generals like Napoleon or whatever, they're famous for their victory, military victories, Washington was famous for relinquishing power, which is as a Sysenatus, not a Caesar. - We see that theme again and again in art, don't we, in paintings and sculptures of Washington? - Yeah, yeah, they usually see some agricultural element to the statue or the painting to remind people that he is, 'cause there's two parts to Sysenatus. One is the relinquishing of power, but the other is what is he going back to? He's going back to the plow, the symbol of virtue. Pastoralism was another big classical theme of this period that Jefferson, of course, was the biggest exponent of that, that he said farmers are the chosen people of God, if ever he had any, and he gets very, sounds a lot like a Virgil in just praising the farmer and the values that come from the agricultural lifestyle. So that's part of it. I mean, a big part of it is Washington relinquishing power, but also part of it is that agricultural virtue that he's not just relinquishing power, but he's doing that in order to return to the plow, the symbol of virtue. - I think of the movie Gladiator, where Maximus is sort of the same figure, right, this heroic Republican figure who wants to go back to his Spanish estate, but of course, the stop of this corrupt empire. Yeah, it's a very well-embedded theme. - Yeah, and you know, you almost have to laugh sometimes because in 1776, John Adams writes a letter and he says, "Once I accomplish a few more things, I'm going back to the farm like Cincinnati." And you look at this and you shake your head and you say, "He stayed in politics another quarter century." And the only reason he left it was he lost reelection. So, but they all feel the need to say this, which I find it interesting. All need to say, "I'd really brother be back on the farm." And I think there was a part of them that did want to be back on the farm. I mean, his politics is a very turbulent lifestyle and they needed that, repose from all that stress and competition and strife and all of that. And I wouldn't discount it completely, but it's really exaggerated, I think. I mean, because okay, then if you want to go back to the farm, why don't you stay there? Why do you keep coming back? You know? And so I think it's something that they felt that they had to say and that's the influence of the classics, I think. The Cincinnati image that a virtuous man does not want power. He accepts it reluctantly as a duty, but he really doesn't want it. - Yeah, the rhetoric is so powerful that they're almost enslaved to their own models in some ways. It's like life imitating art again and again, which is so striking. on those same lines, actually. So they had these slogans about liberty, about being opposed to tyranny in all its forms, about the inherent cryptability of mankind, that power is always a bad thing. And then suddenly they have to make a government that actually works. You mentioned the outer federation, or a hopeless mess. It doesn't work. They can't command the states to do anything. And so they have to suddenly turn about face on their own rhetoric of liberty being the goal of all struggle and make a powerful national government. And so they turn, of course, the classics to do this. To what extent, in particular, is the Constitution shaped by this idea of mixed government that we find in Polybius in his account of the Republic? I think it was crucial. This was the dominant political theory of the day, at least in the United States, I should say, but that going back to Plato sort of throws it out there in the laws. And that was 10 years after the Republic. The Republic is not a mixed government at all. But he suggested briefly in the laws, but doesn't really do anything with it. Our subtle picks it up makes it the centerpiece of his politics. And in Polybius, the Greek historian who's trying to explain to his days and defeated compatriots, the Greeks, how this band of barbarians from the West managed to conquer what he calls almost the whole of the inhabited world, which is the Mediterranean. And what is Polybius do? He picks up one hour a subtle and he says they had a mixed government. That's why they were successful. And the mixed government means that there's power balance between the one who is the executive, the monarch, if there's a monarchy, the few, which is the well-born, the rich, and the many, the masses. And this was a very well-established theory. Britain was held to be a modern version of it, even though it was a monarchy. You also have the House of Lords, a House of Commons, the one, the few, and the many. The colonial governments were set up that way. You had a royal governor, but you also had a colonial Senate and a colonial House. So Americans were used to this. And so it was a very important theory, I think. And when you look at what the framers of the Constitution did, they established a mixed government. Now it's a modern version. We don't have a king. We have a president, but a powerful president, even from the outset, it was powerful. And he's chosen originally, well, even today, not by the people, but by the electoral college. Later on, they tie the selection of the electors to the popular vote, but originally, it