The Founders did not invent their politics; they read it. This episode traces the classical inheritance at the root of American constitutional design through three ancient figures and one cautionary contrast. Aristotle gave the Founders the empirical study of constitutions and the doctrine of the mixed regime anchored in a broad middle class. Polybius gave them anacyclosis — the wheel by which governments decay — and the recognition that a mixed constitution could slow the tu

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.