The New Rome

Socially, economically, and culturally, the America of the Founders was a lot like the Rome of the republican period, and they knew it well.

An agricultural economy based on draft animals, ubiquitous slavery, a barbarian frontier, and woman's place not much different from what it had been in Rome.

Everything softened a bit by Christianity, of course.

Slavery was in some ways less brutal, for example, and its sexual aspect much suppressed.

No gladiators or animal slaughters.

And definitely no executions by crucifixion, even of the worst offenders.

And it is interesting that that felt resemblance those Protestants and deists so much insisted on, they and all their successors before the Civil War, was very clearly with pagan, republican Rome and not with the later Christian - that is to say, Catholic - Rome of Constantine and the emperors after him.

Constantine the Great, whose perhaps apocryphal motto In Hoc Signo Vinces adorns my class ring from the Jesuit school, The College of the Holy Cross.

And it was not as if they unanimously, unambiguously rejected Rome's imperialism.

Far from it!

But the empire of the Romans had been built mostly by the republic.

And they had just fought a rather desperate war against heavy odds for independence during which, despite lingering and frank admiration on the political right, those medieval features of the British state, monarchy, aristocracy, and quasi-theocracy, had all become synonyms for tyranny and oppression for nearly all Americans.

Leaving quite aside the obvious religious reasons for this Protestant society not much more than a century away from the bloody European convulsions brought on by the Reformation to feel precious little kinship with the Rome that created Catholic Christendom, there was ample reason for early America to see itself in the mirror of republican Rome.

And now?

Two hundred years of unprecedented and unprecedentedly fast scientific, technical, economic, and cultural change have put so vast a distance between us and the early Americans as to make the differences between them and Rome seem as small to us as they did to them.

They are very nearly no more like us than the Rome Livy wrote of and Machiavelli commented on.

And their political insights, concerns, and judgments can no more bind us, serve as models for us, or form the horizon of our own than those of Plutarch, Cicero, or Arrian.

Like the Romans they so proudly resembled, the Founders for us, and even the America they created, are so much ancient history.

A point to bear in mind when confronting the endless controversies about the compliance of our republic with the constitution they wrote for their America.

Or silly laments that our society, culture, and mores so little resemble those of that America.

Or vicious attacks on America's white people, heaping blame and bitter anger upon them for the deeds of whites dead two centuries and more ago.