16
The Constitution’s Deep Roots
give them liberty, order, and justice. Civil war within those city-states
was the rule rather than the exception, pitting 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—Greek civilization
never wholly recovered from the disaster.
Leading Americans carefully studied the old Greek constitutions. In
his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (published
in 1787, on the eve of America’s Great Convention), John Adams, for example, critically examined twelve ancient democratic republics, three ancient aristocratic republics, and three ancient monarchical republics. He
found them all inferior to the political system of the new American republics in the several States that were formed after 1776. James Monroe,
a hero of the American Revolution, a member of the Virginia Ratifying
Convention of 1788, and later the fifth President of the United States,
wrote descriptions of the ancient constitutions of Athens, Sparta, and
Carthage—finding all of them seriously flawed and therefore not to be
trusted by Americans. The authors of The Federalist, in their defense of
the Constitution, often referred to ‘‘the turbulent democracies of ancient
Greece’’ (Madison’s phrase) and to other ancient constitutions. In general, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay found the political systems of Greece
and Rome, as Madison put it, ‘‘as unfit for the imitation, as they are repugnant to the genius of America.’’
Eighteenth-century Americans did respect Solon, the lawgiver of Athens in the sixth century b.c. But Solon’s good constitution for his native
city had lasted only some thirty years before a tyrant seized power in
Athens. Few American leaders were much influenced by Greek political
thought; John Adams wrote that he had learned from Plato two things
only, that husbandmen and artisans should not be exempted from military service, and that hiccoughing may cure sneezing. It is true that ancient Greek culture helped to shape education in America, but Greek constitutions had almost no influence in the shaping of the Constitution of
the United States—except so far as Greek constitutional flaws suggested
what the Framers at Philadelphia ought not to adopt.
There is, nevertheless, much to learn about constitutions from reading
Plato and Aristotle. Both of these ancient Greek philosophers wrote about