wasn't. States were allowed to choose electors. They still are, really. However, they want. And in most cases, the state legislatures chose the electors early on. So you have a president who's not popularly elected. You have a Senate who originally was also not popularly elected. They were chosen by state legislatures, and they're supposed to prevent the rich from being robbed by the poor. And then the House, which was to be the so-called Democratic branch, the only branch that was originally elected by the people. So that's a classical mixed government. Now it's altered a bit to fit the modern American scene, but it's still recognizably a classical mixed government. Yeah, it's fascinating how powerful this model was for the framers. And they used the name Senate for the upper level of the legislature. Clearly, they were thinking about Rome. They made a few changes. For instance, there's only one. It's the one that few in the many, not the two that few in the many, because you know, the Romans had the two consoles, and the Spartans had two kings. And the framers looked at that and said, no, we need an energetic, is the way they put it executive. We can't divide up the executive power. Let's do more like Britain, a single person. He's not going to be a lifetime, although Hamilton wanted a lifetime present, but he will be fairly powerful and a single person. So they made a few modifications, but it's still basically a classical mixed government. I've read the Constitution described in some places as originally framed, as a rather aristocratic document, one that's shaped in so many ways by fears of a popular uprising, like say, Shays Rebellion. Yeah, well, yeah, I'm not sure we would have gotten, you know, our original Constitution was their articles of Confederation, and which was a very different document than the Constitution that replaced it. Almost all the power was in state hands. There was no single leader. There was an executive committee of Congress, which had a chairman, but that's the closest you get to an actual president. Single branch, it was Unicameral, not by Camel. Very different document, very different system. And why did we go from one to the other where there were lots of problems with articles? And I think as you mentioned, Shays Rebellion, you had this rebellion of farmers in Massachusetts due to high taxes and deflation. And this scared a lot of people. One of the people had scared was Washington. Washington was really debating whether he should attend the Constitutional Convention, because he didn't want to spoil the Cincinnati thing. He had left office. He had left power. And since the United States doesn't come back, so he didn't want to come back and ruin the whole thing. And I think Shays Rebellion was critical in making him think this whole thing could fail. And so I need to put aside my misgivings and not only attend the Convention, but even service president of the Convention, because the whole Republican experiment, because they called it was in jeopardy. So that's why he attended, why he agreed to serve as president of the Convention. You know, I mean, the issues that caused the farmers to rebel in Massachusetts attacks is the deflation, where I don't know, those are very specific issues. But I think there's a more general sense of people like Washington that that we don't want anarchy. You know, that's what he fears is anarchy. People just rising up with guns and opposing all government, all order, including taxes. And kind of ironic, I mean, they rebel because of taxes, but, but you know Sam Adams, who was the father of the American Revolution, I think the most important person in bringing about the revolution. Even Sam Adams said, this is different. It was okay for us to rebel against taxes because we had no representation in parliament. But now the people have representation. And so it is no longer legitimate to take up arms and rise up against the government. If you have a problem with the taxes, you have a problem with anything. You, you, you, uh, marshal your forces and try to win the next election. That's what you do. You don't take up arms. And I think Washington would have agreed with that. That this is, this is different. And, and he began to fear anarchy and mixed government, that's supposed to be one of its virtues is to prevent anarchy. And to do so by giving each part of society a voice. So that it's not, uh, unbalanced. It's not, uh, tyranny of the minority, but it's not tyranny of the majority either. I know this point that Johnny Adams is often London as an ambassador. How influential is his long treatise on American constitutions? The theory endorses, I think, mixed government. Well, these classical examples. Yeah, uh, the first volume of this was called a defense of the constitutions of government of the United States of America. But that's, that's a long, rose off the tongue. Yeah. I just called it the defense, you know, it's easy. But, uh, yeah, I mean, he's, uh, what he's defending are the state constitutions that had been drafted that were mixed. And he's, he has a stake in this because he actually wrote, uh, another book called the, or pamphlet called thoughts on government, which, uh, was very influential in a lot of these states