Most of us know that the Founders feared tyranny and also feared unchecked democracy. But why?
Carl J. Richard?s new book, Greeks & Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers, attempts to answer that question. Richard reminds us that the Founders spent much of their time learning lessons from classical writers such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicerro, Plutarch, and Livy. Especially influential were works that praised the Roman Republic.
The founders? immersion in the history of the late Roman Republic had a profound effect on their style of thought. They developed from the classics a suspicious cast of mind. They learned to fear conspiracies against liberty. Steeped in a literature whose perpetual theme was the steady encroachment of tyranny on liberty, the founders became virtually obsessed with spotting its approach, so that they might avoid the fate of their Roman heroes. In 1767 John Adams declared regarding the ?spirit of liberty,? ?Principiis Obsta [?resist the beginnings? of tyranny] is her motto and maxim, knowing her enemies are secret and cunning, making the earliest advances slowly, silently, and softly.? The following year his cousin Samuel used the Latin motto ?Principiis Obsta? as a pseudonym for an essay warning against a British military dictatorship over America. John Dickinson echoed the sentiment, quoting Cicero: ?Even though the ruler may not, at the time, be troublesome, it is a sad fact that he can be so, if he takes the fancy.? Dickinson added that the smaller the illegitimate tax the greater the danger, since the more easily it would be accepted by the incautious, thereby establishing a precedent for greater encroachments. Dickinson concluded, ?Nations, in general, are not apt to think until they feel?. Therefore, nations in general have lost their liberty.?
For more on the founders and their thought processes, one could do worse than starting with Richard Brookhiser?s witty take on the Revolutionary period.
