Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 64

Revolutionary Americans were absorbed with Rome. Throughout the Revolution they emulated Roman heroes and dreaded its villains. When the revolution was over they erected a federal city (Washington, DC) that epitomised in its architecture of white-marbled temples and in the political institutions that those edifices seated, namely Congress and Senate, a classical vision of government. Roman nomenclature went much further, however, as in the coming decades numerous cities, townships and crossroads all over the sprawling geography of the United States would resonate with names that evoked Americans’ aspirations to relive classical glory. Decades ago Bernard Bailyn believed that all these attempts amounted to ‘intellectual window dressing’, that early Americans were superficially employing their classical knowledge for rhetorical gain (Bailyn 1965: 21). In this instance, Bailyn could not have been more wrong. Revolutionaries may have not been interested in Roman political culture per se; but they were its most avid practitioners. Rome had such a powerful sway on the founding generation that we cannot properly understand the political choices and claims they made unless we realise that to them, in many ways, the world of the ancient Mediterranean was as vivid and recognisable as the world in which they were living; that classical heroes such as Cincinnatus and Cicero, and villains such as Catiline and Jugurtha, were meaningful and familiar figures. Indeed, in a world in which numerous Americans thought in terms of Roman narratives, styled themselves as toga-clad senators and acted out classical roles, it is possible to see how political actors habitually reflected upon and represented their experiences through Republican Rome. Rome was often the lens through which revolutionaries perceived the tumultuous happenings that they witnessed and provided them with a script to make sense out of their actions.

For an extended moment Republican Rome had a dazzling second life on western shores. The incarnation of a Roman-like American Republic surely had its distinct characteristics (not the least of which was the federalism that the founders incorporated). However, such modifications and alterations only underscore the vitality and adaptability of the long shadow that Rome and its political culture cast on western civilisation for millennia. Nevertheless, the decades following the Revolution witnessed the unleashing of the far-reaching democratisation and the aggressive free-for-all capitalism that would characterise nineteenth-century America. The corresponding and dramatic change in collective mores would inevitably erode the attachment to the aristocratic, slave-holding Roman Republic. The accelerating industrialisation, particularly in the north, and the rise of the ‘common man’ in the Jacksonian Age, made the once universally admired Rome seem irrelevant; other models, particularly the democracy of Athens, were now much more relevant for a growing number of Americans. This fascinating and important decline of aristocratic and hierarchical Rome and rise of democratic Athens in the American imagination is a significant theme in the intellectual history of nineteenth-century America (see especially Adams 2001; Richard 2009: 96–117). It is a story, however, for another Companion.