“The Classical Inheritance” — Athens and Rome

“There is in fact a true law — namely, right reason — which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men, and is unchangeable and eternal. By its commands this law summons men to the performance of their duties; by its prohibitions it restrains them from doing wrong. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times.”— Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica, Book III, c. 54 BCE¹

A Republic of Readers

In the summer of 1787, fifty-five delegates gathered in Philadelphia to draft a new framework of government for the United States. They worked behind closed windows in the same room where the Declaration had been signed eleven years earlier. They argued for sixteen weeks. And when they argued, they argued with the ancients.

James Madison’s notes on the Convention record extensive direct references to ancient Greek and Roman political experience. Delegates invoked the Amphictyonic Council, the Achaean League, the Lycian Confederacy, the Roman consulate, the Spartan ephors, and the Athenian assembly as readily as twenty-first-century legislators might cite recent precedent. Alexander Hamilton spoke for six hours on June 18, drawing freely on ancient and modern political experience in a speech whose breadth surveyed Greek, Roman, and contemporary European examples. Benjamin Franklin, then eighty-one, prefaced his closing address with a parable adapted from the Roman historian Plutarch. George Mason invoked Rome’s struggle between patricians and plebeians as the model for understanding factional conflict. Gouverneur Morris compared the proposed Senate to the Roman Senate. Madison himself, in The Federalist, would devote three consecutive essays to the political lessons of ancient confederacies.²

These were not learned ornaments. They were working tools. The men who designed the American constitutional order treated antiquity as a laboratory of political experiment — failed experiments, mostly, and one or two qualified successes — from which the principles of constitutional design could be empirically extracted.

To understand the American achievement, we must understand the classical inheritance from which it was assembled. Three figures stand at the center of that inheritance: Aristotle, who taught the Founders to think about constitutions analytically; Polybius, who gave them the cycle by which republics rise and fall; and Cicero, who gave them the doctrine that there is a law above all human law, and who died defending it. To these three a fourth must be added as contrast — Plato, the philosopher whose authoritarian republic the Founders read in order to reject. From these four ancients, more than from any other single body of thought, the constitutional architects drew their working vocabulary.

This article traces what each of them contributed. It also confronts honestly what each got wrong, because the Founders inherited both the wisdom of the ancients and the moral failures that disfigured their thought. A complete history of liberty owes the reader both sides of that account.

Aristotle and the Science of Constitutions

Aristotle was born in Stagira in 384 BCE, studied under Plato at the Academy for twenty years, tutored Alexander the Great, and founded his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens. He wrote on logic, metaphysics, biology, ethics, rhetoric, poetics, and politics. His Politics — the eight-book treatise that shaped Western constitutional thinking for two millennia — was almost certainly assembled from lecture notes by his students rather than published as a finished work in his lifetime. The text we have is rough, repetitive in places, and uneven in argument. It is also the foundational document of political science as a systematic discipline.

Aristotle’s central contribution to American constitutional thought was twofold. First, he established the practice of treating constitutions as objects of empirical study rather than abstract speculation. Where Plato had asked what the best constitution would be, Aristotle asked what kinds of constitutions actually existed, how they functioned, why they decayed, and which arrangements proved most stable in practice. He and his students reportedly examined the constitutions of 158 Greek city-states. Only one of those studies, the Constitution of the Athenians, has survived. The method survived intact.³

Second, Aristotle developed the doctrine of the mixed constitution — the political idea that would shape American constitutional design more directly than any other classical concept. His analysis began with a sixfold classification of governments. There are three legitimate forms: rule by one (monarchy), rule by the few (aristocracy), and rule by the many in the common interest, which Aristotle called politeia — usually translated as “polity” or “constitutional government.” Each of these legitimate forms has a corrupt counterpart in which the rulers govern in their own interest rather than the common good. Monarchy degenerates into tyranny. Aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy. Politeia degenerates into what Aristotle called democracy — and here the modern reader must take care, because Aristotle’s democracy meant not the modern democratic ideal but the corrupt majoritarian condition in which the poor majority used its numerical power to plunder the propertied minority. Aristotle’s democracy corresponds more closely to what American Founders would call mob rule or pure democracy than to anything an American would today defend.⁴

The mixed constitution was Aristotle’s solution to the instability of all six forms. By combining elements of monarchy (a unified executive), aristocracy (an elite deliberative body), and the polity (broad popular participation), a constitution might balance the tendencies that pulled each pure form toward its corruption. The mixed form was empirically more stable. Aristotle thought the most durable practical constitution combined oligarchic and democratic elements in a way that placed effective power in what he called the middling class — those who were neither so rich as to despise the laws nor so poor as to envy the wealthy. The middling class, he argued, possessed the moderate self-interest that disposed it toward fair institutions.

