Chapter Nine

Athenian Democracy in the Age of Revolutions

Interaction with men will teach you how to deal with them, but do not hope that your experience alone will be able to provide you with all the guidance you will need. If you do not understand what you have seen, you will feel the constant weight of your ignorance, unless some extreme presumption deceive you. No, it is in studying in history the causes of fortunate outcomes that you will acquire certain knowledge. The past is an image or rather a forecast of the future. Add up the virtues and vices of a people; and like Jupiter, who, according to the poets, weighed the destinies of republics and empires in his golden scales, you will learn the advantages and disadvantages that can be expected.

—Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Conversations of Phocion



Is it not the glory of the people of America that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration of antiquity, for custom, and for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?

—James Madison, Federalist 14

SINCE THE FOUNDATION of British colonies in the new world, curiosity about the possible relevance of the Athenian experiment to American experience has waxed and waned across the centuries and throughout different decades of the same century. Anxiety over the state of popular involvement in government and the withdrawal of energies from civic concerns has prompted many American thinkers in recent years to reopen the study of Athenian democracy and to ask once again whether the achievements of the Athenians might contain valuable lessons and might, mutatis mutandis, provide a positive model in at least some areas. This belief contrasts strikingly with the conviction of America’s founders that what little Athens had to teach was entirely of the negative variety. Reading the past backward in the narrative histories of the eighteenth century—Rollin made his way into many colonial libraries, and Jefferson excerpted Stanyan in his commonplace book—for the framers of the American constitution the story of Athens was the story of failure, and the weaknesses of the democracy were held responsible for everything from the tyranny of the Thirty in 403 to the defeat by Macedonia in 338. Often, moreover, the Athenians were rejected along with the rest of the ancients as un-Christian slaveholders who channeled excessive energy into military pursuits and valued glory above virtue.

Writers in early America did not share the leisure of their educated French and English contemporaries in the Old World, and writing about ancient civilization in depth did not catch on until well after the founding of the republic. Indeed, the very utility of classical education was hotly debated. The colonists’ hesitance to devote great chunks of time to the study of antiquity is easy to understand. To be sure, for men—and sometimes women—cut loose from the mother ship on a strange new continent, such allusions offered vital grounding in a past that bound the colonists not only to heroes and heroines long dead but to more recent generations in England who had agonized over the same texts as they themselves were growing up. In the new world, however, a classical education did not seem justifiable on sentimental or ornamental grounds alone. Rather, it stood or fell on its civic value. Eighteenth-century Americans asked hard questions concerning the relevance of Greek and Roman civilization to the challenges facing the colonists, and the answers to these questions reveal a strong conviction that the history of the tiny republics of antiquity had little of a positive nature to teach modern individuals who were the beneficiaries not only of a whole new range of experience but of a new science of politics as well.¹

THE DEBATE OVER CLASSICAL LEARNING

Because of the limited supply of books and the greater demands of life in the New World, educated people probably knew a little less about the ancient world than their European counterparts, but a determination to cultivate Old World roots and the comparative lack of grinding poverty in America led even the humblest to learn a little about the world of Greece and Rome, and, as Meyer Reinhold has pointed out, though eighteenth-century Americans knew much less about the ancient world than twentieth-century Americans, still “the learning they acquired, circumscribed though it was, affected their thought and action more,” rooting them as it did in a venerable tradition that afforded them a yearned-for continuity with the thread of civilization in Europe.² At the same time, the exigencies of life in the New World led some to question the value of the classics. In part, this questioning focused on the study of dead languages, a pastime that eighteenth-century Americans subjected to precisely the same scrutiny as do their modern descendants. Appealing to arguments parallel to those of Priestley in England and Diderot in France, many Americans called for a more obviously utilitarian education than could be found in the traditional classical curriculum. Quakers in general opposed classical learning, and William Penn decried the oppressing of American children with a “strange tongue or two, that it is ten to one may never be useful to them.”³ At the same time, the content of classical texts was lambasted; in 1769, John Wilson resigned his position at the Friends Academy in Philadelphia because of his belief that the reading of classical authors promoted “Ignorance, Lewdness & Profanity” in America’s youth, and four years later the Tory Jonathan Boucher complained that exclusive devotion to the classics had created men who preferred the “darkness and filth of Heathenism” to “Christian verity and purity.”⁴ The physician Benjamin Rush was concerned that the close study of classical texts was tedious and time-consuming and that emphasis on dead languages excluded women from higher education; he also worried that preoccupation with the classics promoted not only ancient heathen immorality but modern European class-consciousness, asking, “Do not men use Latin and Greek as the scuttlefish emit their ink, on purpose to conceal themselves from an intercourse with the common people?”⁵ If antiquity was sometimes taken to task for inspiring allegiance to an undesirable code of morality, it could also be rejected on grounds of irrelevance. Benjamin Franklin criticized his countrymen for seeking political wisdom in the classical world rather than in themselves and for spending too much time pondering the defunct republics of antiquity; he also groused that it was “better to bring back from Italian travel a receipt for Parmesan cheese than copies of ancient historical inscriptions.”⁶ Others cited the differences between American and classical states to demonstrate the irrelevance of ancient history. Madison in Federalist 14 pointed up the dangers of adulating the ancients, and around the time of the constitutional convention, William Vans Murray of Maryland criticized arguments “derived from the falsely imagined character of antiquity.” The resemblance between the American states and the ancient republics, he argued, was so minor that Americans could gain little from the study of Greek and Roman history beyond “the contagion of enthusiasm.” Problems in the analogy between the classical republics and modern America were also put forward by anti-Federalists who wished to demonstrate that small republics were not necessarily unstable; “Agrippa” (probably James Winthrop of Cambridge) contended in 1788 that the faults of classical republics would not plague the Americans since they were the consequence of widespread slavery.⁷ Three years later a similar observation was put forward by Israel Evans, who denied that the slaveholding ancients could have been acquainted with principles of either liberty or humanity.⁸ On other occasions, however, ancient history appeared in a different light. Even Franklin in his younger days affirmed that the study of Greek and Roman history would tend “to fix in the minds of youth deep impressions of the beauty and usefulness of virtue of all kinds.”⁹ In 1772 John Adams expressed the wish that Americans emulate the mixed governments of antiquity; in 1780 Jonathan Mason advocated the study of Greece and Rome to teach the lesson that the waning of patriotic virtue would ruin a state, and John Gardiner made the same point five years later.¹⁰

Certainly the participants in the Federal Convention of 1787 expected that references to antiquity would lend weight and dignity to their arguments. The notes of William Pierce show one delegate warning on 1 June that a plural executive would “probably produce a tyranny as bad as the thirty Tyrants of Athens, or as the Decemvirs of Rome.”¹¹ On 6 June Madison appealed to the states of classical antiquity as evidence that “where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.”¹² A similar stand was taken by Hamilton (who showed his opposition to popular government by his adoption of the pseudonym of Phocion.) On 18 June in his review of elements of government he cited Demosthenes on the duration of Greek hegemonies, and in arguing that jealousy of commerce begets war as well as jealousy of power, he adduced the examples of Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Rome, Carthage, Venice, and the Hanseatic League; Holland and Athens were put forward as examples to show that republics are “liable to foreign corruption and intrigue.”¹³ In maintaining ten days later that large states in a union were more likely to quarrel among themselves than to join in the oppression of smaller ones, Madison contended that it was the rivalries and not the cooperation of Sparta, Athens, and Thebes that proved fatal to the smaller members of the Amphictyonic League.¹⁴ According to the notes of Robert Yates, Madison also cited the rivalries of antiquity in defense of his argument that major powers were more likely to quarrel than to ally.¹⁵ Later the same day Luther Martin apparently cited Charles Rollin on the system of representation in the Council of the Amphictyonic League.¹⁶

Though some of these classical citations reflect the founders’ need to legitimize their daring enterprise by grounding it firmly in the study of history, the conviction that the ancient world had something to teach modern Americans hung on until the end of the century and in some cases longer. Even Benjamin Rush, a notorious enemy of the ancient languages, conceded in 1795 that ancient historians contained “much useful knowledge.”¹⁷ Although Hamilton declared in the sixth Continentalist that it was “as ridiculous to seek models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome, as it would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and Laplanders,” nonetheless both in his other Continentalist and Federalist papers he recurred repeatedly to the examples of classical history.¹⁸ Writing in 1798, David Tappan echoed the assertion of Jonathan Mason and John Gardiner that the need for moral behavior and public spirit was borne out by ancient history, which is “peculiarly instructive to the people of America,” since the prosperity, decline, and ruin of those states “experimentally show that virtue is the soul of republican freedom” and that “luxury tends to extinguish both sound morality and piety.”¹⁹

Greek history afforded both positive and negative examples. Thomas Welch could adduce the Greeks’ successful defense against Persia in support of his call for a militia, while the anonymous New Hampshire author of “The People the Best Governors” attributed the victory to the internal union of Athens; but Jonathan Maxcy viewed Xerxes’ sack of Athens and near conquest of Greece as a whole as evidence of the need for union of a larger order. Underscoring the necessity for the study of ancient history in the new republic, he asks if it is not prudent to profit by the errors as well as the wisdom of days gone by: “Is it not the part of folly, in the present advanced state of the science of government, to admit an idea which the example of all the ancient independent republics reprobates, as the fruitful source of division, violence, and destruction?”²⁰ Benjamin Church and others disagreed with Alexander Hamilton about the merits of the Amphictyonic League, and although the independence of Greek colonies was often compared favorably with the dependence of Roman ones, the equal participation of Roman colonies in government was also cited.²¹ Praise of Greek and Roman government in general was frequent, and the lukewarm republicanism of the oligarchically inclined Romans held considerable appeal; and yet the more closely the colonists examined the government of the ancient Athenians, the less they liked it.

