Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 61

It is evident that for American revolutionaries Rome was not merely an object of political reflection but an idée fixe that they strove to emulate and re-create. William Hooper’s letter of 1774 to James Iredell, as revolutionary tensions were heating up, is revealing of the modes of thought through which such a feat seemed meaningful. At the end of a remarkable epistle lengthily describing the Roman decadence that led to the destruction of the Republic and the rise of the Caesars, Hooper asked: ‘Reverse the catastrophe [of Roman corruption and decline], and might not Great Britain be the original from which this picture is taken?’ Hooper’s imagery reveals how history was perceived as a canvas that potentially represented more than one reality, or ‘original’. In Hooper’s view, the British Empire did not merely resemble decadent Rome of the first century BCE; Britain was an imprint of a Roman mould. Bostonian Josiah Quincy also described history as playing out reoccurrences of well-known patterns and events when he suggestively asked, in 1774: ‘Is not Britain to America, what Caesar was to Rome?’ A decade later Alexander Hamilton asked, under the Roman pseudonym of Catulus, whether ‘Caesar, who overturned the republic, was the Whig, [and] Cato, who died for it, the Tory of Rome?’ (‘Catullus to Aristedes’, in Morris 1969: 129). Such a debate assigning contemporary labels of ‘Patriot’ and ‘Loyalist’ to ancient Romans reveals the extent to which American revolutionaries viewed history as a medium for repetitions and reoccurrences, and as a method of legitimisation. Searching for the contemporary incarnation of the relationship between Caesar and Rome and finding it in the liaison between Britain and America was a common practice, a contemporary mode of unlocking and revealing history’s logic (see John Adams’s aforementioned inclination ‘to read the history of all ages and nations [as] applicable to’ the United States, quoted in Richard 1994: 84). Such modes of constructing history as a medium that bore witness to the repetition of narratives, a stance that was arguably even more robust during the Revolution – 30 years before Adams’s remarkable observation – indicate the potential of the possible connections Americans could make between Roman and their own history. Indeed, revolutionaries repeatedly suggested that they were witnessing and re-experiencing ‘circumstances similar to those which produced the greatest orators of ancient days’.⁷ In light of such an outlook, revolutionaries persistently searched for, and provided evidence of, the assumed correspondences and parallels between their own experiences and the celebrated narratives of classical antiquity.

The pamphlet Observations on the act of Parliament Commonly Called the Boston Port Bill, published in that same watershed year of 1774, was straightforward in its conception of America as a new Rome. The author mused that the republican, self-sacrificing spirit that ‘rose in Rome’ would ‘one day make glorious this more Western world’. America was on the verge of unfolding its imperial, Roman-like potential; she ‘hath in her store her Bruti and Cassii’ (Quincy 1774: 82). The pamphlet’s author portrayed history as a succession of empires in which Rome (and Britain) assumed the role of America’s predecessors. After Independence, the British Commonwealth tradition and its store of heroes would be pushed to the backstage, and the dominant component of such rhetoric would be Roman. The use of the plural in referring to ‘Bruti’ and ‘Cassii’, alluding to the Roman senators Brutus (Marcus Junius Brutus, 85–42 BCE) and Cassius (Gaius Cassius Longinus, d. 42 BCE) who led the conspiracy to murder Julius Caesar when he overthrew the Republic, suggested at this early point of the conflict what would become obvious in years to come: the belief that America would not only repeat Roman grandeur, but would indeed surpass the empires of the past with its native ‘Romans’. An Elegy of the Times, also published in 1774, invited its readers to ‘meet the Fathers of this western clime; Nor names more noble graced the rolls of fame, When Spartan firmness brav’d the wrecks of time, or Rome’s bold virtues fann’d th’ heroic flame’ (Trumbull 1774: 11). Once again this patriotic poet envisioned America in a succession of ancient and glorious polities. Owing its greatness to its ‘fathers’, the American-Romans who equalled the virtue of the patriots of old, America would rise and eventually it, too, would ennoble the wrecks of time.

Samuel Cooper’s sermon on the day of the commencement of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 further demonstrated such reasoning. The Bostonian reverend explained to his adherents: ‘Rome rose to empire because she early thought herself destined for it,’ and Romans ‘did great things because they believed themselves capable, and born to do them’. Americans, however, have ‘an object more truly great and honourable. We seem called by heaven to make a large portion of this globe a seat of knowledge and liberty, of agriculture, commerce, and arts, and what is more important than all, of Christian piety and virtue’ (Cooper 1780).⁸ The American empire, at least in this cleric’s vision, would become a Protestant Rome (not to be confused of course with the popish Rome; Zakai 1992: 81–82). Here, as elsewhere, America was described as better than her original, pagan predecessor. Nevertheless, even when described as a new and better Rome, it would always be understood in and compared to its classical predecessor’s terms.

Patriots commonly looked backward to antiquity to evaluate their present achievements and prospects. The ‘poet of the Revolution’ Philip Freneau asked, after prophesying that America would become a new Greece or Rome, ‘how could I weep that we were born so soon,/In the beginning of more happy times!’ (Freneau 1772: 21). The ‘more happy times’ to which Freneau referred were those when Americans would equal the Romans. John Adams referred to such an epoch in a 1776 letter to George Wythe (described by Thomas Jefferson as a ‘Cato without the avarice of the Roman’): ‘You and I, my dear friend’, Adams wrote, ‘have been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to have lived’ (Richard 1994: 57, 83). Similarly, the Continental Army’s general Charles Lee reflected, again during the year of Independence, ‘I us’d to regret not being thrown into the world in the glamorous third or fourth century [BCE] of the Romans; but now I am thoroughly reconcil’d to my lot’ (Richard 1994: 84).