Liveblogging Wood's The Idea of America: Rome Was the Model
If any one cultural source lay behind the republican revolutions of the eighteenth century, it was ancient Rome -- republican Rome -- and the values that flowed from its history. It was ancient Rome's legacy that helped to make the late eighteenth century's apparently sudden transition to republicanism possible... If the Enlightenment was to discover the sources of a flourishing society and human happiness, it was important to learn what lay behind the ascendency of republican Rome and its eventual decline and fall. The French and American revolutionaries' view of the past was therefore very selective, focusing on the moral and social basis of politics and on social degeneracy and corruption. Since the eighteenth century believed "similar causes will forever operate like effects in the political, moral, and physical world," the history of the ancient world inevitably became a kind of laboratory in which autopsies of the dead republics, especially Rome, would l...