AMERICA AND ATHENS

What Americans heard about classical Athens would inevitably carry a special valence, for unlike eighteenth-century Europeans concerned about the possible decadence of their large nation-states, Americans shared with the inhabitants of Renaissance Italy a real opportunity to resurrect the classical polis. They decided against it. There was no lack of glowing generalizations about ancient states in eighteenth-century America. William Smith maintained that the history of Greece and Rome might justly be called “the History of Heroism, Virtue and Patriotism”; John Adams insisted that the best governments of the world had all been mixed and cited Greece, Rome, and Carthage as examples.²² Levi Hart praised the “public spirited, patriotic men whose hearts glowed with the love of liberty” to whom the great states of classical antiquity owed their stature.²³ Under scrutiny, however, the eventual collapse of all the ancient states was alleged against them, most particularly in Greece, and still more particularly in Athens.

To be sure, some eighteenth-century Americans had a kind word or two for Athenian government. The anonymous T. Q. and J., in an untitled piece written at Boston in 1763, stressed the need for a check on excessive power in the hands of one man, and the Athenians are presumably meant when the authors praise the Greeks for keeping “their good men from growing formidably great.” These Greeks, they go on, “were a wise people, and all governments would do well in this particular to imitate their example.”²⁴ Predictably, a dramatic defense of Athens appears in the anonymous 1776 New Hampshire pamphlet entitled “The People the Best Governors.” God, the author maintains, “made every man equal to his neighbour, and has virtually enjoined them, to govern themselves by their own laws…. The people,” he goes on, “best know their own wants and necessities, and therefore, are best able to rule themselves.” In support of this he points out that “tent makers, cobblers and common tradesmen, composed the legislature at Athens.” He argues further that any American representative council should lack veto power but rather serve in a merely probouleutic capacity, and again he cites the example of the Athenian boule (which he describes as consisting of four hundred people, a number valid only before Cleisthenes). Finally, and rather bizarrely, he enrolls Athens as a positive example in his argument that there should be no property qualification whatsoever for American representatives, advocating instead the ancient system whereby the best leaders were often in very needy circumstances—men, he explains, like “the Athenians, Cimon [!] and Aristides.”²⁵

The best-known praise of Athens surviving from eighteenth-century America came from the pen of Tom Paine, who claimed in 1792 that “what Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude,” for “the one was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration, the model of the present.”²⁶ It did not go without saying, however, that the model of ancient Athens was applicable to modern America, and although Paine’s joyous boast certainly reflects tremendous warmth for the Athenian experiment, he was quick to explain that the American system would benefit no end from “representation ingrafted upon Democracy.” Representation, he claimed, was preferable to pure democracy even in small territories, and Athens itself would by representation “have outrivalled her own Democracy.”²⁷

Others took harsher views both of Athens in itself and of Athens as an example for moderns. Already in 1645 the New England divine John Cotton had written that “a democratical government might do well in Athens, a city fruitful of pregnant wits, but will soon degenerate to an Anarchia (a popular tumult) amongst rude common people.”²⁸ In the eighteenth century, Athenian democracy was rarely considered suitable even for Athens, and such notions continued throughout the generation that followed the revolution. In his “Oration on the Anniversary of the Independence of the United States of America” delivered at Worcester in 1802, Zephaniah Swift Moore used the example of ancient Athens to support his argument that “vice is to the body politic, what a gangrene is to the natural body,” and he sums up the tradition of the previous century in contrasting the heroism of early Athens with later days, when corruption and faction set in, as a result of which the Athenians, he claims, found themselves “enfeebled and enslaved, reduced to the lowest state of savage stupidity and ignorance, and became an easy prey to their enemies.”²⁹ Similarly Mercy Warren, one of the few women from the early republic to leave behind written opinions about classical antiquity, decried the corruption, luxury, and faction that destroyed Athens, “wasted and lost by the intrigues of its own ambitious citizens.”³⁰ Numerous American orators excoriated Athens for what writers of the Enlightenment in both England and America were fond of calling “licentiousness.”

By and large, the Athenian example was one from which the founding fathers wished to dissociate themselves. Thus for instance Madison made a point of distinguishing the American republics from “the turbulent democracies of ancient Greece and modern Italy.”³¹ This allusion to the instability of Renaissance governments makes plain the continuing role of Florence in thinking about the Athenian past. In the representative principle he saw the remedy for the inherent turbulence of democracy, which, he argued, was a bad thing in ancient Athens. “In all very numerous assemblies,” he insisted, “of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates,” he maintained, “every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”³² (It is important to distinguish these concerns about group psychology from the class prejudice that rejected popular assemblies on other grounds, though there is often some overlap.) It was probably also Madison who in Federalist 63 appealed to his audience to recognize the need for a well-constructed Senate to protect the people at moments when, “stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men,” they “may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn,” and he cited Athens once more as a negative example: “What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.”³³ Similar arguments were put forward by Hamilton.³⁴ Like Madison, he coupled the chaos of ancient Greece with that of Renaissance Italy, writing in Federalist 9 that he found it “impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.”³⁵ Like Madison, too, he stressed the misunderstandings willfully engendered by monarchists who have deliberately confounded republics with democracies in order to bring disrepute on all forms of free government. In truth, he himself stands well within the tradition of those who confused the stable democracy of Athens with the various fluctuating regimes of strifetorn Florence.³⁶ As time went on, the conviction that representation would resolve the problems of ancient democracies continued, and what Hamilton praised in Federalist 9 as the new “science of politics” could be appealed to in order to demonstrate the obsolescence of classical models. Writing in 1794, Samuel Williams of New England contended that governments founded, like the American, on representation, did not admit of what the ancients called democracy any more than they admitted of monarchy or aristocracy.³⁷ Over a generation later the former president James Monroe made similar observations in his treatise The People the Sovereigns; being a comparison of the government of the United States with those of the republics which have existed before, with the causes of their decadence and fall. Published in its unfinished form in 1831, the tract bears witness to the continuing preoccupation with the potential weakness of republican government and the need citizens—indeed, presidents—of the new republic felt to respond to criticisms based on classical parallels. That Monroe should have felt impelled to assemble such a document reveals much about the survival of traditional classical concerns in the first part of the nineteenth century. It is impossible to imagine any twentieth-century president thinking such a subject worthy of attention—not even Woodrow Wilson, who had taught ancient history and would have been perfectly capable of putting together a book of this kind. A deep chasm divides The People the Sovereigns from Profiles in Courage.

The aversion of the Founding Fathers to Athenian government is articulated nowhere more fully than in the writings of John Adams, which make plain that Adams had a large amount of enthusiasm for a small amount of democracy. If there is one lesson that leaps from the pages of history, Adams argued, it is the necessity for a separation of powers. Thucydides, Adams claimed, would have been more optimistic about the potential for stability in human governance had he known about the separation of powers; and recollection of the miseries of Greece would lead citizens of the eighteenth century to prize the checks and balances of free government and even of contemporary aristocracies.³⁸ Like others before him, Adams connected the sins of the Athenians with those of the Florentines, to whose sad history, “full of lessons of wisdom, extremely to our purpose,” he devoted a sizable chunk of his long treatise on government, The Defence of the Constitutions of the United States (1787).³⁹ Like Athens, Florence demonstrated to Adams the pitfalls of inadequately mixed constitutions, what he called “All Authority in one Centre.” Adams considered democratic governments to be the most turbulent and unstable of all unmixed constitutions, and he viewed the reforms of Solon— about which he made a number of factual errors—to be the first step in the destruction of Athens.⁴⁰ Solon, Adams wrote, “put all power into hands the least capable of properly using it.”⁴¹ Though Solon meant well and intended the boule and the Council of the Areopagus as checks on the democracy, nonetheless “factious demagogues” often encouraged the demos to headstrong self-assertion, and the subsequent development of the government of Athens led Adams to inquire, in a sentence borrowed from Rollin that stands alone as a paragraph,

“Is this government, or the waves of the sea?”⁴²

Adams dismissed Cleisthenes as a man of no particular talent and censured Aristides for throwing open the archonship to the poor.⁴³ Not surprisingly, he had no use for ostracism.⁴⁴

Adams’s strictures on Aristides appear in his prolonged and vitriolic attack (in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States) on Marchamont Nedham, of all people, whose defense of free governments in The Excellencie of a Free State had particularly aroused Adams’s spleen. Adams devoted many pages to refuting Nedham’s theories about government in general and Athens in particular, considering Nedham’s confidence in the people seriously misplaced and seeing in popular sovereignty an alarming threat to the sanctity of property. Property, Adams maintained, “is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty,” and consequently majority rule had to be rejected as it would entail “the eight or nine millions who have no property … usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have.” Debts, he claims,

would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.⁴⁵

Adams’s eye was caught by Nedham’s unusual claim that Athenian democratic leaders were “adorned with such governors as gave themselves up to a serious, abstemious, and severe course of life.” No democracy, Adams maintains, is conspicuous for these qualities, least of all Athens, where “on the contrary, from the first to the last moment of her democratical constitution, levity, gayety, inconstancy, dissipation, intemperance, debauchery, and a dissolution of manners, were the prevailing character of the whole nation.”⁴⁶

Adams’s most dramatic indictment of the Athenian state, however, comes in his treatment of the Thirty Tyrants, for he argues that what undid the Thirty was the quintessentially Athenian nature of their power, which was unchecked. Where other authors have contrasted the bloody executions of the Thirty with the comparatively peaceful conduct of the democracy as a whole, Adams contrasts them rather with the conduct of the Spartans, who, he claims, put to death fewer Athenians in a war of thirty years than the Thirty did in eight months of peace, and sees in them not a stark contrast with the democracy but rather its natural outgrowth. Historians, he contends, are wrong to be taken aback at the conduct of the Thirty, when in truth every unchecked assembly in Athens had been equally tyrannical. The astonishment, he concludes, “ought to be that there is one sensible man left in the world who can still entertain an esteem, or any other sentiment than abhorrence, for a government in a single assembly.”⁴⁷ The conviction of Plato and Aristotle that tyranny and democracy were intimately connected also appeared in Adams’s interpretation of Florentine history, where he contended that the abuses of Walter, the Duke of Athens, during his rule over Florence were “as wild, cruel and mad as all other tyrannies have been which were created on the ruins of a republic.” The Florentines, he argued, had no constitution to protect their rights, no rule by law, but “were slaves to every freak and passion, every party and faction, every aspiring or disappointed noble.”⁴⁸ He was probably right about Florence, but this did not make him right about Athens.

