Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 62

As we have just seen, revolutionary Americans universally understood the United States as a new incarnation of the Roman Republic. That view was crafted and buttressed with the revolution’s leaders perceived as the re-embodiment of the greatest Romans. Hence, on the morning of 6 March 1775, Dr Joseph Warren, a leader of the fermenting rebellion in Boston, burst into the city’s Old South church, donned in a toga, to deliver the fifth annual Boston Massacre commemoration oration. The toga was the principal garment of a freeborn Roman male citizen. It consisted of a single piece of material of irregular form – long, broad and flowing, without sleeves or armholes. To wear such a garment was of course highly unusual in revolutionary America and was seen justly as a stark political statement. Similarly, depicting the rebellion in Boston as led by a group of revered Roman republicans in popular dramas was a powerful mode of infusing historical meaning in the American revolutionary movement. That was exactly what Mercy Otis Warren’s (not related to Joseph Warren) dramas The Adulateur (1772) and The Defeat (1773) did, portraying the revolution in Boston as led by Roman republicans such as Brutus, Cassius and Cato. These performative contexts through which revolutionaries could perceive a classically infused present reveal the ease with which American patriots could perceive fellow patriots as Romans operating in American settings and project such perceptions into a burgeoning revolutionary public sphere. Mercy Otis asked her audiences to imagine a street corner in Boston where Cassius appealed to Brutus, his co-conspirator to free the republic of the menace of Caesar, ‘Oh! Brutus, our noble ancestors, who lived for freedom, and for freedom died’), who ‘grasped at freedom, and … nobly won it,’ (line 18) would be proud to see the young generation’s ‘generous bosoms flow with manly sentiment’ (The Adulateur (in Franklin 1980): Act 1, Scene 1, lines 12–13, 18, 50–51). Instead of confusion, these elaborate performances entrenched the understanding that Roman history was playing itself in America, that Rome was reborn on western shores.

Another remarkable example of such a mindset which is worth examining in depth is Jonathan Mitchell Sewall’s A New Epilogue to Addison’s Cato, which served as the concluding section to Joseph Addison’s Augustan tragedy Cato (1712), the most popular play in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century (see Litto 1966: 431–449). Sewall’s New Epilogue was first performed and published in 1778 together with the play to which it served as a concluding section. Literary historian John Shields speculates that this American Epilogue was performed many times during the Revolution, possibly even in front of Washington and his men at Valley Forge (Shields 2001: 192). Sewall, a lawyer and occasional poet (not to be confused with the loyalist Jonathan Sewall, his great-uncle), became well-known as a Revolutionary War versifier. His Epilogue replaced the older British ending section written by Dr Garths in America between 1778 and 1793, in which Sewall obviously intended to Americanise the timeless Addisonian allegory (Shields 2001: 174–193).⁹

Sewall presented in the Epilogue a Manichean worldview in which he contrasted ‘heroic fortitude’ and ‘patriotic truth’ with ‘tyrannic rage’ and ‘boundless ambition’; in the current battle, Britannia occupied the role of the wicked, while ‘what now gleams with dawning ray, at home, Once blaz’d… at ROME’ (Sewall 1778). Sewall thus identified the protagonists of his epilogue and established a historical link between America and Rome, a ‘ray’, which once blazed in Rome and currently dawned in America. Like the Roman Senate, the American ‘senate’, the Continental Congress (the ‘aristocratic’ branch of its successor legislature soon to be significantly named the United States Senate), had armed a ‘virtuous few’, to fight the ‘British Caesar’. America has found a worthy candidate to re-enact the Catonian role in the face of a British Caesar: ‘For a CATO’ she has armed ‘a WASHINGTON.’ The identification of the two leading antagonists marked the beginning of an elaborate effort to assign Romans to contemporary American figures.

While Washington was a Cato, and the British monarch a Caesar, Sewall laid out an extended list, matching American protagonists with Roman heroes, and British villains with nefarious ancients. The elaborate matchmaking list is extraordinary and shows the lengths to which Americans could go in order to explain their revolution as a re-enactment of a classical spectacle.¹⁰ The Epilogue asserted the relations between ancients and moderns in a string of prepositions, adjectives, verbs and indefinite articles: ‘in [General Nathaniel] Greene … we see … Lucius, Juba, Cato, shine in thee’; ‘Montgomery like Scipio died’; ‘Arnold … a second Hannibal’; ‘Marcus blazes forth in Sullivan’; and ‘We’ve had our Decius’. Naming Americans as the ‘second’, ‘western’ or ‘like’ of classical heroes was a trademark of typological thinking, conveying the notion of incarnation and latter-day fulfilment. While the revolutionaries were not actual Romans, they were meant to reanimate and re-enact those ancients’ role on an American stage.

By drawing a laminated map of American champions overlaying Romans, Sewall provided a key to understanding Cato as an American play. Such a legend, which affixed to each classical persona an American protagonist, developed the richness of the image of America as the new Rome to an extraordinary degree. Similarly, Mercy Otis Warren’s aforementioned revolutionary plays, which described revolutionary Boston in Roman terms, enabled contemporaries to imagine their experiences and leaders operating in a classical-like drama, deriving the meaning and historical significance of their actions from the struggles of Rome of the first century BCE.¹¹

Revolutionary contemplation through, and attempts to emulate, Rome were by no means a northern phenomenon. Indeed, one of the most celebrated revolutionary moments, Patrick Henry’s ‘give me liberty, or give me death’ oration, demonstrates the extent to which Rome captured the revolutionary imagination south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Henry’s oration was repeatedly recounted and interpreted in striking classical terms. One of the most celebrated episodes of the American Revolution, Henry’s oration took place just weeks before the commencement of war between Britain and the colonies and was enshrined in the American psyche as a glorious revolutionary moment (see Cohen 1981; McCants 1990). Much of its immediate success and influence, however, owes to the fact that Henry managed to stimulate his viewers to imagine him as a classical Roman, and more specifically, as Cato of Utica.