The Americans recognized themselves in this analysis. Madison’s Federalist 10, on the management of factional conflict through a large commercial republic with a substantial middle class, is recognizably Aristotelian in structure. The federal Constitution’s design — a unitary president, a Senate of state representatives, a House of popular representation — is a recognizable adaptation of Aristotle’s mixed form, calibrated to American conditions. John Adams’ A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, published in three volumes between 1787 and 1788, is an extended argument in Aristotelian form, drawing on Aristotle’s framework explicitly across hundreds of pages.

Aristotle was also the author of one of antiquity’s most influential defenses of slavery. Politics Book I argues that some human beings are slaves by nature, fitted by their lower rational capacities to be the living instruments of their superiors. The doctrine is not incidental to Aristotle’s political thought. It is woven into his account of the household, the city, and the natural order. It is the moral failure that disfigures his entire political philosophy. The Founders who drew so heavily on Aristotle’s analytical method inherited a thinker who had constructed a sophisticated philosophical defense of an institution they would shortly enshrine in their own republic. The contradiction was already present in the source. It will be confronted in full when we examine the case against the classical inheritance later in this article.

Plato: The Path Not Taken

Aristotle’s teacher Plato cannot be omitted from any account of the classical inheritance, but the Founders’ relationship to Plato was almost entirely a negative one. Plato’s Republic — the most famous political work of antiquity — proposed an ideal city governed by philosopher-kings, in which property was held in common among the ruling guardian class, families were dissolved in favor of communal child-rearing, art was censored, religion was constructed by the state for civic purposes, and the social order was sustained by carefully controlled noble lies. It was a vision of authoritarian perfection administered by an enlightened few.

Jefferson detested Plato. In an 1814 letter to John Adams, he wrote that he had finally forced himself to read the Republic and found it “the heaviest task-work I ever went through.” He described Plato’s “whimsies” and “nonsense” with unconcealed contempt and could not understand how such a writer had achieved canonical status. Adams was milder but no friendlier. He read Plato more sympathetically than Jefferson, conceding the literary force of the Republic, but he rejected the political content with full force.⁵

The Founders’ reading of Plato matters less for what they took from it than for what they rejected. The vision of an enlightened few making decisions on behalf of the many, the contempt for ordinary life and ordinary judgment, the willingness to fabricate myths in service of social order — all of this the Americans saw clearly and put aside. The classical inheritance the Founders carried into Philadelphia was Aristotelian and Ciceronian, not Platonic. It treated politics as the empirical study of how free citizens might govern themselves under law, not as the design of a perfect order to be administered by experts.

This was a choice with consequences. The progressive tradition of the twentieth century, which exalted the administrative state and the expert class as the proper instruments of social management, would recover Plato in ways the Founders had decisively refused. The fork in the road between expert rule and self-rule runs through Plato, and the Americans took the other path. That decision is part of the inheritance.

Polybius and the Cycle of Constitutions

Polybius of Megalopolis was born in Greece around 200 BCE, came to Rome as a hostage in 167 BCE — one of a thousand Achaeans demanded by Rome as security after the Roman defeat of Macedon at the Battle of Pydna in 168 BCE — and lived for years in the household of the Scipios. He observed Roman politics at the closest possible range, including the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE, the same year Rome finally crushed the Achaean League in the Achaean War. Polybius witnessed the burning of Carthage personally as a member of Scipio Aemilianus’s staff. Out of these observations he produced the Histories, a forty-book account of how Rome rose to dominance over the Mediterranean world. Most of the work is lost. Book VI, on the Roman constitution, survives substantially intact. It is one of the most influential single books in the history of political analysis.⁶

Polybius, statue in Vienna

Polybius asked a question that has occurred to every careful observer of politics since: why do governments decay? His answer was the doctrine of anacyclosis, the cycle of constitutional forms. Every form of government, Polybius argued, carries within it the seeds of its own corruption, and constitutional history is best understood as a predictable rotation through six stages.

