The Objective Standard The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers TIMOTHY SANDEFUR The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers TIMOTHY SANDEFUR Copyright © 2018 by The Objective Standard. All rights reserved. The Rational Alternative to “Liberalism” and Conservatism OBAMACARE v. 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SUMMER 2011 MUST GO WINTER 2013–2014 ∙ VOL. 8, NO. 4 Plus: Ex-CIA Spy Reza Kahlili on Iran’s Evil Regime (p.24)Hamiltonian Ribbon, Orange Crate, and Votive Holder, 14” x 18” Historian John D. Lewis on U.S. Foreign Policy (p.38) LINDA MANN Still Lifes in Oil SUMMER 2016 ∙ VOL. 11, NO. 2 lindamann.com ∙ 425.644.9952 WWW.CAPITALISTPIG.COM POB 1658 Chicago, IL 60658 An actively managed hedge fund. For Accredited Investors only. Photo: Gregory H. Jenkins, AIA The Objective Standard is the preeminent source for commentary from an Objectivist perspective. Subscribe to our quarterly journal for in-depth articles; visit our website for daily commentary; and join us on Facebook and Twitter for inter- esting links and stimulating conversation. Subscribe Today! www.TheObjectiveStandard.com Contents Introduction 5 1. The Greek Frame 6 2. Learning What Not to Do 23 3. The Two Freedoms 40 Endnotes 59 Introduction ou probably know that the American Founders were substantially Yinfluenced by the thinkers and culture of ancient Greece. But you likely don’t know the whole beautiful story. In this short ebook, which is adapted from a lecture series created for the Politismos Museum of Greek History, Timothy Sandefur presents the essence of this vital history. And it is powerfully concentrated. Chapter 1, “The Greek Frame,” examines the ways in which ancient Greek philosophers and statesmen influenced the Founders. This chapter is packed with illuminating identifications and rich connections that may surprise even the geekiest history buffs. Chapter 2, “Learning What Not to Do,” focuses on ways in which the Founders learned from the Greeks’ mistakes and sought to avoid them in constructing the land of liberty. And chapter 3, “The Two Freedoms,” examines two conflicting conceptions of liberty held by various Western intellectuals and cultures in the long trek toward the individual rights-based ideal held by Objectivists and classical liberals today. The road to our modern conception of liberty was neither straight nor simple, and Sandefur highlights some of the critical curves and complexities that are easy to overlook, yet crucial to understanding how freedom developed conceptually and existentially across time. The ebook closes with one of the most beautiful scenes ever painted with words. Have a tissue handy. —Craig Biddle The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers • 5 1 The Greek Frame o place in America more perfectly symbolizes the influence of the Greeks Non America’s founding fathers than the central lawn of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The lawn is framed on three sides by the central Rotunda, which housed the library like the brain of the school, and the two porticoes that reach out like arms and originally housed the dormitories. Some students still reside in them today. The architect who designed these buildings was, of course, the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, who among his many other accomplishments was one of America’s first architects. The style is Roman, and therefore, essentially Greek. Jefferson designed the buildings as a teaching device for the university’s architecture students. As they walk along the central lawn, students can see each of the classical orders represented: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and composite. One reason the university so aptly represents the Founders’ connections to the Greeks is that they largely knew of the Greeks through the Roman lens, not just in building but in thought as well. Jefferson got his classical Greek architecture from Roman models. And it is largely thanks to his efforts that to this day, our government buildings are primarily classical in style. It was his copy of the Roman temple known as the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, France, that became the state capitol building for Virginia. He also collaborated with Benjamin Latrobe in designing the first version of the U.S. Capitol building and even secretly entered a classically inspired design in the competition for the president’s house. In all of these, his model was Italian architecture, adapted to local needs in various elegant ways. Most notably, both his home, Monticello, and the university, though classical in design, are built from brick made locally out of Virginia soil. Jefferson was a state-of-the-art thinker, made—like his buildings—of Virginian materials. But his mind was fashioned on classical forms. As in their architecture, so in their thought, America’s founding fathers looked primarily to the Romans for their political and legal foundations, but what they found were ideas that largely originated with the Greeks. In some The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers • 6 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame cases, this was because the original writings of, say, Plato and Aristotle, either were still lost, or were obscured by poor translations or by fake books falsely attributed to the ancients during the American Revolutionary period. Despite his classical education, which enabled him to read Greek and Latin—as well as Spanish, Italian, French, and Anglo-Saxon—Jefferson was not adept at spotting forgeries. Among his favorite poets was “Ossian,” purportedly an ancient Anglo-Saxon poet whose work was actually forged by the man who claimed to be his translator. During Jefferson’s life, it was fairly well known among educated men that Ossian was a fake, but Jefferson couldn’t bring himself to believe it.1 As for the ancient Greeks, many were known to the Founders through the Roman lens as well. They got their Plato and Aristotle largely through Cicero, for example, and their Epicurus through Lucretius—as we still do today. I want to focus on Epicurus and Lucretius, because even now Epicurean ideas are not as instantly recognizable to ordinary people as those of Aristotle or Plato. Yet Epicurus had the strongest influence on Thomas Jefferson. This is less true of political ideas—Greek politics largely served the Founders as models to avoid, rather than ideals to be imitated—than of his ideas about the nature of man and what the good life should be. But as we shall see, all of these ideas came together in Jefferson’s final and proudest achievement. • Epicurus was born on Samos in 341 BC. As a young man he moved to Colophon, on the coast of present-day Turkey, and then in 306 BC, to Athens, where he founded a school known as the Garden of Epicurus, not far from Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. He was a brilliant and prolific writer and thinker. Yet thanks to the war against his ideas that Christians waged during the Medieval period, Epicurus has been largely obliterated from our history. Of the three hundred or so books Epicurus is said to have written, only four letters remain today, in addition to some scattered passages quoted in other manuscripts and collected in lists of aphorisms. We also have the writings of some of his followers, the most important of which is the incomplete epic poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, a Roman who lived two and a half centuries after Epicurus, between 99 BC and 55 BC. Even his beautiful and intriguing poem was lost to the West for centuries after the fall of Rome and was not published in translation until less than a century before Jefferson’s birth. Given how little is today remembered about him, one might imagine that Epicurus was a minor figure in the ancient world, but he was among the most 7 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame widely respected thinkers of Greco-Roman era. Schools, like monasteries, devoted to Epicureanism were found in all the major cities. His followers wore jewelry with portraits of him and hung his picture in their homes. Epicureanism was not only influential in this sense, but it was, according to Norman Wentworth Dewitt, “the first missionary philosophy”2—the first school of thought that actively sought to convert others to its central tenets. Yet those tenets were not religious. Epicurus was a thoroughly secular philosopher, and we might call him the true founder of secular liberalism. The two best-known elements of his thought were his materialism and his hedonism, and it was these ideas that, when Rome fell and mysticism rose in the Western world, made him so controversial that Christians sought to purge him from history. To this day, in fact, the Hebrew word for heresy is apikoros, or “Epicurus.” Epicurus’s primary metaphysical doctrine was atomism.