Adams spoke for most of his countrymen when he urged the principles of representation and of the separation of powers. Americans of both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries took a great deal of pleasure in Aristotle’s Politics, which served for many decades as sacred writings in the cult of mixed government.⁴⁹ John Corbin maintained in a backward glance at eighteenth-century ideology that “the theory of our Constitution derives from Aristotle, and was put into successful practice in ancient Rome, in eighteenth-century England, and in our early state constitutions, before it was given its most perfect embodiment by the Convention of 1787.”⁵⁰ Auxiliary texts from antiquity were provided by Cicero and Polybius, whose preference for mixed government over democracy informed their political writings, and altogether founders as different in outlook as Hamilton and Madison found their concerns foreshadowed in classical writers and agreed that by the use of representation and the institution of checks and balances America could avoid the mistakes of the Athenians. Similar ideas, of course, had been derived from more recent texts such as Montesquieu’s revered Spirit of Laws, whose influence in America was enormous.⁵¹

Altogether America’s founders were deeply ambivalent about the utility of classical history in general and Athenian history in particular. In the end, not a single Greek institution was incorporated into the Constitution drawn up by the Federal Convention of 1787. The Romans fared somewhat better, most obviously in the shaping—and naming—of the Senate and in the adoption of Roman mottos and catchwords such as E pluribus unum and Novus Ordo Saeclorum; in view of the oligarchic bent of republicanism in ancient Italy, this is no surprise. Despite the rejection of Athenian-style democracy, the classical ideal of republican government served as an important legitimizing tool for American constitutionalists seeking to demonstrate the ancient pedigree of accountable and nonmonarchic governments. Even Adams himself included a paean to the animating force of classical republicanism in a letter he wrote from Holland to Lafayette in 1782. “I have the honor and consolation,” he declared,

to be a republican on principle; that is to say, I esteem that form of government the best of which human nature is capable. Almost every thing that is estimable in civil life has originated under such governments. Two republican powers, Athens and Rome, have done more honor to our species than all the rest of it. A new country can be planted only by such a government. America would at this moment have been a howling wilderness inhabited only by bears and savages, without such forms of government; and it would again become a wilderness under any other.⁵²

(He goes on to underline his veneration for the French monarch and to stress that he is “not a king-killer, king-hater or king-despiser.”) Skepticism about the value of classical history except as a source of admonitory counterexamples continued after the adoption of the constitution, however, and Jefferson, though an ardent champion of the classics and the author of a letter advising a young man that the Greek and Roman historians were eminently worthy of study in the original languages, in time concluded that classical history had little to teach modern Americans.⁵³ In this dichotomy he echoed the ambivalence of Franklin, who had seen moral value in the study of the classics in general but judged the study of ancient history in particular at worst distracting and at best irrelevant. Perhaps the most striking example of the distinction in usefulness between classical ideals and ancient history is to be found in the correspondence of Washington’s friend Robert Morris. A proud citizen of the eighteenth century, Morris’s correspondent General Charles Lee proclaimed, “I have ever from the first time I read Plutarch, been an Enthusiastick for … liberty in a republican garb,” for indeed, he goes on, it is natural for a young person “whose chief companions are the Greek and Roman Historians and Orators to be dazzled with the splendid picture.” Alas, however, the perfect liberty of antiquity depended on a degree of virtue lacking in modern individuals, a “public and patriotick spirit reigning in the breast of evry [sic] individual superseding all private considerations,” for it was this spirit alone that preserved the classical states, and emphatically not their constitutions, which were hopelessly inadequate. Not surprisingly, he cites Montesquieu later in his letter. Classical governments, he concludes, were “defective to absurdity—it was virtue alone that supported ’em.”⁵⁴ The unpopularity of the Athenian democracy in eighteenth-century America is revealed as well in the striking failure of the anti-Federalists to appeal to the Athenian example. Though on the whole they were much more democratically inclined than their Federalist opponents—the writer known as “Philadelphiensis” contending that “America under [a government] purely democratical, would be rendered the happiest and most powerful nation in the universe”—still the handful of references they made to classical Athens were either negative or neutral.⁵⁵

The suspicion that the tiny, factious republics of Greece had little to teach modern Americans gathered force as the new nation prospered. Whereas some contrasted the merit of classical ideals with the irrelevance of ancient history, others rejected classical ideology itself, and the gloomy prognostications of John Wilson and Jonathan Boucher about the moral bankruptcy of the classics found a somewhat later analogue in the Advice to the Privileged Orders of Joel Barlow, author of the American epic the Columbiad. Writing in 1792, Barlow commended his fellow-citizens for a commitment to egalitarian principles inconceivable in ancient—or modern—Europe. Equality, he wrote, is so fundamentally alien to most people’s ways of thinking that Europeans of the revolutionary era had been astonished at Washington’s willingness to lay down his arms once the crisis had passed; remembering the classical examples of Rome and of Athens as well as the modern example of Cromwell, they had failed to understand that no American would have dared do otherwise. The habits of egalitarian thinking, he contended, “are deep-rooted ones,” which “almost change the moral nature of man”; and they are “principles as much unknown to the ancient republics as to the modern monarchies of Europe.”⁵⁶

The American foundation would radically alter the connotations of democracy. Three very different men—Hamilton, Adams, and Madison—recoiled with force from the Athenian example and from the notion of direct democracy with which it was inextricably associated. By co-opting republican principles for liberal ends, Madison sought to detach the democratic impulses from republicanism; but he also engineered in his writings a deliberate redefinition of terms whereby an aristocratic theory of politics was couched in sufficiently democratic language that the founders would soon be claimed as the authors of American democracy by men whose beliefs were very different.⁵⁷ In 1816 Jefferson was able to proclaim, “We in America are self-consciously … democrats.”⁵⁸ This new and more comfortable thinking about democracy had been made possible by the frequent reiteration in the Federalist of the alternatively destructive or irrelevant nature of the Athenian experiment; in turn it would make possible the far more enthusiastic picture of Athenian democracy that emerged in the nineteenth century in both Europe and America. In the 1930s, by which time democracy had firmly entrenched itself in American ideology (and propaganda), John Dewey identified the utility of historical knowledge as its capacity to provide us with “a lever for moving the present into a certain kind of future.”⁵⁹ The future into which Madison and his cohorts moved their present was indeed in significant part facilitated by the ways in which they understood and deployed the Athenian example, but I suspect Dewey had something rather different in mind. The misinterpretation of history can be as profitable as its more thoughtful understanding, but Dewey seems to have posited the possibility of gaining true knowledge of the past.

There is no reason to believe that Americans confronting a frontier situation with the intellectual equipment of Englishmen formed their ideas about politics from reading about ancient Greece. The bulk of their thinking was surely a product of their own life experiences and the traditions they had absorbed from European writers. One such writer was Locke, who had ignored classical antiquity. Another was Hume, who decried Athenian slaveholding and imperialism and labeled Athenian democracy “such a tumultuary government as we can scarce form a notion of in the present age.”⁶⁰ A third was Montesquieu, who saw the little republics of antiquity as grounded in virtue and was convinced that a large, modern, commercial republic was a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, classical analogies could be, and were, used to legitimize just about anything. The energy men like Hamilton, Adams, and Madison devoted to reiterating the inadequacy of direct democracy was remarkable in view of the fact that no nation had tried it for over two thousand years—and in view of the belief frequently expressed by Hamilton and Madison that a new political science had redefined parameters so as to render classical schemata obsolete. Though they admired Montesquieu in many respects, it was crucial to refute him in the matter of the workability of large republics, and appeals to improvements in the science of politics could do just that. Where Jonathan Maxcy argued that, a fortiori, men fortified by “the present advanced state of the science of government” should find it easy to reject an idea that even “the example of all the ancient independent republics reprobates, as the fruitful source of division, violence, and destruction,” Madison went further and contended that this new science made it possible to reject the outmoded formulas of earlier days.⁶¹ As Sheldon Wolin has observed, Madison managed to “historicize democracy” as the product of a particular age now gone by, and by presenting the dynamics of representative government in “abstract, quasi-scientific language” to elevate Federalist notions about central powers “to an objective plane where The Federalist’s teaching about them could appear axiomatic rather than contestable.”⁶² The same pretensions to science and objectivity, I would suggest, had characterized the most influential detractors of Athenian government, Plato and Aristotle, who chose to discuss democracy in the abstract while living in the most vibrant democracy in existence.

