Colonial History Education and Ancient Rome

 

[Colonists'] detailed knowledge and engaged interest covered only one era and one small group of writers”: Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus—those who “had hated and feared the trends of their own time, and in their writing had contrasted the present with a better past, which they endowed with qualities absent from their own, corrupt era.”46 There was always, in Max Weber’s term, some sort of elective affinity between the Americans’ interests and their beliefs, and without that affinity their ideas would not have possessed the peculiar character and persuasiveness they did. Only the most revolutionary social needs and circumstances could have sustained such revolutionary ideas.

Wood, Gordon S.. The Idea of America . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.