The cycle begins with monarchy — the rule of one strong leader in the common interest. The monarch, ruling well, secures the loyalty of his people and the cooperation of capable advisors. But monarchy is unstable in succession. The qualities that made the founder a good ruler do not pass reliably to his heirs. Within a generation or two, monarchy degenerates into tyranny, the rule of one in his own interest, against the people he was meant to serve.

Tyranny is then overthrown by the leading men of the city, who establish aristocracy — rule by the few in the common interest. The aristocrats, having seen tyranny, govern moderately at first. But power compounds across generations, the founders’ virtue erodes, and aristocracy decays into oligarchy — rule by the few in their own interest, distinguished from aristocracy chiefly by the abandonment of any pretense of public good.

Oligarchy is then overthrown by the people, who establish democracy — rule by the many in the common interest. (The word here is doing the work Aristotle assigned to politeia: democracy in its legitimate form means broad popular government under law.) Democracy in its initial form is, in Polybius’s account, the most morally attractive of the constitutions. But it cannot sustain itself. As the founding generation passes, the next generations come to take political equality for granted. They begin to compete not for honor but for advantage. Demagogues arise who flatter the majority and propose to redistribute the wealth of the productive. Civic discipline collapses. Democracy decays into ochlocracy — mob rule, the rule of the many in their own interest, the corruption of democracy. Out of the chaos of mob rule, eventually, a strong man emerges to restore order. The cycle returns to monarchy.

This was the framework Polybius applied to the Roman Republic, and it was the framework the American Founders applied to themselves. Polybius’s central insight was that the cycle could be slowed — perhaps even arrested — by a mixed constitution that combined elements of all three legitimate forms. Rome, he argued, had achieved exactly this: consuls embodied the monarchical element, the Senate embodied the aristocratic, the popular assemblies embodied the democratic. The balance among these institutions, the way each could check the excesses of the others, was what made Rome durable in a way no pure constitution had managed.⁷

The Americans believed this analysis. The federal Constitution is a mixed constitution in the Polybian sense — a president, a Senate, and a House of Representatives, each with structural incentives to resist the overreach of the others. The fear that haunted the Founders was the fear Polybius had named: that without a mixed constitution properly maintained, the republic would slide through the cycle’s stages, with mob rule and the strongman not far behind.

.This is the classical formulation of constitutional cycling, and it concerns forms of government. It is worth noting that other cyclical frameworks, attentive to the moral and cultural conditions of peoples rather than the structural forms of their governments, have been advanced in later centuries. These frameworks are compatible with Polybius’s, and they may operate alongside it. The reader who has encountered cyclical theories of democratic and cultural decay in other contexts should hold them as a related but distinct lens. Polybius is concerned with what happens to the machinery of government; the moral and cultural frameworks are concerned with what happens to the people who operate that machinery. Both observations are real. They reinforce one another. But they are not the same observation.

The Founders’ engagement with Polybius was direct and serious. Madison’s “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies,” composed in the spring of 1786 in preparation for the Constitutional Convention, drew on Polybius’s account of the Achaean League at length. The Federalist numbers 18, 19, and 20 — the three essays on ancient and modern confederacies, primarily authored by Madison and drawing on Hamilton’s research notes — are saturated with Polybian material. John Adams cited Polybius repeatedly in his Defence of the Constitutions. The Polybian cycle was, for the Founding generation, not a curiosity of ancient historiography but a present and pressing analytical framework for understanding what they were building.

Cicero: Natural Law, Republican Virtue, and Property

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 BCE in Arpinum, a town southeast of Rome, to a family of equestrian rank but no senatorial standing. He rose by sheer rhetorical ability and political shrewdness to become, in 63 BCE, one of the two consuls of the Roman Republic. He defended that Republic against the conspiracy of Catiline. He defended it again, decades later, against the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, and after Caesar’s assassination, against the further consolidations of Mark Antony. He failed, and his failure cost him his life. But the writings he left — the philosophical works composed in his last years, when the political battle was being lost — gave the Western tradition one of its most enduring statements of natural law and republican virtue.