By eighteenth-century standards, Madison, at least, was no snob. Yet he concurred with Adams and Hamilton in their resounding rejection of direct popular control of government policy. In part, his beliefs seem plainly to have been derived from Montesquieu and the English republicans, who believed that a separation of powers offered the people an indispensable check on its own passions; and his contention that an assembly would still be a mob even were every individual voter a Socrates argues against class prejudice as the source of his concern. He writes at length about the psychology of factions in a way that does not plainly identify the poor as more likely than the rich to play the villains.⁶³ In part, however, his orientation must be traced to his experience of uneducated men in the Virginia legislature, where he served from 1784 to 1787, and to his preoccupation with the sanctity of private property, which he defends earnestly in his Federalist 10 against the potential attacks of democratic leaders.

The relentless insistence that the government of Athens offered no salutary example for the eighteenth century was noticeable on both sides of the Atlantic as well as on both sides of the channel, but the tone of America’s founders was decidedly different from that of their European contemporaries. What concerned Athens’s European detractors from Rousseau to Mably to Jean-Jacques Barthélemy to Edward Wortley Montagu to William Young was the supposed decadence that attended on the fervid growth of commercial ambition. Some decried the element of selfish competitiveness while others lamented the corrupting effects of luxury. Altogether Athens was judged to have been wanting in that backbone of the state, civic virtue. The picture Americans had of classical Athens was similar, but they focused on different issues. Though civic virtue still held interest, it was approached with a little more sophistication, a development inevitable in a civilization that, while still greatly dependent on agriculture, nonetheless was heavily invested (in every sense) in commerce. A good number of Americans who were concerned that government was becoming too big and European decadence oozing across the Atlantic did not belong to the literate class anyhow. Sparta was rarely held up as a viable model; though Hamilton in the first Continentalist had found it less repulsive than other Greek states, in Federalist 6 he labeled it “little better than a well-regulated camp.”⁶⁴ On the whole eighteenth-century Americans were less drawn to the familiar European clichés about Spartan virtue versus Athenian vice (though they were not without concern about heathen ignorance versus Christian wisdom); where luxurious Athens was censured, as by Zephaniah Moore and Mercy Warren, frugal Sparta was not dragged in as a foil. For the kinds of late eighteenth-century Americans who left writings behind them, the issues seem to have been promoting stability, limiting faction, and putting the brakes on agitation for agrarian reform. Such agitation was precisely the sort of activity people of property associated with mobs.

The fear of the mob in American politics no doubt had something to do with the painful experience of Shays’s Rebellion, which boasted some nine thousand men in arms seeking to close down courthouses in western Massachusetts to enable poor farmers to escape paying their debts, and with the intermittent cries for relief coming from debtors elsewhere. It is important to notice that Madison’s exhortation to representative institutions in Federalist 10 was supported by intimations that direct democracy might lead to the implementation of “wicked” projects such as a “rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property.”⁶⁵ These farmers’ concerns were not entirely different from those of their ancient counterparts; in particular they were associated with seditious agrarian reformers at Rome, where the Gracchi had worked for the breakup of huge landed estates and the rebels whom Cicero put to death in 63 B.C. had wanted cancellation of debts. Solon had in truth altered the currency at Athens to facilitate trade, and, more famously, had canceled debts. He had most emphatically, however, not redistributed land as his more indigent supporters had hoped he might, and in reality Athenian jurors had regularly to swear that they would not tamper with private property. Despite this important Athenian principle, however—and no doubt because of some nasty verdicts in fourth-century trials in which the jury was swayed by the prospect of getting hold of the accused’s wealth for the state—America’s founders tumbled comfortably into the tradition that billed the Athenian demos as the enemy of property and of proper repayment of debt. In truth, not only were Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries averse to redistributing land and canceling debts; the fact was that no such political movement in Europe or America had achieved the slightest success. Even the English Levellers of the seventeenth century, associated by their enemies with precisely such programs, in actuality limited their aims to political, not economic, equality. The redistribution of land would have to wait for the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century.

Despite all this, a mixture of recent and long-standing anxieties drew the founders comfortably into the venerable European tradition that discounted the Athenian achievement and focused instead on the shortcomings of majority rule—some real, some invented. Though the Athenians could be productively paraded as warnings to sensible men, however, Americans’ concerns were plainly rooted in more recent developments. In part they arose from the immediate past—the issues they saw underlying Shays’s rebellion, for example—and in part in the intermediate past: the turbulence of Renaissance Italy, for instance, and the rights of Englishmen.⁶⁶ There is reason to believe that Jefferson, absent from the Constitutional Convention, devoted some of his time in Paris to damage control, busily writing home that the rebellion of Shays had not drawn much attention in Europe and had not damaged the republican cause in European eyes: J. S. McClelland in his study of crowd theory has suggested that one of Jefferson’s motives for playing the rebellion down was that he thought that the rebellion was being “played up for the benefit of the Founding Fathers at Philadelphia.”⁶⁷ The propaganda value of history is not limited to exempla from antiquity.

Much can be learned about what political science meant to America’s founders and framers from what they did not discuss when they wrote about Athens. Two crucial aspects of Athenian democracy were routinely ignored in eighteenth-century America: universal adult male suffrage among citizens, and the important extrapolitical structures that gave Athenian democracy much of its vitality and indeed made it possible.

To explain the unwisdom of distributing the franchise among all citizens would raise awkward questions that many American political theorists preferred to avoid discussing in a public forum. Instead, therefore, when direct democracy formed the subject of discussion, the emphasis was on “direct” and not on “democracy,” with the result that democracy could be billed not as majority rule but as chaos, and tricky questions about what made men of property better decision-makers than the landless could be avoided.⁶⁸ Because direct political power had not been gathered in the hands of (male) citizens since classical times, people of property tended to assume that the impotent rage of disfranchised crowds would be only more dangerous should the ballot be placed in such scruffy fingers. The idea that the crowd would be less turbulent were it permitted to debate and legislate rarely surfaced, and when it did, the notion of the “turbulence” of Athenian democracy could be trotted out as proof of the impossibility of enfranchising the masses. Americans of the late eighteenth century actually did have evidence that chaos and violence were not the inevitable hallmark of popular bodies; though some recoiled from both the legislative decisions of broadly based state legislatures and from the Cleonesque manners of some elected representatives, meetings were plainly not of the order of riots and tumults. But ideas firmly held in a long tradition are not easily dislodged, and so on top of the accusations of imprudence constantly lodged against the Athenians there had come a new preoccupation with instability. It is important to notice that observers of Greek politics like Thucydides, Xenophon, the Old Oligarch and Isocrates focused on the crassness of the ordinary citizen and his incapacity for prudent decision making; the notion of the instability of democracy derived in large part first from the high-flown theoretical constructs of Plato and Aristotle (and to some extent from the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia with its supposed eleven constitutions) and next from conflation with Renaissance Florence. It was primarily in the sixteenth century that instability became a key element in the hostile assessment of Athenian democracy rather than just one drawback among many. Inevitably, however, the connection between democracy and disorder was intensified in people’s minds by the developments that followed shortly in France.

The same revolution, however, that would send Britons scurrying to books on Greek history that might assist them in belaboring the sins of democracy also focused attention on the role of the civic festival as an important building block of solidarity, virtue, and patriotism among citizens. Within a generation, Macaulay would exalt the education that civic life afforded in classical Athens and Hegel would stress the importance of Athenian festivals in fostering communal values. This concern was conspicuously lacking in writing about Athens in eighteenth-century America, as it had been missing from such writing during the centuries that had gone before. Its absence is more significant, however, in the special context in which the founders were examining the Athenian state—as a potential model for a daring enterprise of their own, a model whose rejection they needed to justify and explain. Given their passionate concern with the welfare of their fledgling nation, the indifference to the kind of civic education offered by everyday life in classical Athens takes on special meaning. To the condemnation of the demos and its fickleness in Thucydides and Plutarch, to the antidemocratic constructs of Plato and Aristotle, to the carping of the Old Oligarch and the disturbing story of Socrates’ death, the founders in their search for a useful picture of Athenian democracy would have needed to add the writings of the tragedians and the astonishing story of how these remarkable national treasures functioned as a shared civic heritage—how ordinary citizens (men and to some degree women as well) had the patience and motivation to engage the most painful issues of human existence, and how this engagement contributed to their competence as judges and framers of policy. On the whole, however, the founders showed little interest in extraconstitutional civic structures in general or in Attic tragedy in particular, and the new political “science” mislaid art. This is not entirely surprising in light of the positions taken by Plato and Aristotle, the founders’ ancestors in scientific political inquiry. Plato had banished the poets from the Republic; Aristotle in the Poetics had ignored the democratic roots of tragedy or its role in fostering community and dialogue of a high caliber, and his Politics had identified two different kinds of mousike, a challenging one for the class of serious political men and one for the lower orders of society that was merely entertaining and not designed to inculcate growth. The founders’ writings show no curiosity about the extraordinary training for political decision-making that was afforded in the nature of civic life at Athens. Americans of the late eighteenth century were not indifferent to education. They took pride in the fact that literacy was high among whites in the American colonies at the time of the revolution—perhaps as high in some areas as 90 percent among adult males—and writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush were all committed to education as one of the bulwarks of the new nation. Its connection with free political institutions was not ignored. Noah Webster proclaimed that “while property is considered as the basis of the freedom of the American yeomanry, there are other auxiliary supports; among which is the information of the people. In no country is education so general—in no country, have the body of the people such a knowledge of the rights of man and of the principles of government. This knowledge,” he proclaimed, “joined with a keen sense of liberty and a watchful jealousy, will guard our institutions.”⁶⁹ But the leap to understanding what had made Athens work was not made; and it could be argued too that “knowledge” is something quite different from what participation in the assemblies and the theatrical festivals gave the Athenians. Much can be learned about late eighteenth-century American thinking about education from Samuel Knox’s 1799 prizewinning essay on education for Americans. Presumably because of its reputation for cultivation and its role as a university city in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Knox inferred that Athens provided public education to its citizens, something that the evidence suggests is not true. What Athens did provide was an extraordinarily active civic life that included attendance at extremely demanding tragic dramas that examined the most difficult questions facing humans. But Knox dismissed tragedy in his treatise on education; after encouraging the reading of Rollin’s insipid Ancient History and the uninspired Antiquities of Potter—both common items in early American libraries—and of some Virgil, Theocritus, Hesiod, Anacreon, Pindar, and Horace, he suggests that “in order also to be acquainted with the state of dramatic poetry among the ancients, one or two of the most celebrated performances in each language might be read, but it does not appear that a long attention to that species of composition would be either proper or improving.”⁷⁰

