Greece, Rome, and the American Experiment
In 1785, a man with no training as an architect sat in Paris and drew a building for a country an ocean away. Thomas Jefferson had been asked to design a capitol for Virginia. He could have copied a king's palace. He chose a temple instead — the Maison Carrée, standing in southern France since the first century BC, raised when Rome was still a republic. He called it the most beautiful piece of architecture the ancient world had left us. He wanted his new nation's lawmakers to meet inside a Roman idea made of stone.
Key Terms
- Democracy
- From demos and kratos: citizens governing in person, not through representatives.
- Republic
- From res publica, "the public thing" — a state with no king.
- Demagogue
- Wins support by stirring up people’s fears and desires instead of reasoning with them.
- Checks and Balances
- Each part of a government can stop or limit the others.
- Anacyclosis
- Polybius’s turning-cycle: any single, unmixed government rots into a worse one.
- Civic Virtue
- The habits a free state needs: self-control, public service, community above self.
- Federalism
- Power divided between a national government and state governments — a design Greece and Rome never built.
- Natural Law
- A true law above all rulers, knowable by reason, binding in every age — no king or vote can repeal it.
- Electoral College
- Each state’s electors — House seats plus two senators — cast the official votes for president.
- Cleisthenes
- Reshuffled 139 demes into ten tribes, 508–507 BC, so no single clan could own the government.
- The Pnyx
- The bare, rocky hillside where up to 15,000 citizens argued and voted face to face.
- Alcibiades
- Brilliant and reckless — talked Athens into sending a fleet against Syracuse in 415 BC.
- Tribune of the Plebs
- Won by the plebeian walkout of 494 BC; sacrosanct, and armed with the veto.
- Twelve Tables
- Rome’s laws carved where even a poor man could point to them, 449 BC.
- Polybius
- The Greek historian who said Rome slowed the wheel by mixing all three forms of government.
- Cincinnatus
- Took total power to save Rome, then laid it down after fifteen days, 458 BC.
- Cicero
- Wrote that a true law — right reason, agreeing with nature — stands above every ruler.
- Madison
- Studied the ancient leagues; argued in Federalist No. 10 that a wide republic defeats any single mob.
- Washington
- Resigned his commission in 1783 and rode home to his farm — a modern Cincinnatus.
- Jefferson
- Designed Virginia’s capitol on a Roman temple — antiquity rebuilt in American stone, AD 1788.