From Police to Praetorian Guard
“We are all Romans,” declared Carl Richard, the eminent classicist who has dedicated his professional life to educating Americans about the debt we owe to the institutions and habits of Ancient Rome. He’s not alone in this belief. A quick search on Amazon reveals hundreds of books written with the same thesis — namely, that, as the title of one of these books proclaims, America is “Rome reborn on western shores.”
If Richard and his colleagues are correct, then we have many lessons from the history of that time that must be read and learned. Sadly, though, in our day, the creators of the new Common Core school standards suggest dispensing with the reading of Roman history and replacing it with readings from “FedViews” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the EPA’s “Recommended Levels of Insulation,” and “Invasive Plant Inventory” by California’s Invasive Plant Council.
Ancient history provided the Founders with examples of behavior and circumstances that they could apply to their own circumstances. Their heroes were Roman republicans and defenders of liberty. The Founders’ principal Roman heroes were noble and selfless statesmen such as Cato the Younger, Brutus, Cassius, and Cicero — all of whom sacrificed their lives in unsuccessful attempts to prevent the Roman republic they had inherited from becoming a freedom-extinguishing empire.
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