Three of Cicero’s works deserve particular attention because the Founders engaged each of them directly.

De Re Publica — “On the Commonwealth,” composed between 54 and 51 BCE — is the dialogue from which the article’s epigraph is drawn. The work survives only in fragments and substantial passages preserved by later writers, but it contains some of antiquity’s most consequential political philosophy. Modeled on Plato’s Republic but answering Plato in nearly every respect, De Re Publica defines the commonwealth (res publica) as the property of the people (res populi), understood not as a mere collection of individuals but as a moral community united by shared agreement on what is just and shared interest in the common good. The work develops a mixed-constitutional theory parallel to Polybius’s, with whom Cicero was directly engaged. And it contains, in the third book, the locus classicus of natural law thinking — the passage quoted at the beginning of this article. Right reason, in agreement with nature, applies to all rational beings, in all places, in all times. It cannot be repealed by any senate or assembly. It binds Rome and Athens equally, the present generation and the future, because it has one author and one enforcer: the divine reason that orders the universe.

This is the most consequential single passage in the history of natural law philosophy. It would be quoted, paraphrased, adapted, and rediscovered across the entire Western tradition. Aquinas would build his medieval synthesis on it. Locke would echo it. Jefferson, in the Declaration’s reference to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” was writing in a vocabulary Cicero had given Latin philosophy two millennia earlier.⁸

De Legibus — “On the Laws” — continues the natural law argument with particular attention to civil legislation. Civil law, Cicero argued, derives its authority not from the power of those who enact it but from its conformity with the higher law of nature. A statute contrary to natural law is not merely unwise but, properly speaking, not law at all. This argument would be picked up by Aquinas in the medieval period, by Coke in the English seventeenth century, and through Coke would shape the American constitutional tradition’s doctrine of judicial review.

De Officiis — “On Duties,” composed in the autumn of 44 BCE as Cicero faced his final political crisis — was the most widely read of Cicero’s works in colonial America. It is practical ethics rather than abstract philosophy: a manual of duties owed by the gentleman to his family, his city, and his fellow citizens. De Officiis taught the colonial gentleman the meaning of honestas, fides, gravitas, and virtus — the cluster of Roman civic virtues that the eighteenth century reorganized into the moral character it expected of republican citizens. It also contained Cicero’s discussion of property: that while there is no such thing as private property by nature, once property has been acquired by long occupation, conquest, law, agreement, or labor, it becomes a sacred possession that the commonwealth exists in significant part to protect. The Founders drew on De Officiis for both the doctrine of civic virtue and the doctrine of property rights. Both belong to the inheritance.⁹

What Cicero gave the American tradition can be summarized in four propositions: that there is a law above all human law, discoverable by reason and binding on all rational beings; that political community is constituted by shared moral agreement rather than by mere force; that the proper political order combines elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and broad popular participation under that higher law; and that the citizen owes duties of virtue to the commonwealth that no statute can prescribe but every well-formed conscience can recognize. These four propositions found their way, in various forms, into the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, and the entire moral vocabulary of American republicanism.

Cicero, like the other classical authors, was a man of his time. He owned slaves — including the secretary Tiro, whom he eventually freed and to whom he wrote letters of evident affection. He participated in the politics of the late Republic with the compromises and ambitions of an ambitious Roman of his class. He was not a saint, and the series will not pretend he was. What he was, was a careful thinker who articulated, in language of remarkable durability, the central claims of the natural law tradition. The Americans were right to read him closely.

The Death of Cicero

On December 7, 43 BCE, soldiers sent by the Second Triumvirate caught Cicero on the road near his villa at Formiae, south of Rome. He had been trying to reach the coast and a ship to Greece. He was sixty-three years old.