Much of the Americans’ difficulties with the Athenians lay in their inability to distance themselves from the question whether Athenian democracy should be resurrected in toto in the New World. To dwell constantly on this concern inevitably interfered with a thoughtful examination of the Athenian democracy. Even within the parameters inside which they were operating, however, Americans of the founding era asked limited questions of Greek history. They did not ask how best they might emulate the civilization that had produced the plays of Sophocles or the Zeus of Phidias, because the intensity of their fears stood in the way of their seeing a dynamic connection between Athenian democracy and Athenian creativity; they did not read the history of Greece by Lysias or Demosthenes’ essays on government, for no such texts had been written. What they found in their reading was a composite picture built up over the centuries into which little critical or creative thought had been put, and the end product rendered by this tedious process taught the vices of Greek democracy alongside the virtues of a sort of bland, generic republicanism. The first group to enjoy the benefit of the moralizing narrative histories of antiquity composed in eighteenth-century Britain and France, America’s founders chose not to question the account of Athens’ history they found there and looked to the end of the “story” for an assessment of the Athenian achievement. Examining the past with an eye to the present, they did not examine it very much at all. It would be many generations before Americans could explore classical history in a context at least partially set apart from the challenges of their own day. Monroe’s ponderous monograph on ancient governments focused obsessively on the superiority of the constitution of the United States to those of the classical republics, and the Greek portions of Thomas Dew’s 1853 Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations frequently took the form of object lessons for modern Americans. Ironically, indeed, the most positive reaction to classical Athens in America made its appearance in an exceedingly presentist context: the greatest excitement generated by the history of Athens in America prior to the twentieth century came when Dew joined others like Calhoun, Holmes, and Fitzhugh in adducing the Athenian example in support of the merits of slavery.

REVOLUTION AND NOSTALGIA

Americans could, and did, hark back to the autonomy of Greek colonies and the victory of the Greek republics over the Persian monarchy, but the relevance of Greek history to revolutionary France was less clear, and on the whole the classically minded among the French revolutionaries recurred rather to republican Rome, home of Cato and the Bruti and the seat of resistance to tyranny. In comparisons with classical Athens, the French had both more and less to fear than the Americans. The loosely federated republics that fought together against England were more nervous about taking on the instability and vulnerability to foreign aggression that seemed to them to mark the ancient Greek city-states, but the French were more sensitive about the imputation of the chaos, violence, and popular tyranny that had come to be associated with classical democracies. Predictably, some French revolutionaries looked back nostalgically to the eager civic preoccupations of the Athenians, but most rejected the Athenian model and were careful to avoid associating modern France with ancient Athens. Just as predictably, enemies of the revolution were quick to throw cold water on enthusiasm for ancient republicanism and let no opportunity slip for exposing what they believed had been the true nature of political life in the anarchic states of antiquity.⁷¹

The French revolutionaries shared with their American counterparts a desire to ground their bold new venture in classical precedent, and calls for the resurrection of ancient virtue were commonplace. Robespierre identified the Greeks as men whose republican virtues “had raised them at times above humanity” and praised the “political virtue which accomplished so many prodigies in Greece and in Rome, and which ought to produce far more astonishing ones in republican France” as the essential principle of a democratic and popular government.⁷² Saint Just proclaimed that his program offered not the happiness of Persepolis but rather that of Athens and Sparta, a universe in which “the people make the republic by the simplicity of their manners and morals.”⁷³ Certain personality types are always especially vulnerable to the values propounded by texts read in youth, and both Buzot and his companion Jeanne-Marie Roland attributed their republicanism to their childhood education in the classics. Buzot reported in his memoirs that his head and heart had been filled from an early age with Greek and Roman history and its heroes, on whose virtues he nourished himself.⁷⁴ Roland’s 1793 Mémoires tell how thirty years before, when she was nine years old, she had carried her Plutarch to church in place of a prayer book.⁷⁵ Brissot, filled from earliest youth with a desire to emulate Phocion, recalls in his Mémoires how he hid his light from his disapproving father when he stayed up through the darkness to improve his Latin.⁷⁶ The popularity of the craze for the classics is attested by the laments of the critics, such as the conservative Regnaud de Saint-Angély’s complaint of his contemporaries’ mindless admiration for antiquity and the scorn the professor Volney heaped on the revolutionaries’ enthusiasm for the ancients.⁷⁷ The Marquis de Bouille also complained of the seditious effects of the high school study of classical civilization on the revolutionary generation.⁷⁸ The concerns of these men are evocative of the earlier condemnation of the study of classical authors by Hobbes, who had targeted them as a prime source for the evolution of dangerous republican ideals. The American scholar Harold Parker has astutely uncovered a note to a 1771 school text of Nepos in which the French editor warned his readers against Nepos’s wrongheaded republicanism and cautioned them that Miltiades had sinned in plotting to preserve Greek liberty by betraying his employer, Darius.⁷⁹ It seems likely that most of the early, prerevolutionary attachment to classical antiquity took the form of wistful identification with republican heroes who operated in a universe in which renown could be achieved even by men born outside a limited circle of nobility. (Madame Roland apparently imagined that it could be achieved in antiquity by women as well, but that is another story.⁸⁰) Robespierre looked back in nostalgia to the ancient republics in which talent even without birth might lead to glory, and Marat contrasted his own day, which witnessed the rewarding of various mercenaries and sycophants by mere money, with Greece, where men like Miltiades and Thrasybulus were honored with statues, trophies, and crowns.⁸¹ Warmth for classical republicanism continued in many cases well into the revolution; Rabaut de Saint-Étienne reported with satisfaction in 1793 that his fellow-citizens took pleasure in recollecting the laws of the ancient republics and hoped that the Convention would find a means of overhauling France on “these happy models.”⁸²

The extent to which it was either possible or desirable actually to resurrect ancient institutions in modern France was the topic of considerable disagreement among the revolutionaries, and individual thinkers often changed their mind from one week to the next. Jacobins on the whole enjoyed setting up Sparta as a model; Billaud-Varenne contrasted the solidity of Sparta under the Lycurgan system with the disastrous effects of the weak and trusting Solon on Athens. Girondists sometimes rejected both Athens and Sparta, though it was the militaristic oppressor of the helots and enemy of commerce who generally bore the brunt of the attack: Vergniaud in 1793 cautioned his fellow revolutionaries against the dangers of resurrecting either Athenian softness or (a fortiori) Spartan austerity.⁸³ In many circles, however, a sentimental attachment to classical antiquity persisted, especially in Paris, where babies began to carry names like Solon, Lycurgus, Phocion, Aristides, Socrates, and—most of all—Brutus.⁸⁴ The popularity of Brutus serves as a reminder of the revolutionaries’ essentially Roman focus. Parker has assembled a catalog of citations to classical authors among the revolutionaries that makes plain the far larger role played by Roman authors than Greek in their education.⁸⁵ The Roman orientation is particularly evident in the writings of the singularly humorless and puritanical Saint Just. Nonetheless, Saint Just’s plans for overhauling French education offer striking parallels to the Spartan system, and many of the revolutionaries found the selfless and ascetic patriotism of Sparta inspirational.⁸⁶ Madame Roland’s tearful wish that she had been born a Spartan is notorious. This sort of enthusiasm had been fostered by youthful reading in Plutarch and Rousseau. Others gravitated toward Athens, a gracious society more reminiscent of the blandishments of the French capital. Comparisons of the merits of Lycurgus and of Solon were frequent, and it was in the writings of the republican journalist Camille Desmoulins that Athens figured most prominently in the revolutionary vision of France.

