Without The Ancient Greeks, We’d Have No America 250 To Celebrate |
1 Trending: John ‘Failure Is Not An Option’ Thune Just Failed Election Integrity
2 Trending: Washington Post Worries Illegals Might Pay Their Own Legal Fees, While Immigration Costs Americans Billions
3 Trending: Thune Has Tried Nothing To Pass The SAVE Act And He’s All Out Of Ideas
4 Trending: Lane Kiffin Is The Classless Coach Who Cries Racism
Without The Ancient Greeks, We’d Have No America 250 To Celebrate
We would be foolish (and ungrateful) to overlook the Greeks’ wisdom in shaping our own national American heritage.
Share Article on Facebook
Share Article on Twitter
Share Article on Truth Social
Share Article via Email
If you go to Washington, D.C., this year to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, you’ll probably visit the Capitol Building or the Lincoln Memorial. I’d hope you’d go and see the signed copy of the Declaration of Independence in the National Archives. And, if your tour guides on the National Mall are worth their salt, they’ll remind you of the unique blessings of our representative form of government. To all of these, we owe a debt of gratitude to the Greeks.
Thomas Jefferson declared that “every citizen” should be a soldier, because “this was the case with the Greeks & Romans and must be that of every free state.” The Federalist Papers are filled with references to the Greeks, both as examples of what to do and not to do. As bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas E. Ricks argues: “The classical world was far closer to the makers of the American Revolution and the founders of the United States than it is to us today.” This semiquincentennial, we would do well, like our founding fathers, to remember the Greeks.
The Beginnings of Representative Government
As classical historian Adrian Goldsworthy argues in his excellent new book, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece, democracy, a political system that until recent history was uncommonly rare, emerged among the Greeks. Today, woke critics who exemplify what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” complain that the Greek democracies were exclusionary based on sex or status. Goldsworthy labels this complaint “sterile.” From one city to another, which citizens enjoyed political rights........