adopting a mixed, a mixed constitutions. So he's, when he's defending that, he's sort of defending himself, his earlier book and saying these are good constitutions. He's mixed constitutions. Well, the first volume, it was a two volume work, the, the defense, the first volume, was circulated at the Constitutional Convention and was read by Madison and others who framed the US Constitution. How influential, I don't know, it was just one more element telling them we need to adopt a mixed government. Now they were able and they did go back to our subtle politics, a polybias Madison who's one of the chief framers of the Constitution actually spent several years before the Constitutional Convention reading polybias, studying polybias, not only for mixed government, but also for how do you form a confederation? Because polybias, you know, was a leader of the Italian League, which was one of the main models. There were very few models for confederacies that the founders could see. And that was one of the major ones. It was a major confederacy of southern Greek city states. They fought and lost unfortunately to Rome, but had a pretty good run there and seemed to have a very well-established government. So Madison's reading of polybias, not just for mixed government, but also for how do you run a confederacy? Because there was nothing in English history. English England is a relatively small island. They never had a confederated government with states and federal system is all centralized. So I think the ancients are important in that sense to those ancient Greek confederacies. And polybias, it was sort of a guide as far as the Italian League was concerned. So the framers assumed that by creating this more powerful and balanced government, they could avoid the fate of the Roman Republic? Yeah, that was the hope. You know, Madison at the Constitutional Convention has an interesting speech where he says, you know, I understand that we don't have tidal aristocracy here. And our gap between the rich and poor is not as great as it is in Europe. Nevertheless, we still do have the few in the many mixed government theory still applies to us. And any makes an interesting statement. He says that in the future, this would become even more the case. And eventually the land will run out. And so then you will have a greater discrepancy between the rich and the poor. And he said the only thing that will save us at that point is mixed government. It's kind of interesting. He and Jefferson were the two leaders of the Democratic Republican Party. But they had different approaches somewhat. And then he said, we have a lot of things that we can do. And we have a lot of things that we can do. Federalist see the Federalist as these sinister people that want to use their army to take over. And the Federalist see the anti-Federalist as people who want to form an anarchy as a way of seizing power. Now some would say seizing power on a federal level, others would say they want to seize the power of their own state. So in other words, if you keep the Union week, the center of central power week, like the Federal Government was, then these lesser men who can't win office at the federal level will say, well, let me seize power at the state level. I can do that. So that's another fear. And there's a fear, Hamilton has a fear that without a stronger federal government, the states will go to war against each other. And he says, look at Greece. I mean, the Greek ancient Greece. These were people were united by a common language, common religion, trade. All of the things that the anti-Federalist said would keep us, our states from fighting each other. They had those things and they still went to war against each other all the time. What makes us think that we would be any different? So Hamilton says, without a strong federal government, we're going to have wars between the states. And then what's going to happen? A state that's weaker is going to call in a foreign power to support it. And there they use the example of Philip of Macedon. Some of the lesser Greek city states calling for aid for Philip who's very glad to supply it because that's his foot in the door. And so they say, well, we might get Britain back in charge because they will come to the aid of some small state that's fighting a large state and then we're back to to British rule. So it's kind of interesting to me is sort of competing fears. What's the what's the what's the greater danger? Yeah, it's fascinating. I look into the same historical examples and drawing opposite lessons from that same set of examples. So we have of course the Constitution ratified, you know, this is the grand denouement of this era, the revolutionary era. But then afterward it seems, the classics become less central to American political discourse. And why is this kind of slow denution of classical influence in American political language, political action rhetoric? It seems to have occurred really in the late 19th century. I actually wrote a book called The Golden Age of the Classics in America, which is about the Annabelle period. I would argue that Annabelle period was even more classical than the founder's era because the classics became democratized. You now have middle class