The belief of Marat and Robespierre that antiquity would have afforded greater scope to their talents was shared a fortiori by Desmoulins, and by and large it was Athens on which Desmoulins’s wistful eyes turned in his search for a better world. In the Athens of Desmoulins’s imagining, as Parker has written, where liberty “meant rewards for the talented” and was not at odds with gracious living, Desmoulins’s “wish for a career, a good time, and domestic joy would have been gratified.”⁸⁷ In his journal the Vieux Cordelier Desmoulins makes a point of mentioning that Solon’s (purported) enthusiasm for wine, women [sic], and song did not detract from the esteem he was accorded as a wise legislator.⁸⁸ In his fourth issue Desmoulins set up Thrasybulus as his hero and capped his call for clemency and compassion with an appeal to Athens, home of an altar to mercy and of “the most democratic people which has ever existed.”⁸⁹ Plainly these are words of praise. The next issue reprised the same theme.⁹⁰ Attacking Brissot in the sixth issue for his championship of Sparta, Desmoulins maintained that Spartan equality amounted only to equal deprivation, reassuring those who feared that republicanism would establish that Spartan austerity so dear to the likes of Mably and Rousseau that the prosperity of Athens offered clear proof that “there is nothing like republican government to foster the wealth of nations.”⁹¹ In Number Seven (and in a disjointed fragment evidently attached to Number Six) Desmoulins paints France as the modern picture of Athens but for the absolute freedom of the Athenian press, of which the impunity of Aristophanes was the unmistakable proof. It was not freedom of the press, Desmoulins insists, that killed Socrates, but rather the calumnies of Anytus and Meletus. Except for the absence of this freedom, Desmoulins sees the France of his day as a true resurrection of ancient Athens: read the three-thousand-year-old comedies of Aristophanes, he advises his readers, and you will find that across the centuries the French and the Athenians are soulmates and, indeed, contemporaries.⁹²

But Desmoulins was not representative of his compatriots, and it was not as an exemplar of liberality and gentility that Athens found her niche in revolutionary literature but rather as the site of numerous inspirational martyrdoms. Desmoulins’s hero had been Thrasybulus, but his contemporaries gravitated instead to Aristides, Socrates, and Phocion. Naturally the exiles and executions of such men reflected badly on the Athenian state, and identification with these heroes implied no endorsement of Athenian government. Robespierre cast himself as one of those unappreciated statesmen who, like Phocion, measured the degree of their virtue by that of their persecution, and he was quick to identify himself with Aristides as well.⁹³ Predictably, Girondists and other imminent victims of the guillotine awaiting their fate in jail positively wallowed in identification with classical republican martyrs. Le Bon, writing from prison to his wife, suggested that she “read ancient history and see how all the useful men were, one after the other, repaid with ingratitude,” and he consoled himself with the belief that such a death “is the most glorious which man can desire.”⁹⁴ Others were more specific: Buzot identified himself and his friends with Socrates, Aristides, Phocion, Demosthenes, and Themistocles; Brissot congratulated himself on sharing the fate of Phocion; Gensonne and Dufriche-Valazé appealed to the models of Phocion and Socrates; and Lasource on hearing himself condemned to death quoted Phocion’s parting shot—that he was dying when the people had lost their reason, but his attackers would die when they recovered it.⁹⁵ The preoccupation with dying well goes some way to explain the revolutionaries’ enthusiasm for Sparta and Rome. Chateaubriand, visiting the ruins of Greece in 1806, expressed the wish to have died with Leonidas and lived with Pericles; for those to whom a martyred death was a priority, only disaffected and ultimately antidemocratic Athenians could serve as role models.⁹⁶ Nobody yearned to die like Pericles.

The romantic glorification of Athenian martyrs by their Girondist counterparts was not the only possible perspective on the misfortunes of Athens’s great men. Those who were not republicans placed more emphasis on the injustice and incompetence of the people than on the heroism of their victims. Arguing in 1789 that liberty depended on the continuation of the monarchy, Mounier adduced the governments of antiquity as evidence that the liberty of republics was illusory. The tyranny of a multitude, he argued, is more pernicious than that of an individual precisely in its failure to inspire the same heroic resistance. What ancient states enjoyed was the anarchy of license, not the blessings of liberty. Neither Greece nor Rome knew the essential principles of the separation of powers or of representation. (Because of its incorporation of the representative principle Mounier found the Unites States to be the best constituted of the ancient and modern republics.) Despite all the “sophisms of those who adulate the Greeks and Romans,” Mounier concluded, the real state of affairs in antiquity was pitiful.⁹⁷ In February of 1790, Montlosier, arguing that what the French needed was “liberty, a constitution and a king,” complained of the leveling tendency at Athens, where no house and no individual were permitted to be more glorious than any other, and decried the exile, proscription, and death with which Athens rewarded her benefactors.⁹⁸

The reactionary Cazalès adopted a similar line of argument the following summer in opposing the election of judges by the people. Admonishing his audience that “the past is the school of the present,” Cazalès cited the examples of Socrates, Lycurgus, Aristides, and Solon [sic], all of whom were “immolated by the people,” in warning his compatriots of the “errors and violence” of the masses and the “inconveniences that attend on popular government.”⁹⁹ A few days later Count Clermont-Tonnerre recurred to the theme of the sophistries that defended the policies of ancient states. Arguing that the right of making war and peace should remain with the King, Clermont-Tonnerre identified “sophism” as the guiding principle in decisions of war and peace in republican Rome and sought an equitable system to prevent France from “falling into democracy.” Among ancient and modern republics that suffered reverses as a result of having decisions of war and peace deliberated in open assembly, he gave pride of place to the Athenians’ failure to mobilize against Macedon.¹⁰⁰

Athens, then, served as a negative example to French conservatives and was largely avoided by staunch republicans except as the instrument of the martyrdom of their heroes; most republicans who wished to be transported back to Athens wished it so that they might glory in being mistreated. For all Desmoulins’s dreamy nostalgia, Athenian institutions were not resurrected; Rouzet, a representative of the Haute-Garonne, wanted an areopagite council and ostracism (as well as ephors), but nobody listened; in his history of Greece the distinguished twentieth-century historian Gustave Glotz made implicit comparisons with the creation of Departments in France during the revolution with the demes, trittyes, and tribes of Cleisthenes, but, as Vidal-Naquet has pointed out, the analogy seems to have escaped the revolutionaries themselves, who had little knowledge of Cleisthenes or his work.¹⁰¹

. . . . .

In the intellectual and political tumult that surrounded the revolution in France, every possible opinion about antiquity was voiced at some time, often with considerable passion. In the last analysis, however, what appealed to those who advocated the emulation of antiquity was not classical government per se but rather the outlook on life and the societal and educational institutions that had made ancient governments workable. In the vast literature on education produced during the revolutionary era, for example, much care was taken to determine what festivals, competitions, and other communal experiences might best transplant ancient virtues to modern France.¹⁰² In this respect the French revolutionaries differed from the American founding fathers, a far more peaceable and harmonious lot who had the leisure to frame a constitution under more auspicious conditions than their French successors were to enjoy, and whose disputes over questions of government were by comparison relaxed and amicable. For the Americans, the constitution was the primary issue in the examination of the ancient republics, while the French revolutionaries were more concerned with the regeneration of ancient virtue. It is interesting to notice that the revolution in America had not on the whole persuaded the French of the viability of classical models of government. Rather, the employment of both the federative and, most dramatically, the representative principle had pointed up the weaknesses of ancient governments and opened up a bright new future for republicanism. It had been the belief of Montesquieu that although ancient republicanism had fostered, and been fostered by, the virtue of citizens, nonetheless republican government was impossible in a large state. Now, France was a very large state. Followers of Montesquieu’s principles, therefore—and there were many—had yearned for the simple virtues of the ancients without wishing to transplant any of the organs of ancient government. But the revolution in America had suggested that it might be possible to have the same virtues with new and improved organs. Far from causing the stock of the ancient states to rise, the founding of the American republic prompted invidious comparisons between the successful new republic across the Atlantic and the defunct ones in ancient Europe. To be sure, some, like Chastellux, praised the Americans by comparing them to the Greeks and Romans; but Brissot promptly took Chastellux to task for failing to see that the Americans had in fact succeeded where the ancients had fallen short, and Condorcet concluded that the American state was far superior to the classical republics.¹⁰³ The revolution in France, following upon that in America, did much to blunt the reformers’ nostalgia for antiquity, refuting as it did the belief that modern life offered no scope to men (and women) of talent and conviction. Already in 1790 Desmoulins compared the French revolutionaries favorably with the Greeks and the Romans, concluding that nothing in past history had so honored any people as the revolution had honored its authors.¹⁰⁴ Even those who, like Jeanne-Marie Roland, avoided invidious comparisons reported that they no longer had any reason to envy the ancient republics, as they were being “enlightened by a purer day.”¹⁰⁵

The far greater promise afforded by the modern world in comparison with antiquity was also developed in scholarly and pedagogical circles. The most vehement champion of contemporary France over Greece and Rome was the polymath and orientalist Volney, who forcefully denounced the desire to recast the modern world according to classical specifications.¹⁰⁶ In his history lectures delivered at the École Normale and published in 1795, Volney complained bitterly of his contemporaries’ excessive reverence for antiquity. “We scold Jews,” he wrote, “for their superstitious worship, yet we are fallen into a no less superstitious worship of the Romans and the Greeks; where our ancestors swore by Jerusalem and the Bible, we swear by Athens and Livy.”¹⁰⁷ What Volney finds astonishing about this new religion is that its apostles have so little understanding of the creed they are preaching and do not recognize that the ancient states provided no admirable model of liberty. He expatiates at length on the brutality of Greek slavery in general and helotry in particular. For Volney, oppression and butchery abroad and tyranny and faction at home characterized the glory that was Greece. Volney dismisses the Greek states as models for France on grounds of both irrelevance and turpitude. The size of France, he argues, should alone preclude meaningful comparison with the Greek world. Nor is any analogy possible between the French, for whom fifteen centuries of friction have only produced increasing unity, and the divided savages and bandits of Greece.

Volney goes on, however, to reject the Greek models on other grounds as well, complaining that his contemporaries, seduced by Athens’s artistic achievements, have lost sight of the key role played by her great monuments in her eventual collapse. These very temples and public buildings, he argues, were the first cause of Athens’s ruin and the first symptom of her decadence, as the rapine and extortion that had made them possible sparked the defection of her allies and the jealousy and cupidity of her enemies. Volney compares the needless luxury entailed in Athens’s building programs with the Louvre, Versailles, and other construction projects in contemporary France that forced the increase of taxes and placed an alarming strain on the treasury. Learning, Volney concluded, is the prerequisite of progress, and by teaching the moral, spiritual, and political bankruptcy of Greece he hoped to liberate his countrymen from the adulation of antiquity and encourage them to see that their own age—an age that had discovered, among other things, the principle of representation—had the opportunity for a future far more glorious than the Greek past.

