A Teaching for Americans: Roman History and the Republic’s First Identityby M.E. Bradford
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/10/a-teaching-for-republicans-roman-history-and-the-nations-first-identity.htmlBut Roman architecture and sculpture were not the primary inspiration for America’s early infatuation with the city on the Tiber. That connection came by way of literature, and particularly from readings in Roman history. What Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, and their associates taught the generation that achieved our independence was the craft of creating, operating, and preserving a republican form of government. For gentlemen of the eighteenth century, Rome was the obvious point of reference when the conversation turned to republican theory. The Swiss, the Dutch, the Venetians and (of course) the Greek city states sometimes had a place in such considerations. And in New England the memory of the Holy Commonwealth survived. Yet Rome had been the Republic, one of the most durable and impressive social organisms in the history of the world. Moreover, there was a many-sided record of how it developed, of how its institutions were undermined and of the consequences following their declension. This Rome was no construct issuing from deliberations upon the abstract “good,” no fancy of “closet philosophers.”[1] Public men might attend its example with respect, learn from its triumphs and its ruin. On these shores they did. And, once we were independent, with a special urgency. To explain why and with what results, I will first reconstruct a composite Roman model according to the understanding of those first Americans and then document that pointed synthesis with a limited selection from the wealth of supporting evidence left to us from the architects of our political identity. Only then will it be possible to account for the impetus given by this effort at emulation to the development of an indigenous American regime: account for and thus correct many now accepted readings of our early history, as that identification requires.
The best way to recover Roman history as it signified to the English Whig or like-minded commonwealthsman of the late eighteenth century is to ignore such diverting questions as what it meant to the republican historians themselves, to Polybius, to Plutarch, the Renaissance, or the leaders of the French Revolution. Or of what it means to Western man today. The distinction here is akin to the difference between the study of biblical influence and direct exposition of the scripture itself. Our fathers trusted the Roman historians rather well. To them, as to other late Augustans, history was a moral and political study, not a precise antiseptic science.[2] And especially Roman history. They found the truth of men and manners in its long and varied entirety. This enlightenment did, to be sure, include a deposition from life under the Caesars—even though that testimony was chiefly negative in character. But the deepest teaching of the full chronicle was concentrated in its first three parts: from 510–252 b.c., the rise of the Republic (in Livy and Book II of Cicero’s De Republica); 262–202 b.c., the era of the Punic Wars (in Livy, Appian, and Polybius); and 201–27 b.c., the decline toward anarchy and despotism (in Sallust, Lucan, Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, and others).[3] Admiration for the old order was a convention with the later, imperial authorities. Caesar allowed the sentiment, sometimes even officially encouraged it: Caesar as the only conceivable keeper of the republican fires. Yet the moral imagination of Romanitas continued its location in the memory of the Republic long after the subject of this recollection had forever disappeared. Nothing could be more republican than the wicked, arbitrary, and tumultuous princes drawn to life in Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, than Tacitus’s portrait of Tiberius in The Annals, or the Galba and Otho of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. But these writings are republican only by implication. It is a presupposed knowledge of the Republic itself, and of the books where it is described and reported, that gives them an indirect resonance of bygone stabilities. Finally, it is the history of the Republic that is republican history proper.