Over the preceding fifteen months, Cicero had delivered a series of speeches — known to history as the Philippics, in imitation of Demosthenes’ speeches against Philip of Macedon — denouncing Mark Antony as a threat to the Roman Republic. The first was delivered in September of 44 BCE; the remainder followed through the spring of 43 BCE. The speeches were a moral and rhetorical triumph. They were also a political miscalculation. When Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate in November of 43 BCE, they immediately drew up proscription lists — lists of political enemies to be killed and whose property would be confiscated to fund the triumvirate’s armies. Cicero’s name was on the list. Octavian, who had previously called Cicero his friend and political mentor, agreed to it.

Cicero attempted to flee. He was old and tired and could not bring himself to leave Italy. The soldiers caught him in a litter being carried toward the sea. Plutarch’s account, which has shaped the memory of the scene across two thousand years, records that Cicero put his head out of the litter, faced the soldiers, and offered his neck. He was killed cleanly. His hands and his head were cut off and carried back to Rome.

Storia di Roma by Francesco Bertolini (Marcus Tullius Cicero dragged from his litter and assassinated by soldiers under the command of Marc Antony 43 BCD)

Antony ordered the head and hands nailed to the Rostra in the Roman Forum — the speaker’s platform from which Cicero had delivered the Philippics. Cassius Dio records that Antony’s wife Fulvia took Cicero’s head into her lap, pulled out his tongue, and pierced it with her hairpins. The scene was meant to communicate, with brutal clarity, what would happen to those who used speech against power.¹⁰

The Republic did not long survive Cicero. Within fifteen years, Octavian — now styling himself Augustus — was sole ruler of Rome, and the Senate had been reduced to a ceremonial chamber. The forms of the Republic persisted for centuries; the substance had ended.

The American Founders absorbed this story. They knew exactly what the proscription lists meant. They knew exactly what it meant for a republic to die — not in a single catastrophic moment but in a long slide of compromises and accommodations, until one day the defenders of the old order found themselves on the road at sixty-three, with soldiers coming over the hill, and no Republic left to flee to. The Founders’ fear of standing armies, of executive consolidation, of the proscription power, of political violence dressed in legal forms — all of it had a specifically Ciceronian texture. They had read about the proscriptions. They had translated the Philippics in their school days. They knew where republics could end.

This is the cautionary half of the classical inheritance. The wisdom of the ancients is real, but so is the lesson of the ancients’ failure. A republic that does not maintain its institutions, that allows extraordinary power to consolidate in extraordinary circumstances, that punishes its critics rather than answering them — such a republic walks, eventually, the road to Formiae.

The Founders as Classical Readers

The classical inheritance just described did not reach the Founders by accident or by general cultural transmission. It reached them through specific books, specific schools, and specific habits of reading that defined the educated American gentleman of the eighteenth century.

The colonial American education, where it existed in formal form, was a classical education. Boys destined for college studied Latin from the age of seven or eight and added Greek by twelve. They read Cicero’s orations, Caesar’s Commentaries, Virgil’s Aeneid, Horace’s odes, and, in the more rigorous schools, selections of Aristotle and Plato in Greek. Admission to Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, the College of New Jersey at Princeton, and King’s College in New York required examination in Latin composition and Greek translation. The classical authors were not optional enrichment. They were the curriculum.

The Founders’ personal engagement with these texts went well beyond schoolboy memorization. John Adams’ copy of Cicero’s writings, preserved at the Boston Public Library, is densely annotated in Adams’ unmistakable hand. He read the Orations and De Officiis repeatedly across his life, marking passages, arguing with the text in marginal commentary, and copying out long extracts into his diaries. Adams’ political prose carries the rhythms of Ciceronian oratory deliberately. His Defence of the Constitutions is structurally an Aristotelian work; his Discourses on Davila, an extended Polybian meditation. The classical authors were his working partners in political thought.¹¹

Madison’s preparation for the Constitutional Convention drew most heavily on classical sources. The “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies” treats the Amphictyonic Council, the Achaean League, the Lycian Confederacy, and other classical examples as analytical case studies in confederal government. The Federalist essays 18, 19, and 20 develop the same case studies for public argument. Madison’s command of the material is granular and operational; he is not citing classical examples as ornament but using them as data on confederal failure.