Not surprisingly, French conservatives such as the ultraroyalists who despised republicanism ancient and modern were not converted to its cause by the abolition of the monarchy in France, a development that served only to intensify the hostility of such men to Athens. One of the fiercest and most eloquent of the ultraroyalists, Count de Bonald, included in his Theories of Political and Religious Power in Civil Society, Demonstrated through Reason and through History a sweeping attack on the Greeks in general (whom he labeled “degenerate Egyptians”) and Athens in particular.¹⁰⁸ In ancient Greece, a terrible place where the separation of powers was unknown, the absence of a general will led to the ascendancy of the individual wills of particular legislators and fostered a multiplicity of godless and fluctuating ambitions that made any concerted effort impossible. De Bonald reproaches the wrongheaded writers who have failed to see that the republican Greeks defeated the monarchic Persians only because of superior military discipline and the desperate determination to survive.¹⁰⁹ Like Filmer and assorted thinkers of the Renaissance, De Bonald identifies monarchy with the eternal and republicanism with the ephemeral. In republics, he contends, the present is all, everything that is eternal is called into question, doubted, and the very existence of God denied, whereas “monarchy, like religion, eternalizes everything.” An examination of human history, De Bonald concludes, has demonstrated to him the truth that atheism, materialism, and republicanism all go hand in hand.¹¹⁰

THE BRITISH BACKLASH

The revolutions in America and France also inspired monarchists of other nationalities to warn their countrymen against trying the experiment at home. The anxiety was most keenly felt in England, and the reaction was discernible soon after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. In his 1778 edition of Lysias and Isocrates, John Gillies, the Scottish historian to the king, warned dissidents who, ignoring the sad history of Greece, wished to “set on foot a republican confederacy” to tremble “at the prospect of those calamities, which, should their designs be carried into execution, they must both inflict and suffer.”¹¹¹ Gillies’s 1786 History of Ancient Greece also served as a vehicle to convey to readers the evils of nonmonarchic government. Greek history, Gillies announced in his dedicatory epistle to the king, by “describing the incurable evils inherent in every form of Republican policy,” evinces the inestimable benefits to liberty from the “lawful dominion of hereditary Kings,” and therefore may with singular propriety be offered to George III as sovereign of the most free nation on earth.

Not surprisingly, Gillies presents the story of Athens as the history of “a wild and capricious democracy” in which an unbridled mob interacted with a series of worthless demagogues from Ephialtes to Eubulus.¹¹² Gillies is not content to let his readers draw their own conclusions about the evils of democratic government; he states plainly that democracy in general is “a fierce and licentious form of government” with “incurable defects” and a “tyrannical spirit.”¹¹³ Frequent references to the character flaws of the poor with their “gross appetites” make plain the source of Gillies’s objection to popular sovereignty.¹¹⁴ In ancient times, he explains, as in modern, “the corrupt taste of the licentious vulgar was ever at variance with the discerning judgment of the wise and virtuous.”¹¹⁵

Developments in America also led Josiah Tucker to crystallize his thinking about government in his 1781 Treatise concerning Civil Government, but the nature of Tucker’s revulsion for Athens was different from Gillies’s. Though Tucker resembled Gillies in his desire to rouse in “every true Friend to Liberty an Abhorrence of the Idea of an Athenian Common-wealth,” he alternately censured Athens for being a flagrant democracy and mocked her as a closet aristocracy.¹¹⁶ An attack on the principles of Locke and their recent application in America, Tucker’s treatise warns potential republicans in England that “this very Argument of unalienable Rights, weak and trifling as it is, may nevertheless become a formidable Weapon, in the Hands of desperate Catalinarian Men, for establishing a real and cruel Tyranny of their own (according to the Example which the American Rebels have already set) instead of that harmless, imaginary Tyranny, of which they so bitterly complain at present.”¹¹⁷ Though Tucker censures all forms of unmixed government—absolute monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, and democracy—he is particularly concerned to caution his readers about government by the “Caprice and Humour of the giddy Populace.”¹¹⁸ Tucker makes clear that it was experience rather than scholarship that led him to reject democracy. In a footnote to his section on comparative government he reports that he is sorry to say that in his fifty years as an observer of government, he “hardly ever knew an unpopular Measure to be in itself a bad one, or a popular one to be truly salutary,” and he lists numerous helpful measures for the development of commerce that were universally opposed by the English people.¹¹⁹ Scant indeed, he laments, “must the Pittance of Power be, which results from the Union of 40, 50 or even 100 Savages, issuing forth from their Dens and Caverns, and assembled together for the first Time, in order to constitute a Body Politic” in the form of an “Insect Commonwealth,” that “Grub of a free, equal and Sovereign Republic” that is “a reptile, democratical Institution.”

It is noteworthy that Tucker felt some need to assure his readers that he was not, in fact, attacking classical governments. Some admirers of antiquity, he conjectures, will say, “What? Do you compare the famous republics of Greece and Rome to Insects, Grubs, and Reptiles?” To this “smart Objection” Tucker has “the following Reply to make: that in ancient republics by far the majority of the populace was excluded from political privilege, so that one cannot in fairness call them democracies”; insofar as they were democratic, however, they were indeed to be excoriated.¹²⁰ As we will have occasion to observe later on, Tucker takes a harsh view of ancient slavery—and modern. Tucker regarded Athenian exclusivity concerning citizenship as both impolitic and uncharitable, and he saw the restriction of citizenship working with imperialism and slavery to create a de facto hereditary aristocracy. Athens, in short, was bad insofar as she was democratic and worse insofar as she wasn’t.

It was the revolution across the channel, however, that sparked the greatest anxiety and provoked the most energetic counterattacks in England. Two powerful essays appearing in the 1790s linked Athens and France in obloquy—William Young’s The British Constitution of Government Compared with that of a Democratic Republic (1793) and Robert Bisset’s Sketch of Democracy (1796). Both tracts were designed to counter suggestions that republican reforms would profit contemporary England—suggestions that Young attributes to “no very friendly advisers” and that Bisset ascribes to the London Corresponding Society and “hireling lecturers.”¹²¹

For Young, the hallmark of democracy was constant contention, since under a democracy men will constantly compete for preferment. At the same time that individuals and parties of the people contend with one another, the people at large contest with other nations, stirred up by demagogues who have a private interest in fomenting troubles that may make them indispensable to the people. He supports this allegation by reference to the story that Pericles brought on the Peloponnesian War to avoid having to render his accounts to the Athenians.¹²² All the traditional accusations against Athens are reprised in Young’s complaint that demagogues in a democracy support the tyranny of the many poor over the few rich and bribe the electorate on the pretext of remunerating public duties. Athenian democracy for him consists of a licentious “bargain of a demagogue on one part, and of the people on the other— for rights to do wrong.”¹²³ Like his contemporary John Adams, Young compares the excesses of democrats in Athens to those of their counterparts in Italy.¹²⁴ Young also sees ancient Athens as the forerunner of modern France, in all its “wretched anarchy”; for although the Athenians ostracized simply for unpopularity, without any specific charge, still the climax of popular tyranny remained to be realized in the massacres of revolutionary France.¹²⁵ The revolution in France, Young concludes, is no example to England, for while the French had nothing in their old government worth clinging to, the English with their excellent British constitution had “every thing to fight for.”¹²⁶

Young considered himself particularly qualified to hold forth on the weaknesses of Athenian democracy as he had published in 1777 the first edition of his History of Athens, at once an impassioned encomium on the patrios politeia of Solon and Cleisthenes and a savage indictment of the “leveling” that began with Aristides’ extension of the franchise and led to the demagogy of Pericles and Ephialtes. But Young was not the only Englishman to draw the French and the Athenians together in a comprehensive attack on the violence of democratic government. A similar spirit informs the Sketch of Democracy penned by a Chelsea schoolmaster, Robert Bisset. The stated purpose of Bisset’s work was to remove “erroneous notions from those who had listened to modern lecturers and demagogues,” and Bisset expresses the hope that his essay will succeed in showing those of his countrymen who are “deluded by democratic theories, or enamored of fanciful innovations, that the happiest of all lands is”—and this in all capital letters—“THE LAND WE LIVE IN.” His argument, he contends, will deal as little as possible in abstraction, since “many of those who have embraced democratical opinions, are probably men not much accustomed to abstract reasoning.”¹²⁷

Bisset, in fact, reads the sins of democracy back into the earliest days of Greece, billing Thersites as a “seditious demagogue” and Achilles as a self interested whig—for, he explains, “the same cause often makes that subject a whig, who if a king would be a tyrant impatient of controul.”¹²⁸ Greek history, he maintains, is the story of the substitution of democracy for limited monarchy, a subversion that converted Greece to a scene of wicked license wherein Athens was especially notorious. Attacking the sophists, “a set of pretended philosophers” who abetted the multitude in its licentiousness, he posits a natural connection between the presence of democracy and the absence of religion, since “those who will submit to no human authority, however salutary, come by no very different transition to disavow divine.”¹²⁹ Democracy, moreover, is strikingly volatile and labile, and in another reference to the revolution in France Bisset cites Aristotle’s observation that “mutability is one striking feature in democracy,” arguing that Aristotle saw in the history of Greek democracies and inferred from human nature “what every man now sees in the awful monuments of recent facts.”¹³⁰

