Just recently, I finished "The Culture of Classicism" by Caroline Winterer. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this well-crafted book. It discussed the role of Classics and Classicist in the Universities of the United States from 1780-1910. Unless you have an interest in the history of the Classics as a field of study in the Universities, this book will not be of interest to most people. However, it did have a few interesting descriptions of the influence of Classical works and the Classical world on early American society.
In today's world, Greece stands as the most well-known civilization in the Classical world while Rome is viewed as the Imperial power that defined it from Caesar onwards, with most people in ignorance of Republican Rome. However, in early America, (Republican) Rome took precedence over Greece.
"The overwhelming preference for Rome over Greece in the American imagination of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rested on this imagined affinity between antiquity and modernity. Americans found a number of interlocking features in republican Rome congenial: the Senate as a guarantor of liberty and stability; the ideal of the cultivated, virtuous Ciceronian orator; and agriculture as safeguard to civic virtue. William Smith...noted that in American studies of ancient history 'everything between Augustus [first Emperor of Imperial Rome] and the beginning of the sixteenth century is past over.' Moreover, Rome's descent into corrupted empire supplied Americans with cautionary tales about the fragility of civic virtue."
As opposed to the fractured city-states of Greece, Republican Rome was a stable nation of virtuous citizens that early America modeled themselves after.
The Classical world also had a profound effect upon early American women. Unlike the meek and "behind-the-scenes" women of the Christian era, Greek and Roman women were proud, intelligent, and influential. Around the time of the American Revolution:
"Abigail Adams styled herself as Portia, the long-suffering but wise wife of the Roman statesman Brutus, and when her husband was away she encouraged her son John Quincy to read passages from Charles Rollin's Ancient History to her. Her friend Mercy Otis Warren, the historian, answered Abigail's letters as Marcia, the wife of the Republican orator Hortensius. Judith Sargent Murray looked to Helen of Troy and Penelope to argue for greater utility in women's education..."
It was not only women who used Classical pseudonyms. Open up any copy of The Federalist Papers and, at the end of many of them, you will find the name Publius. This was a reference to Publius Scipio Africanus, the general who defeated Hannibal and saved Rome.
In general, the American people felt a relation to the Classical world.
"...they had also been convinced that the great actors of antiquity were somehow also their contemporaries, a mirror for their own selves, a font of morals, a template for virtuous statecraft and peerless expression. Cicero was as relevant to the American Senate as he was to ancient Rome."
The 20th century, and especially the later half of the 20th century, witnessed the decline and final abandonment of the Classics as a major driving force of American virtue. In its place we are left with postmodernism, multiculturalism, moral relativism, and an esoteric intellectualism. Instead of the superiority of Greece and Rome, we are taught the "equal" value of the Native Americans, the early African Tribes, modern Amazonian Cannibals, Communist China, and Islamic "moderates". I think that the facts are proof enough: "As goes the Classics, so goes America."
-Jason Roberts
