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GREECE AND ROME IN AMERICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2013

JOHN PAUL RUSSO
JOHN PAUL RUSSO*
Affiliation:
Departments of Classics and English, University of Miami E-mail: jprusso@miami.edu
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Extract

The classics appear conspicuously in the pamphlet wars of the American Revolution, though in the opinion of Bernard Bailyn (written many years ago), their presence is “window-dressing” and their influence “superficial.” They are “everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought” (my italics). Up the scale in influence comes Enlightenment rationalism, also “superficial” but only “at times”—that removes the foreigners, ancient and modern. Then, further up the scale are English common-law writers, “powerfully influential” though still insufficiently “determinative”; above them, a “major source,” New England Puritan thought and culture; and finally, at the top, seventeenth-century British “heroes of liberty” and the “early eighteenth-century transmitters of this tradition,” e.g. Commonwealth men, Bishop Hoadly. Who would have thought that the bishop of Winchester weighed in the balance more heavily than Plato and Aristotle? Only once in passing does Bailyn even mention Machiavelli, to whom J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Harvey C. Mansfield would grant large prominence in the development of Revolutionary thought.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 2013 , pp. 177 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

1 Bailyn, Bernard, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution: 1750–1776 (Cambridge, MA, 1965)Google Scholar, 21, 23, 24, 25–7, 29. See also Shalev, Eran, Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2008), 50–51.Google Scholar

2 Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edn (Cambridge, MA, 1992; first published 1967)Google Scholar, 85; Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975)Google Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar; Skinner, , Machiavelli (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; and Mansfield, Harvey C., Machiavelli's Virtue (Chicago, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Most recently, Bederman, David J., The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution: Prevailing Wisdom (Cambridge, 2008), 15, 70–71, 146–147CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has restated the significance of Machiavelli in the founders’ thought.

3 Richard, Carl J., The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 209CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his earlier book Richard had rejected Bailyn's judgment as uninformed, replying that “the classics supplied mixed government theory, the principal basis for the U.S. Constitution . . . [and] contributed a great deal to the founders’ conception of human nature, their understanding of the nature and purpose of virtue, and their appreciation of society's essential role in its production”; “in short, the classics supplied a large portion of the founders’ intellectual tools.” Richard, Carl J., The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 1–2, 8Google Scholar.

4 Kopff, E. Christian, “Open Shutters on the Past: Rome and the Founders,” in Gregg, Gary L. II, ed., Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition (Wilmington, 1999)Google Scholar, 71 ff.

5 Caroline Winterer's The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (2002) is “superb but brief”; it focuses “largely” upon education, and only “marginally” addresses the “interaction between the classics and democracy, the Industrial Revolution, nationalism, romanticism, the Second Great Awakening, and slavery”—in other words, it must have missed much in the period it purportedly intended to cover (ix). Also “excellent but brief” is her The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (2007), which “contains about fifty pages concerning antebellum women” (ix).

6 Richard refers to Reinhold, Meyer, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, 1984).Google Scholar

7 Johnson, Samuel, Life of Pope, in Johnson, , Lives of the English Poets, vol. 2 (London: Dent, 1968), 222Google Scholar.

8 Capper, Charles and Giorcelli, Cristina, eds., Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age (Madison, WI, 2007)Google Scholar; some essays published in Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica: Rivista del Dipartimento di Storia moderna e contemporanea dell'Università degli studi di Roma “La Sapienza” 1 (2001). Cf. Stowe's, William review of Margaret Fuller in “Transatlantic Subjects,” American Literary History 22/1 (2010), 1162CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Gummere, Richard M., The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Reading Antigone was popular at the time, but not staging it. The first Greek tragedy staged in the United States was Oedipus Tyrannus at Sanders Theater, Harvard, in May 1881; in the audience sat Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Eliot Norton, Phillips Brooks, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alexander Agassiz, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, and Yale president Norton.

10 Snowden, Frank M., Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 58Google Scholar.

11 The Iliad was translated by himself, the Odyssey with the assistance of William Broome and Elijah Fenton.

12 “Sitting always involves a downward pressure on something which is defenseless,” writes Elias Canetti. This pressure is the physical manifestation of the leader, his “weight” of authority measured in degrees of oppression. An “upholstered chair is not only soft, but also obscurely gives the sitter the feeling that he is sitting on something living”; that is, a victim. Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power, trans. Stewart, Carol (New York: Continuum, 1978), 389–90Google Scholar.

13 The satire on the Roman matron Fabia, mother of Fabius Maximus, would make a fine addition to Winterer's catalogue: Fabia: “I have lived in Rome for seventy-three years. I have not found it monotonous.” Amytis: “But, my dear mother, you must remember that you've never been anywhere else. I had the misfortune to be born in Athens.”

14 John Paul Russo, Cf., “An Unacknowledged Masterpiece: Capra's Italian American Film,” in Camaiti Hostert, Anna and Julian Tamburri, Anthony, eds., Screening Ethnicity: Cinematographic Representations of Italian Americans in the United States (Boca Raton, 2002), 291–321.Google Scholar

15 Victoria De Grazia, Cf., Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005).Google Scholar

16 Franci, Giovanna, Dreaming of Italy: Las Vegas and the Virtual Grand Tour, with photographs by Zignani, Federico (Reno, 2005)Google Scholar.