Jefferson’s classical reading was the most extensive of any major Founder. His letters to his nephew Peter Carr and to other young men in his orbit prescribed reading lists in which the Greek and Roman classics held a place of honor and pride. He read Greek and Latin throughout his life and could translate freely from both. His correspondence with Adams in their final years is studded with classical references — debates over Plato, comparisons of modern statesmen to ancient ones, exchanges in which both men obviously assumed the other had the full classical corpus available for instant comparison. Jefferson kept Tacitus and Thucydides on his desk at Monticello.

Hamilton’s relationship to Plutarch may have been the most operational of any of the Founders. The standard biography reports that Hamilton carried Plutarch’s Parallel Lives into the camp at Valley Forge, where he had read the Greek and Roman biographies as a moral and political education, treating the lives of Alexander, Pericles, the Gracchi, Cato, Brutus, and Caesar as case studies in statecraft.

The Constitutional Convention itself returned to classical examples constantly. Madison’s notes on the Convention record references to Sparta, Athens, Rome, the Achaean League, the Lycian Confederacy, and the Roman provincial system. Hamilton’s June 18 speech, the longest single address of the Convention, drew on Greek and Roman political experience throughout. The pseudonymous publication tradition under which the Constitution was both defended and opposed — Publius for the Federalists, Brutus and Cato for the Anti-Federalists, Federal Farmer and Cincinnatus and Centinel in the state ratification debates — was a deliberate invocation of Roman political identity, signaling to readers that the disputants understood themselves to be reasoning within a tradition that began in classical antiquity.

This is what it means to call the classical inheritance operational rather than decorative. The men who designed the American constitutional order did not gesture vaguely toward Greek and Roman precedent. They knew the material in detail and they applied it with discipline.

The Skeptic’s Case

A serious account of the classical inheritance must engage two challenges that have been pressed against it. Both deserve fair statement before they can be answered.

The first and stronger challenge concerns the moral failures of the classical authors themselves. Aristotle defended natural slavery. Cicero owned slaves. Plato envisioned an authoritarian republic governed by an enlightened few. The Greek and Roman citizens whose political experience the Founders studied excluded the majority of the populations of their cities — slaves, foreigners, women, and the poor — from any meaningful political role. The republics whose virtue the eighteenth century admired rested on the unpaid labor of human beings their constitutions did not recognize as fully human. To draw the foundations of universal liberty from sources so deeply implicated in bondage is, on this view, either incoherent or hypocritical. The Americans who borrowed Cicero borrowed a slaveholder; the constitutional order they built incorporated, from its first moment, the same hideous compromise.

This critique deserves direct answer. The honest answer is that yes, the classical authors held moral views that we now reject — views that ought to have been rejected then, and that some thoughtful minds within antiquity itself did reject, however incompletely. The Founders inherited the contradiction. Their own republic was born with the slavery problem already in it, written into its compromises and visible to anyone who cared to look. Some of the Founders themselves saw clearly that the contradiction would eventually destroy them. Jefferson, whose moral position on slavery was tortured and inconsistent throughout his life, wrote that he trembled for his country when he reflected that God was just.¹² Adams, who never owned a slave, regarded the institution as morally and politically corrosive. The Founders were not unaware that they were carrying forward both the philosophical achievement and the moral failure of the classical inheritance.

But the philosophical achievements do not depend on the moral failures. The doctrine that there is a law above all human law, the analysis of mixed constitutions, the diagnosis of how republics decay, the doctrine that civil law derives its authority from natural justice — these are claims that stand or fall on their own arguments, not on the personal practices of the men who first articulated them. The moral failures of the classical authors are real, and they should be named. The classical philosophical inheritance is also real, and it should be carried forward by readers who have learned both from the wisdom of the ancients and from their failures. The series will not absolve the failures. It will also not surrender the wisdom.

A second challenge comes from a particular strand of academic interpretation. The historians J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and others have argued that the political tradition the American Founders drew from was not the modern liberal tradition of natural rights and individual liberty but rather the classical republican tradition of civic virtue, public-spiritedness, and self-sacrifice for the common good. On this account, the American Founding was a fundamentally classical and republican project, and the natural-rights reading that places Locke and the Declaration’s universalist language at the center is anachronistic. The Founders, the argument goes, were really republicans, not liberals.