people studying the classics, you know, women, you know, female academy studying the classics, it moves to the frontier, it moves geographically. You have public buildings in the classical style. It began in the founders era. I mean Jefferson was a Neil classical architect himself, but it becomes widespread, the Annabelle period. So I think the decline is after the Civil War. And especially in the later 19th century, and there's a variety of factors for that. I think the utilitarians finally went out, you know, almost every generation, there was this group of people saying classics are outdated. We need to be studying modern subjects, modern languages, science, things that are more practical, they call them. There are those people that are in average generation. And you can actually go back to the beginning of class education. And there were in those days, it wasn't so much utilitarians, it was Christians saying this is a pagan literature which shouldn't be reading this. Now it's also Christians that are advancing the classics, which is interesting. This kind of a love-hate relationship between Christianity and the classics, I think. But in the late 19th century, utilitarians finally went. And it's a great question. And I think still an open question. Why do they went? I don't know. I think, you know, you look at the politics of the late 19th century. A lot of it was more economical, things like tariffs and a lot of economic issues that the classics really didn't address. You have, of course, science becomes even bigger. Darwin and evolution and things like that, that the classics don't really address. So maybe there's different concerns than there were, it was in the past. You know, I think it's still an open question as to why it declines. But it clearly does because by the end of the century, increasingly, colleges are no longer requiring it. Harvard, Yale, they all drop their classical requirements. You still have many students taking the classics, but they're not required to. And so there's a gradual diminution. Even then, you still have, you know, hundreds of thousands of kids taking Latin in high school. In fact, usually whenever I talk about the decline of the classics, I usually get someone in the audience, a late person saying, I took Latin in high school. But then that sort of declined as well. I think some people are hopeful that it's rising up again, ironically, again, often in Christian academies. So that partnership is being restored to some extent. But there's no question there's a decline in the classics. I briefly looked into the presidents in the classics, and I didn't complete that study. But what I found was there's a big drop off after the first six, after John Quincy Adams, of course, get Andrew Jackson, who's when classical, well, we weren't educated at all, really. But I mean, a few pop up, Garfield actually taught the classics. He taught the classics. He loved the classics. Teddy Roosevelt loved the classics. I didn't get much beyond that, but my impression was that it's few and far between after the first six. So yeah, there's no question there wasn't declined. And I think it's still an open question is to exactly why. I recall reading somewhere that Garfield could write, "We can Latin simultaneously, one like I said, one hand, one with the other," I think. So obviously, very versatile guy. Yeah, and he married a lady if you saw the Netflix series about his, which I thought was great. His wife's name was Lucretia. He married a woman named Lucretia. So yeah, he was very much into the classics. But he was rare. That's a rare example. Right. It's the sort of that this new educational paradigm taking over from the 19th century on, word that eclipses the classical knowledge. And it's true already. You said, "Other generations." Was it Benjamin Rush who opposed the classics even in the 18th century? Benjamin Rush was highly classically educated and often included Latin phrases in his letters. So what's going on there? Well, I don't know. Rush is a complicated fellow. Almost feel like he had a bit of a mental illness because he was into the list of reforms that he was involved in or trying to advance is just off the chart. So I don't know if he had some kind of messianic impulse or something. And God bless him. I mean, he was a very dedicated physician. Not a very good one because he was tied, unfortunately, to the classical body humor theory. Where he bled patients. But very dedicated. I mean, he stayed in Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic. When many physicians fled, they didn't want to get it. They didn't want to die. He stayed there and treated patients. Very humane person, a complicated person. And he sometimes writes as though he doesn't like the classics for Christian reasons. He was devout Christian. Didn't like some of the paganism maybe. But then or other times where he doesn't really seem to be opposed to the classics as much as he's opposed to the classical language requirement. He thought it was so as utilitarian. He thought we're spending too much time studying these languages. All of this stuff or almost all of it's in translation now. So you can do a lot more if you study it in translation. And that's true of Ben Franklin as well. he