Caesar, Cato, or Cincinnatus?
Choose Your Roman Carefully.
I recently went on a patriotic family vacation for America’s semiquincentennial. We toured through Williamsburg, the Yorktown Battlefield, Monticello, the University of Virginia, and Mount Vernon, closing out the trip with several days in Washington, D.C., as the city held World Cup festivities, readied America 250 events on the National Mall, and prepared for the UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House.
At 250 years old this July 4, the United States is the oldest republic in the western world. There was another republic that lasted even longer—the Roman Republic. And because it died amid a transformation into the Roman Empire, America’s founders were obsessed not only with its republican architecture, as my family witnessed in Washington, D.C., and at Monticello (see photo), but also with the heroes and villains involved in the republic’s dissolution.
The founders believed there were lessons to be learned from the Roman Republic. They were right.
George Washington intentionally associated America and the cause of republican liberty with the classical period of Western Civilization, the Greco-Roman world. Specifically, like most elite Americans in the 1700s he was a great admirer of the Roman Republic.
But how would Americans emulate the best of ancient Rome and ignore the worst?
In striving for republican virtue, it was Cato the Younger, not Julius Caesar, whom Washington most sought to emulate. Frank Grizzard, Jr., author and longtime associate editor of the Papers of George Washington, describes Washington as a Latinize Stoic. Victor Davis Hanson and Bruce Thornton argue that Washington emulated Cincinnatus in a purposeful way as an admirer of the gentleman-farmer archetype of ancient Rome.
Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Washington studied Roman literarature closely.
Yet there were key differences between their approach and his when it came to the classics of Western Civilization.
All three men read and admired Cicero and had a few other favorite writers in common. It was not so much who they read as the goals these men had in their reading. Jefferson read the classics mostly for style but also for moral insight into the pursuit of happiness. When it came to politics, he thought they were outdated.
Adams mined them for historical lessons and political inspiration. He also hoped to learn self-control, which was a struggle for him, so he could be taken seriously as a statesman.
Unlike Jefferson and Adams (and James Madison, for that matter), Washington was not college educated. His education had been mainly practical. Thus, Washington read very little of the Greeks but focused instead on the practical but prudent Romans. He primarily read the Roman classics to learn about virtue. Among the works he read, he appreciated most Plutarch’s Lives and Livy’s History of Rome.
Washington was especially interested in the life of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. In 458 B.C. Cincinnatus, a farmer, was called on by the Roman Senate to serve as general and dictator until Rome’s army could oust the Aequi invaders. He agreed, led the army to victory, and famously immediately left Rome and “returned to his plough.” All in the span of two weeks.
Here was a farmer who left his home, led an army against great odds, and then resigned his generalship and dictatorial voluntarily, returning to home and hearth when his service to his country ended. No wonder that Washington admired him, and did the same not once but twice, when he theatrically relinquished power before Congress at the end of the Revolutionary War and when he retired after two terms as U.S. President.
Historians Thornton and Hanson argue that it was not just Cincinnatus’s virtuous relinquishment of power that Washington sought to emulate. It mattered, they say, that Cincinnatus was a farmer.
Thornton and Hanson: “Like Jefferson, Washington believed the availability of western land would ensure that successive waves of cultivators could expand the nation, increase its prosperity and hence autonomy, and underwrite its political virtue both by inculcating the virtues necessary for the Republic and by avoiding the manifold evils of manufacturing and trade.”
Thornton and Hanson are right about the first part. Washington, however, did not see “manufacturing and trade” as an evil. (And to be fair, in terms of trade, neither did Jefferson, who hated factories and cities but promoted international free trade.)
Washington voiced his thoughts about the role of manufacturing and industrialization in American prosperity and unity in his 1796 Farewell Address:
The East, in a like intercourse with the West, already finds, and in the progressive improvement of interior communications by land and water, will more and more find, a valuable vent for the commodities which it brings from abroad, or manufactures at home. The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and comfort, and, what is perhaps of still greater consequence, it must of necessity owe the secure enjoyment of indispensable outlets for its own productions to the weight, influence, and the future maritime strength of the Atlantic side of the Union, directed by an indissoluble community of interest as one nation. Any other tenure by which the West can hold this essential advantage, whether derived from its own separate strength, or from an apostate and unnatural connexion with any foreign power, must be intrinsically precarious.
Even more than Cincinnatus, it was Cato the Younger who attracted Washington, thanks to Joseph Addison’s 1713 play, Cato. Both Ron Chernow and Joseph Ellis—two of the best Washington biographers, in my view—note Washington’s interest in Cato.
It was not just Cato’s Stoic mastery of his feelings and passions that impressed Washington, although this served as a model for Washington’s cultivation of his public character as a reserved, serious, but ambitious man.
Rather, like Cincinnatus, Cato was an example of republican virtue in the face of the great temptation posed by military power. Cato opposed Julius Caesar, who marched his army across the Rubicon, seized power by force, and sponsored games and bread for the people of Rome. Caesar eventually was stabbed to death by friends as well as enemies after declaring himself “dictator for life.”
At the Valley Forge winter encampment in 1778 the play was one of Washington’s tools to teach leadership and virtue. In other words, the play was not just entertainment to relieve the soldiers’ misery. The General wanted to inspire his officers to stand firm like Cato’s soldiers.
Washington also hoped the play would remind them that the cause of republican liberty was bigger than the army or any one man. This was an important lesson for the men of the Continental Army. It is also an important one for Americans as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence.