American Thinker by Walter Johanson 7/4/2021
Classically-educated colonial Americans learned to be wary of monarchy from the Iliad and the Odyssey.
It is very likely that, in July 1776, many Americans heard sermons based on the text of Psalm 143:6 -- “Put not your trust in princes….” One suspects that ministers used words even more harsh than those in the Declaration of Independence, where “the present King of Great Britain” was assailed for “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having their direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
George III had been much admired by colonials. They had erected an equestrian statue to him in New York’s Battery in 1770, but in what was probably our first statue take-down, it was toppled after the Declaration was read to Continental troops on July 9, 1776.
Americans had blamed Parliament for the political crisis that began with the Stamp Act in 1765, and for the war which began in April 1775. They hoped to reform relations between colonies and Britain,
Americans knew about many bad kings: John, Richard II, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and others, but Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in January 1776, argued that the problem was not the moral or intellectual weaknesses of individual kings; instead the problem was monarchy itself, and the only solution was independence. Paine’s arguments were convincing, but Americans’ classical education prepared them for Common Sense.
In Polybius they learned about how the parts of government functioned.
In Livy, they saw Romans establishing their republic by throwing off Etruscan King Tarquin.
In Tacitus, they saw Queen Boudicca raising the Britons in rebellion against abusive Roman colonizers.
In Homer, they were thrilled by accounts of battles in which bronze-age battlefield weapons inflicted mortal wounds in every way possible, but he also gave them a political education. The Iliad and the Odyssey show how harm can result when power is conferred by circumstances of birth. In the former poem the Greek army suffers harm from the presence of King Agamemnon; the latter, Ithaca suffers harm from the prolonged absence of King Odysseus.
More:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/our_debt_to_homer_on_independence_day.html
