First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country.

• Author: Meany, Paul

First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

Thomas E. Ricks

New York: Harper, 2020, 415 pp.

Classics, the study of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, is today a niche subject studied by a diligent yet small circle of people. The ancient world is increasingly alien to the modern mind. But this was not always the case. For a long time, classical thinkers were revered as excellent sources of wisdom on both political and moral subjects. Classical writings were studied for centuries within the Western world, but few? places could match the intense adoration of the ancient world that the American revolutionaries cultivated in the 18th century.

After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, stunning pundits and statistical gurus alike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas E. Ricks contemplated the same question many generations of Americans have grappled with: What are our values as a nation? To answer this question, mirroring the American revolutionaries, Ricks returns to first principles by examining the classical sources from which the Founders gleaned some of their most hallowed ideas about our duties toward our fellow citizens and our nation as a whole.

First Principles offers an important corrective to a common narrative of the American Revolution. When libertarians and classical liberals discuss the American Revolution's intellectual blueprints, John Locke often dominates the discussion. Locke's Second Treatise on Government informed the Founders on questions of resistance to tyrannical authority, the principles of natural law, and the justification of private property. But Locke was not the only thinker in the Founder's intellectual arsenal. At times, this intense focus on Locke and Enlightenment thought, in general, obscures the classical tradition's role in providing both moral and political models to follow. The writings of Thucydides, Tacitus, Livy, Sallust, Polybius, Plutarch and, above all other ancients, Cicero, were constantly cited by the Founders to argue in favor of an Enlightenment-informed republicanism. In tandem with political writings, figures of moral exemplarity were often praised as models to emulate. Larger-than-life figures such as Cato, Brutus, Epaminondas, Aristides, Phoeion, and Cincinnatus all loomed in Americans' minds. Though these names might not be familiar to the educated modern American, there is no question 18th-century Americans were acutely aware of the ancient past, or at least the chunks of it they found particularly pertinent.

Scholars such as Caroline Winterer, Carl Richards, and Michael C. Hawley have done a great deal to illustrate just how pervasive the example of Rome and Greece was in the revolutionaries' minds. Their works are of an academic nature, however, while Ricks focuses on the interested layperson. Ricks' main goal is not to argue for a radically new interpretation or particularly novel vision of the Founding and classicism. Instead, he aims to raise the...