didn't have a classical education and his view was a very utilitarian. I'm not against reading classics but we should read it in translation, not spend so much time on Greek and Latin. And then the third major opponent of the classics and among the founders was Thomas Payne, who had almost no classical education. And again, it's largely largely utilitarian. I mean, he does write some things about cruelty. You know, Homer, he thought was a warmonger, which I don't think is true at all. But so often in the case of Russian Payne, there's a little bit of morality mixed in there. They're not so sure about classical morality. In the case of Franklin, I think it's all utilitarian, his arguments against it. So it's complicated. But yeah, those were the three main opponents of the classical language requirement. I always put it that way because I'm not really sure they were opposed to the classics just the classical language requirement. And I suppose coming from an educational system where you do nothing but study Latin grammar, it makes sense to see that it's being a little excessive sometimes. Yeah. And sometimes, by the way, sometimes they would use a classical argument against the classical language, which is they would say, you know, the Greeks and Romans didn't spend all this time, steady, and other people's languages. They studied their own language. And so what made them great was their proficiency in their own language, which is kind of an interesting classical argument against the classical language. Yeah, it's a very meta. So turning to the present, in your opinion, and it's a very broad question, how important is it for about an Americans to understand their country's Roman DNA? I think it's very important. You know, there's a famous book about Jefferson by Daniel Borsen called the Lost World of Thomas Jefferson. And I think this is true. The founders in general, the world they inhabited has been lost to us. It's almost like investigating a foreign country. Foreign culture almost. And yet it's the source of our own culture. And so I think it's not really possible to understand the founders without understanding what concern them the most and how powerful they were influenced by the classics. And so, you know, there was a period where I think the historians mid-20th century, a lot of them really didn't quite understand the founders because they themselves had not been classically educated. And they tended to do what is natural to humans is if we come across something we don't understand, unless we're highly motivated, what we tend to do is dismiss it. And so if you're a mid-20th century American historian of the founders, you haven't been educated in the classics and you come up to our reference to Helvides Priscus, you're a natural inclinationist to say, "Well, that's not important. I'm just going to skim over that. I'm not going to try to find out what they're referring to here because I don't think it's important. Very natural but also very misguided because you may not understand it, but that doesn't mean it's not important." And so I think you read someone like Alden, I can't remember John Alden, I think was his name, Roder history of the American Revolution in the mid-20th century. And in many ways it's an excellent history, but he's got this chapter into beginning on on Britain in 1763. And in many ways it's a great chapter of our British culture. But then he gets to this passage where he says, "All they did was study Greek and Latin. I don't understand how they produced so many great men. So many great, and he lists all the great literary men and thinkers and philosophers and economists and all these people that Britain produced, which is really amazing the British Enlightenment and he's perplexed. I don't understand sort of like despite this system of education, they produce these great men. And I'm reading this and I'm shaking my head and saying, "Well, clearly he doesn't understand, he hasn't studied the classic, doesn't understand what the virtues of the classics are in terms of promoting original thinking, promoting the promoting language, a skill with language. He doesn't understand any of that. So it's mystifying to him. And I think that changed. I really do. My orine whole was a pioneer in this. You know, he was in many ways the first trained classes to look at this and say, "No, we need to investigate this. What did they learn from the classics?" And I think that impacted me personally and it impacted a lot of other American historians, not classes. People trained as American historians to take this seriously, to look into it, to try to learn about the classics, to be able to understand this lost world of the founders. Well, thank you. This has been absolutely fascinating. And I agree for what it's worth and that we don't understand how they thought about the world that we mystified by some element of our own society and its underpinnings. But Carol, this has been great. Thanks so much. I learned a lot. I'm sure when listening has as well, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and tell us about this fascinating and often I think underappreciated topic. I enjoyed it. Well, well, again, my great pleasure. And everyone listening, thanks for tuning in.