The Constitutions of Antiquity
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stitution (an ‘‘unwritten’’ one) included other provisions for preventing
any one class from putting down other classes, and for preserving the republican form of government. Praised by Polybius as the best constitution of his age, this Roman constitutional system was bound up with a
beneficial body of civil law, and with ‘‘the high old Roman virtue’’—the
traditional Roman morality, calling for duty and courage.
The actual forms of checks and balances that the Americans incorporated into their Constitution in 1787, however, were derived from English precedent and from American colonial experience, rather than directly from the Roman model. Instances from the history of the Roman
Republic, nevertheless, were cited by the Framers and by other leading
Americans of that time as reinforcement for the American concept of political checks and balances.
The Americans’ vision of a great and growing republic, it may thus be
seen, owed much to the annals of the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic failed because of long civil wars in the first century b.c., and it was
supplanted by the Roman Empire. This Roman experience, and the decadence that fell upon Roman civilization as the centuries passed, were
much in the minds of American leaders near the end of the eighteenth
century. The grim consequences of political centralization under the Roman Empire convinced many Framers that an American government
should be federal rather than central—just as some delegates pointed
to the Greeks’ disunity as a warning against leaving the American Republic a weak confederation. Besides, Roman struggles of class against
class reminded Americans that they must seek to reconcile different
classes and interests through their own constitutional structure.
Thus Rome’s political and moral example was a cautionary lesson to
Americans of the early Republic. Edward Gibbon’s great history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been published between 1776 and
1783, the period of the American Revolution, and its details were vivid
in the minds of the delegates at Philadelphia.
Yet it will not do to make too much of the influence of the Roman constitution upon the Constitution of the United States, two thousand years
after Polybius wrote in praise of Roman character and institutions. The
more immediate and practical examples of constitutional success were
the British and the colonial political structures. The American Republic