Henry, despite his scant education and superficial knowledge of the classics, nevertheless became in the eyes of his audiences strongly associated with Greco-Roman images throughout his career. Henry’s dramatic, transformative talent made him appear to his peers as a Plutarchian figure as early as the Stamp Act crisis, a decade before his noted speech to the Virginian Convention. In the classically saturated public sphere of the Old Dominion, Henry was arguably the most deeply classicised figure of his day, at least until Washington assumed command of the Continental Army (for the classics in Virginia, see Wright 1939). As a young and relatively unknown member of the House of Burgesses, Henry’s polemic genius was bold enough to warn the British Monarch in May 1765 against collecting taxes in America, ending his speech with the memorable catchphrase: ‘Caesar had his Brutus – Charles the First, his Cromwell – and George the Third – may profit by their example’ (McCants 1990: 121). In his own mind, and perhaps in the minds of his audience as well, Henry may well have already situated himself as the third potential tyrannicide, the epic follower of Brutus and Cromwell.

Returning from the Continental Congress in March 1775, Henry delivered his speech in a Virginian delegates’ meeting in Richmond on the 23rd. In his oration, Henry, taking his usual bold patriot’s position, advocated that the provincial convention assume the functions of government, called for the establishment of a militia and the development of a plan of defence for the colony, and unflinchingly urged resistance against Britain. Thomas Marshall, a member of the convention remarked to his son, the future Chief Justice John Marshall, that the speech was ‘one of the most bold, vehement, and animated pieces of eloquence that had ever been delivered’ (McCants 1990: 57). Imploring the delegates to support the radical resolutions he had presented, Henry elicited classical interpretations of his performance not only through his already-renowned classical rhetorical style but also by his choice of concluding words (Gustafson 2000: 142, 174). Henry’s powerful and memorable ending phrase, ‘Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!’ derived directly from Cato’s words in the Second Act of Addison’s famed tragedy: ‘My voice is still for war. Gods, can a Roman senate long debate which of the two to choose … but chains or conquest, liberty, or death’ (Litto 1966: 444–445). Once again, as in the ‘Caesar–Brutus’ speech he had delivered a decade before, Henry posed in front of his audience as a classical-republican figure. If during the Stamp Act controversy he postured as a modern-day Brutus, threatening George III with regicide, he now chose to act out an embattled Cato. The importance and omnipresence of Addison’s Cato in revolutionary America, notably its sway on Virginians lacking a college education, such as Henry and Washington, is well known (Furtwangler 1987: 64–84; see also Litto 1966). Indeed, Henry’s audience did not fail to cipher his classical cues and described him not only as a classical orator but specifically as a Cato fighting Julius Caesar.

Contemporary commentators took Henry’s cue and portrayed him in vivid classical terms. Edmund Randolph, in the contemporary The History of Virginia, described how ‘Henry moved and Richard Henry Lee seconded it. The fangs of European criticism might be challenged to spread themselves against the eloquence of that awful day. It was a proud one to a Virginian, feeling and acting with his country. Demosthenes invigorated the timid, and Cicero charmed the backward’ (see Shafer 1970). Randolph’s description, however, written for his History after the Revolution ended, paled in comparison to Judge George Tucker’s account of the same occasion. To describe the glory of the moment he had witnessed, Tucker invited his readers to immerse themselves in a classical fantasy, in one of the most remarkable classical allusions from an era steeped in such flourishes:

Imagine to yourself this speech delivered with all the calm dignity of Cato of Utica; imagine to yourself the Roman Senate assembled in the capital when it was entered by the profane Gauls, who at first were awed by their presence as if they had entered an assembly of the gods. Imagine that you had heard that Cato addressing such a Senate … and you may have some idea of the speaker, the assembly to whom he addressed himself, and the auditory… (Henry 1891, vol. 1: 264–265)

Five times in these few sentences Tucker invoked the imagination of his readers, creating a fictive classical setting to convey the essence of the historical moment, in which the American was Cato and the British played the role of the Barbarians. Tucker depicted Henry, the ‘forest-borne Demosthenes’, while paraphrasing the dramatic words of Cato (or rather Addison’s version of Cato), as a modern-day Cato in front of the Roman Senate, defying Rome’s enemies.

John Roane also described Henry as a figure from classical history, turning for the climactic centrepiece of his description to Roman annals: Henry ‘stood like a Roman Senator defying Caesar, while the unconquerable spirit of Cato of Utica flashed from every feature; and he closed the grand appeal with the solemn words “or give me death!”’ (Henry 1891, vol. 1: 270). This conclusion was a worthy ending to the string of classical allusions and metaphors that Roane employed. In Roane’s remarkable description, Henry’s stance was once again that of a ‘Roman Senator defying Caesar’. However, he could not be mistaken for Brutus or Cassius, Caesar’s notable opponents, but was clearly Cato the Younger, so well known to the revolutionary generation. This remarkable transformation of an American into a Roman, a Henry into a Cato, demonstrates not only the historical similarities which Americans found between their own and the embattled Roman Republic. It demonstrates how their historical sensibilities played out similarly and led them to perceive, even if just ‘for a moment’, their compatriots as classical reincarnations.