The Constitutions of Antiquity
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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. Indeed, the
classical past was a dynamic force in American public life well into the
nineteenth century. The last President of the United States with a truly
classical education was probably John Quincy Adams, the son of the second President, John Adams. John Quincy Adams even taught the classics
at Harvard as a Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and in 1810 published
his lectures on this subject. His administration (1825–1829) marks a turning point respecting the classical influence, however, and after the Jacksonian era few Presidents have been well read in the classics. None was
a classicist in the sense that the Adamses and Jefferson were, and certainly none was portrayed, like George Washington in a famous statue by
Horateo Greenough, in the character of a Roman senator—nude to the
waist, with uplifted arm, draped by a toga, pointing to the heavens.
Few statesmen understood, as the Revolutionary and Federal generations had, that classical history had much to teach the nation. Perhaps
the last conspicuous surviving remnants of America’s classical tradition
in the first half of the nineteenth century were in architecture, which experienced a Greek revival, as seen in the construction and design of great
plantation houses in the South; and in oratory, as witnessed in the great
senatorial debates and public addresses by John Randolph of Roanoke,
John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and the most celebrated Ciceronian orator
Daniel Webster.
Most of the Framers had read, in translation or in the original Greek
and Latin, 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.
From their study, the American leaders of the War of Independence and
the constitution-making era learned, by their own account, what political
blunders of ancient times ought to be avoided by the republic of the
United States. ‘‘History,’’ Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘‘informs us what bad
government is.’’ Perhaps he had the ancient republics in mind when he
wrote those words.
The Greek city-states of the sixth and fifth and fourth centuries before
Christ never succeeded in developing enduring constitutions that would