Bisset confronts directly the connection between domestic and foreign affairs in Athens. Even the guarded Americans had posited a connection if only of the most general kind between Greek republicanism and the defeat of Persia; but Bisset takes an opposite stand. Friends to democracy, he complains, affect to impute the Athenians’ gallant conduct in the Persian war to their democratic constitution; but he points out that nondemocratic countries have done just as well, citing the heroism of William Wallace’s band in Scotland and of the English navy against Spain. In fact, he argues, it was the choice to make Miltiades sole commander in the first war and Aristides and Themistocles “really princes” in the second that accounted for the Athenians’ success, with the result that the Athenians’ famous victories, so far from arising from their democratic form of government, in reality were due to a “temporary departure from its spirit.”¹³¹ It was indeed the Athenians’ form of government, however, and the “imbecility” of the “mob” to which Bisset attributed the Athenian failure in Sicily, though he concedes that the Athenians, although wise in wanting to change from their democracy in 411, simply raised four hundred of the mob above the others, gaining “no more by the change, than did the French by their change from the club and mob government in the time of Petion, Brissot, and Condorcet, to that of the junto of Danton, Marat and Robespierre.” Even Aristophanes’ comedies are for Bisset “the comedies of democracy,” and their vulgarity was predictable in view of the characteristic coarseness of democratic sensibilities.¹³² Throughout Athenian history, Bisset concludes, it is plain that the Athenians’ “misfortunes were chiefly owing to the nature of their government, their successes to a temporary deviation from that government.”¹³³

Bisset died in 1805, and his writings, which included a couple of novels and a book on George III, attracted little attention; somewhat more has been paid to the works of Young, and more still to Gillies’s History. Though Gillies’s work was well received, however, in the end it was Mitford’s ten volumes that caught the public eye and superseded Rollin’s history. Mitford had traveled a good deal in France, where he reported finding enormous admiration for the balance of the English constitution. To this admiration he was conspicuously receptive. When he returned to England and became a colonel in the South Hampshire militia, he found Edward Gibbon serving in the same company. It was apparently Gibbon who suggested to Mitford that he write a history of Greece, and the first of Mitford’s ten volumes appeared in 1784.

Mitford’s profound commitment to monarchy manifested itself in an orientation to Greek history that even some of his Tory associates found peculiar. He judged the Persians to be quite delightful and considered Persian rule over Greece perfectly thinkable. His consistent defense of Philip of Macedon bordered on hysteria, as when he insisted that Philip had never abridged the “civil rights” of the “Macedonian people,” or when he maintained that the Athenian prisoners who requested from Philip clothes in which to return home gave proof thereby of the “arrogance and levity of the Athenian Many in that age.” (Mitford also discounted the story of a reproof administered to Philip on the part of Demades the orator, arguing that this tale, if true, would give partial credit to the Athenian democracy for molding the character of a man as great as Philip.)¹³⁴ Not surprisingly, Mitford is intensely preoccupied with the dangerous example the Athenian democracy had set for modern Europe—one England had, to its credit, largely ignored. A perfectly executed history of Greece, he maintains, should offer education in political science to all nations, and in so claiming he seeks to justify some rather protracted digressions in his middle volumes on the superiority of the English government to all other systems.

Mitford makes a point of conceding that there is some difficulty in translating political terms from one culture to another. Nonetheless, he lapses frequently into comparisons between Athens and England, comparisons that are invariably favorable to his own country. Life, liberty, and property, he warns, had not been as secure in Athens as in England—England, where the democratic element was “more wisely given, and more wisely bounded, notwithstanding some defects, than in any other government that ever existed.”¹³⁵ Only at the local democratic level did England resemble Athens—Athens, where all shared the “burthensome, disgraceful and mischievous office” of flattering the multitude, and where freedom of speech was frequently denied.¹³⁶ Nothing in modern Europe, Mitford contends, has so much resembled the constant Athenian canvas for popular favor as the contest for the representation of a county in England, Middlesex in particular.¹³⁷ Athenian political life, he writes, “strange as it may appear to those who have had no experience of a democratical mixture in government, cannot appear strange among ourselves, where county meetings, too frequently, and the common hall of London, continually exhibit perfect examples of that tyranny of a multitude.”¹³⁸

If democracy was appalling in England, so much worse was it in France. Trying to find some silver lining for the cloud that was the late revolution, Mitford in his second edition pointed out that at least the disgraceful proceedings in France served to make Greek political life credible to the English, who under the security of their own excellent constitution might otherwise have found it utterly inconceivable. Greek and French politics cast light on one another, Mitford maintains, and show that neither state is alone in atrocity. Although the parallel Mitford draws between the tribunal of the Committee of Public Welfare in Paris and the Thirty Tyrants at Athens might seem at first to cast no shadow over the Athenian democracy, in fact Mitford (like John Adams and like Paolo Paruta) blames the democracy for the rise of the Thirty and sees Critias himself as the inevitable product of democratic excess. Not surprisingly, however, Mitford reached his conclusions about the evils of Athenian democracy prior to the revolution in France. Aware that readers might suppose his work to be influenced by the revolution, Mitford takes pains to assure them that his aversion to Athens is based entirely on the ancient evidence. In discussing the Peloponnesian War, he attributes it to the “apprehension excited, among the oligarchical states, by the growing preponderance of the Athenian democracy, rendered terrible by its spirit of conquest, its spirit of tyranny, and its particular disposition to overthrow and oppress the oligarchal [sic] interest”; but in a footnote to this paragraph he insists that this passage predated the revolution: “The alarm spred over Europe by a similar spirit … in the French democracy, may possibly be supposed to have furnished this idea; but it was derived purely from the Grecian cotemporary [sic] historian, and indeed the passage was written before the spirit of conquest and tyranny among the French had given the lie direct to their pretension of peaceful and equitable principles.”¹³⁹

What appears to have frightened Mitford most powerfully about democracy was the attendant insecurity of property. “The satisfaction … of an Englishman in considering his house and his field more securely his own, under the protection of the law, than a castle defended by its own garrison, or a kingdom by its armies,” he writes, was unknown in Athens, where, after the Solonic constitution was overthrown, the nobility were forced to “cringe” to the rabble in order to protect their property.¹⁴⁰ He praises the clandestine Athenian oligarchic clubs, the synomosiai, as counterweights to the despotism the democracy exercised over the rich in a society in which both life and property were incomparably less secure than under the mild firmness of British government.¹⁴¹

That the concern over property was hardly idiosyncratic to Mitford is made clear by the prominence of the theme in the writings of Young and Bisset in Britain and the founding fathers in America. Both Bisset and Young praised Solon’s refusal to redistribute land, and Bisset saw Solon’s program sharing with English law the goal of preserving property. Bisset also cited Peisistratus as an example of a demagogue to whom men of “sense and property” were opposed; Adams, it must be remembered, attacked Marchamont Nedham for separating power and property.¹⁴² Young saw many of Athens’s problems arising out of the unseating of the landed aristocracy by the new aristocracy of trade. In his history of Athens he portrayed post-Cleisthenic Athens as declining into a democracy in which the corruption at the core was concealed by the “ruddy and rich superficies which ever covers the diseases of a commercial state,” and later in his comparison of Britain with democratic republics Young warned that political theorists must take men as they are, not shepherds of Arcadia but rather “men who follow trade and commerce … who abuse, or are ready to abuse, both power and wealth.”¹⁴³ Young’s enthusiasm for early Athens is matched only by his revulsion from Athens at its most democratic, and his growing anxiety about the impact of democracy on a commercial state is made plain by the changes the title of his book underwent from the first edition of 1777 to the second of 1786 and the third of 1804. The original edition was entitled The Spirit of Athens. Being a political and philosophical investigation of the history of that republic; the next, The History of Athens politically and philosophically considered with the view to an investigation of the immediate causes of elevation and decline, operative in a free and commercial state; and the 1804 edition, The History of Athens, including a commentary on the principles, policy and practice of republican government, and on the causes of elevation and decline, which operate in every free and commercial state.¹⁴⁴

. . . . .

By the close of the eighteenth century, the longing to resurrect ancient virtue had by and large been replaced by a more forward-thinking mentality that saw the solution to society’s problems in the future rather than in the past. Abandoning the search for a route by which to return to the prelapsarian world of antiquity, monarchists and republicans alike sought governments that would best protect the bustling and diverse commercial world of the present. Though the more democratically inclined focused their energies on protecting the aspirations of the little man while more conservative thinkers devoted theirs to protecting the acquisitions of the big one, they shared a fundamental interest in serving the needs of the present. The new concerns that agitated citizens of the nineteenth century, however—and of the late eighteenth century in Germany—were to raise new questions about the relationship of the modern world to the ancient.

What Desmoulins cherished about Athens was the life-style of democracy, where graciousness, prosperity, and freedom of the press were important building blocks of a comfortable existence. Where the ponderous search for stability that exercised the framers of the American constitution had led to a negative valuation of Athens that looked back to the preoccupations of the Renaissance, an interest in how people were to live projected Desmoulins into the intellectual universe of the next century, when Hegel would point to Athenian festivals as emblematic of the vitality of the civilization and Macaulay would identify the life of the city as the best education in civics. Wrapped up in their cherished science of politics, the framers of the American constitution paid scant attention to the extraconstitutional structures that made a civilization what it was. Already before the revolutions in America and France, Winckelmann had published the study of Greek art in which he identified a connection between democracy at Athens and the extraordinary flowering of Athenian culture, and nineteenth-century thinkers in Germany and Britain would soon articulate these ideas at some length. Asking new questions of precisely the same evidence was to produce radically new constructs that differed sharply from what had gone before.