This is a serious scholarly tradition and it has identified something real. Classical republican virtue was indeed a powerful current in eighteenth-century American political thought. The Founders did value civic participation, public-spiritedness, and the willingness to subordinate private interest to the common good. They drew these values from the classical authors examined here. The scholarly correction is welcome insofar as it reminds readers that the American Founding was not a pure exercise in liberal individualism.

But the correction has been overstated. The Founders’ political thought was both republican and liberal. The classical inheritance and the natural-rights tradition are not opposites; they are complementary parts of the same project. Cicero, who articulated the natural-law tradition the Declaration would echo, is precisely the figure in whom both currents converge. The Founders read him as both the philosopher of natural law and the philosopher of civic virtue, and they did not see the two as in tension. The series will follow them in treating both as parts of a single, coherent inheritance.

The Inheritance Carries Forward

Three figures, three contributions.

From Aristotle: the science of constitutional analysis, and the doctrine that the most stable political order is one that mixes elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and broad popular government, with effective power placed in a substantial middling class. The American Constitution is recognizably Aristotelian in structure.

From Polybius: the cycle by which governments decay, and the recognition that a mixed constitution might slow the cycle’s progression by setting institutions in productive tension with one another. The American constitutional design is recognizably Polybian in its checks and balances.

From Cicero: the doctrine that there is a true law, common to all rational beings, discoverable by reason, binding on all peoples and all times; the recognition that civil law derives its authority from this higher law; and the example of a man who held to that doctrine even when the cost was his life. The American natural-rights tradition is recognizably Ciceronian in vocabulary and conviction.

Each of these contributions was an inheritance, not an invention. The Americans did not produce them. They received them. They studied them. They debated them. They adapted them to American conditions. And they built a constitutional order whose deepest architectural assumptions were Greek and Roman before they were ever American.

Two thousand years separate Cicero on the road to Formiae from Madison at his desk in Montpelier reading the Histories by candlelight in the spring of 1786. The candle is still burning. The reading is still possible. The arguments the ancients made are still arguments any thinking citizen can engage today, in the language of any country that has access to a library and the freedom to use it.

The classical inheritance is one thread of the golden cord. The next two articles will trace others — the Hebrew covenant tradition, the Islamic transmission of the Greeks, and the medieval synthesis in which Aristotle returned to the Latin West through Arabic intermediaries. The story of natural law and natural rights is not the property of Greece and Rome alone. It is a human inheritance, contributed to by every great tradition that has reflected seriously on what it means to be a person under law. The Greeks asked the questions first, in the form we still recognize. They are not the only ones who answered.

Self-Reflection Prompts

1. Aristotle proposed that the most stable constitution combined elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and broad popular government, with effective power placed in a substantial middling class. Apply this analysis to the contemporary American political order. Where does effective power actually reside today? Has the middling class been reinforced or eroded? What would Aristotle conclude about the present condition of the mixed constitution?

   
   

2. Polybius’s anacyclosis identifies six stages through which governments cycle. Locate the contemporary United States within the cycle. Are we in the constitutional phase of politeia, the corrupted phase of mob rule, or somewhere in the transition between them? On what evidence?

   
   

3. Cicero argued that there is a true law, in accordance with nature, that applies to all rational beings in all times and places, and that civil law derives its authority only from its conformity with that higher law. If this claim is true, what follows for the legitimacy of civil statutes that contradict natural justice? If this claim is false, what is the alternative ground for distinguishing legitimate authority from mere power?

   
   

4. The classical authors held moral views — particularly regarding slavery and the political exclusion of women and the poor — that we now recognize as failures. The Founders inherited both their philosophical wisdom and their moral failures. How should a careful reader of the classical tradition today handle this combination? What does it mean to receive an inheritance that includes both genuine discovery and genuine error?

   
   

5. The American Founders carried Plutarch into battle and read Cicero throughout their lives. The classical education they received shaped the constitutional order they designed. What does it mean for the future of self-government that this kind of education has largely disappeared from American schooling? Can a republic preserve institutions it no longer understands the philosophical foundations of?

Endnotes

1. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica, Book III, fragment preserved in Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones, 6.8.6–9. Translation adapted from C. W. Keyes, Cicero: De Re Publica, De Legibus, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 211. The passage is universally regarded as the classical locus of natural law doctrine.

2. James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison, ed. Adrienne Koch (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985). For Hamilton’s June 18 speech, see Madison’s notes for that date and The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 4:178–211. For the Madison-Hamilton essays on ancient confederacies, see The Federalist nos. 18, 19, and 20, in The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 86–104.

3. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 2013). On Aristotle’s empirical method and the lost constitutions, see Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield, eds., The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 310–40. The Constitution of the Athenians was rediscovered in 1879 on Egyptian papyri and published in 1891.

4. The classification of constitutions appears in Politics, Book III, chs. 6–8. The doctrine of natural slavery appears in Politics, Book I, chs. 4–7. The analysis of the middling class appears in Politics, Book IV, ch. 11. For Aristotle’s influence on Madison, see Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

5. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, July 5, 1814. In The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 432–34. Jefferson wrote that he had finally completed reading the Republic and described it as the heaviest task-work he had ever undertaken. Available at Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0341.

6. Polybius, The Histories, trans. W. R. Paton, rev. F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht, 6 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010–2012). Book VI on the Roman constitution is in vol. 3. On Polybius’s American influence, see Marshall Davies Lloyd, “Polybius and the Founding Fathers: The Separation of Powers,” and Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 121–28.

7. Polybius, Histories, 6.10–18, on the mixed Roman constitution. The doctrine of anacyclosis is set out in 6.3–9. Polybius’s debt to earlier Greek thinkers, particularly Plato’s Republic Book VIII, is discussed in F. W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 635–46.

8. The natural-law fragment from De Re Publica Book III survives because Lactantius quoted it in the early fourth century. Lactantius’s text is the earliest source for the passage. See Stuart Gillespie and Christopher Pelling, “Roman Models of Civic Virtue,” in The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society, ed. Michael Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

9. Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913). On the prevalence of De Officiis in colonial American libraries, see Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics, 88–94, and Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984).

10. Plutarch, “Life of Cicero,” chs. 48–49, in Plutarch’s Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1919), vol. 7 — for the death of Cicero on December 7, 43 BCE, and the display of his head and hands. The Fulvia and hairpin detail is found not in Plutarch but in Cassius Dio, Roman History, 47.8.4. Appian, Civil Wars, 4.19–20, provides additional detail on the proscriptions and the death. The misattribution of the Fulvia scene to Plutarch is common but incorrect; the earliest source for that detail is Cassius Dio.

11. John Adams’ annotated volumes are preserved in the Adams Collection of the Boston Public Library. The most extensive published study of Adams’ marginal commentary is Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952). On Adams’ lifelong engagement with Cicero specifically, see Richard, The Founders and the Classics, 53–84, and the recent study by C. Bradley Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

12. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, “Manners,” in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), 2:227. The full passage reads in part: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” The passage is one of the most frequently quoted in the entire body of Jefferson’s writing.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

• Aristotle, Politics. Translations recommended: Carnes Lord (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 2013) for accuracy; Benjamin Jowett (widely available, public domain) for accessibility.

• Polybius, The Histories. Loeb Classical Library edition, trans. W. R. Paton, rev. F. W. Walbank.

• Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica, De Legibus. Loeb Classical Library edition, trans. C. W. Keyes.

• Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis. Loeb Classical Library edition, trans. Walter Miller.

• Plato, Republic. Multiple modern translations; Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1968) is widely used in American political theory.

• Plutarch, Parallel Lives. Loeb Classical Library edition, trans. Bernadotte Perrin.

• James Madison, “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies.” In The Papers of James Madison, vol. 9. Available at Founders Online.

• The Federalist, nos. 18, 19, 20, 38. Liberty Fund edition.

• John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 3 vols. In The Works of John Adams, vols. 4–6.

Secondary Works

• Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 1994). The standard treatment.

• Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Wayne State University Press, 1984).

• Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

• J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975).

• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Harvard University Press, 1992).

• Carnes Lord, Aristotle’s Politics: A Reader’s Guide (Cornell University Press, 1991).

• F. W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, 3 vols. (Clarendon Press, 1957–1979).

• Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (Random House, 2001). Accessible biography.

• Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait (Cornell University Press, 1983).