Lore of the Founding- An Introduction

America’s founding didn’t spring from a blank page. It grew out of a loud, messy argument that had been running for centuries about how people should govern themselves, and Joanna Kenty helps us follow that argument back to its classical roots.

We talk with Joanna, a former classics professor and civic education writer, about what “classical history” actually means beyond “great books.” She maps the Greek and Latin-speaking Mediterranean world, the timelines most people mean when they say “the classics,” and why certain authors like Plato, Sophocles, Cicero, and Virgil still feel provocative thousands of years later. From there, we zoom in on 18th-century America, where Latin study and Greco-Roman references were common, visible in mottos, coins, and a culture that constantly borrowed symbols like Liberty and Columbia to explain what the new republic hoped to become.

Then we dig into the founders’ political education: why Athens mattered as an early democracy, why it also terrified later thinkers, and why the Roman Republic often became the more practical model for stability, offices, and restraint. Joanna also explains the historical accident that shaped the curriculum for generations: the West kept Latin while Greek became harder to access until the Renaissance. Along the way, we point teachers and curious readers to foundational sources, including John Adams’s love of Cicero, and we connect ideas to physical space through Jefferson’s neoclassical architecture at Monticello and the University of Virginia.

If you care about the US Constitution, civic education, the Federalist Papers, or why Washington, DC looks the way it does, this conversation gives you a clearer origin story. Subscribe for the rest of the series, share this with a history-loving friend, and leave a review with your take: which ancient lesson feels most urgent right now?

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Transcript

Series Premise And Guest Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to a special edition and series of Civics in the Year. I am just, I love learning things. And our guest today, Joanna Kenti, is going to lead us through a series. And I'm really excited because it's a lot of things that I am not familiar with. So I get to be a learner in this. And Joanna and I talked, and we kind of came up with this series idea of the lore of the founding, right? Because as wonderful as the ideas of our founders were, they were not original. They all came from somewhere. So before we get started in our very first episode of this series, introduction to classical history, I want Joanna to introduce herself. We already started talking before this, and I had to make sure I hit record because these conversations are just so fun. So, Joanna, can you please introduce yourself for our guests? Yeah. Or for our listeners. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 1:07

Thank you so much, Liz. I'm very happy to be here and excited to get into this topic. My name is Joanna Kenti. I am coming here. I'm sort of going back to my days as a classics professor. I was an academic for a few years. I mostly taught at the University of New Hampshire. I taught Latin, ancient Greek, Roman history, some Greek mythology, a little bit of a lot of different topics. And in 2020, I left academia and I started doing civic education instead, which is how I learned about civics in a year. And I'm so grateful for what you all are doing with the podcast.

Joanna’s Path From Classics To Civics

SPEAKER_02 1:48

And I am currently doing a couple different projects, but one of them is writing for The Renovator, which is a newsletter about our democracy, ways to make our institutions work better, realize the promise of the constitution and our founding. And I write a news roundup about civic education for that. So I hope everybody will check it out.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yes. And we will put the link to the renovator in all of the episodes that we do with Joanna. Joanna, I'm so excited to talk to you about this. So when we talk about classical history, what does classical mean today?

SPEAKER_02 2:29

Yeah, so I'm gonna approach that from a couple different ways. Because when we talk about like classic books, most of us just imagine great books, and classics can mean that. A classics department at a university refers to the study of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. It also applies to Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking cultures all over the Mediterranean Sea region that covers Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Time-wise, we're talking. I'm gonna get in a fight with a lot of classicists right now. Um time-wise,

What “Classical” Really Means

SPEAKER_02 3:07

we're talking roughly 800 BCE or so, when we start getting written literature and history in Greek through about the 300s CE. There are definitely people in classics departments studying before that, after that. But that's kind of the core. So I went to grad school to get my PhD in classical studies, which meant that I had to take exams in ancient Greek and in Latin. So that's classical studies. I focused on literature, history, politics, but I also took courses in religion, art, and archaeology, different aspects of those civilizations. And those civilizations drew a lot on others in like the Near East, Egypt, the Old Testament, and the New Testament are being written around the same time, but I didn't study those languages. So those would be in other departments, even though the cultures were in contact at the time. Yeah, classics departments, it's kind of a funny discipline. It's only actually existed since like 19th century Germany. And some departments are rebranding themselves as ancient Mediterranean studies. There's like a lot of different ways to think about it. But but those are the basic outlines. And then classical literature is like a little bit of a different term. So in Greek or in Latin, we talk about a classical period of the language. So languages change all the time, right? And different people in different places speak them differently. So there are lots of different dialects of ancient Greek. Latin is spoken very differently in like North Africa versus Greece versus Rome versus Spain. Classical Greek, we think about like Plato's dialogues, where Socrates is a philosopher as a speaking character, or maybe like the Greek tragedies of Sophocles, so Oedipus. In art, we might think about like the Parthenon and these like really famous monuments. Those are all from about like the fifth or fourth century BCE. And then on the Latin side, we get a classical period. That's Julius Caesar, it's Cicero, Virgil's Aeneid. Those are from like the first century BCE in Rome. And what we mean by classical is that those periods of the language are thought to be very artistically sophisticated. The works of literature that are being produced are very intellectually rich, and they just keep speaking to us thousands of years later in ways that are really provocative and generative and important. So a classical text can refer to that time period, that style of language, that moment in the language, and also like a literary kind of high point.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

That is it's so interesting. And I appreciate too that like yes, there's a time period, and some people might like play with that time period. And I think this is why I just love the study of history so much, is because it tells us so many stories. So when we're looking at 18th century America, right, we're looking back at our founding. What does classical education mean in 18th century America?

SPEAKER_02 6:36

So a lot of American colonists at that time are getting certainly a fair amount of Latin and maybe some Greek, as early as like their secondary education, maybe even earlier from tutors that they might have at their home. When they go to school, they might be learning Latin. It was just considered to be one of the building blocks of a good education in the 18th century American colonies and in most of Western Europe. They're inher inheriting this really long traditions of like medieval monasteries where reading and teaching and copying by hand manuscripts

Classical Education In Early America

SPEAKER_02 7:16

of all these texts. That's why we have them today, is because people kept copying them. You know, paper doesn't last that long. So someone like Cicero, I worked on Cicero when I was an academic researcher. He was a lawyer, a politician, a philosopher, and he wrote a lot. And in the medieval period, in monasteries in like Italy and France, they were just copying Cicero over and over. The universities like Oxford or the university in Bologna in Italy, some of the first universities in the world, they're also teaching a lot of Latin, less Greek. Greek is kind of less common until the Renaissance. And one of the quotations I really love is from a scholar, Caroline Winterer, who wrote a book called The Mirror of Antiquity about how the kind of classical past was all around people in the 18th and 19th century in America. And she said, if we could spend a day with an elite American woman of the early republic, it might go something like this. And then she imagines this woman is sitting and holding a wedgewood teacup that has a Roman cupid or an acanthus leaf, part of Greco-Roman art. She might open a magazine, she might read a story about Roman history, so about the Sabine women of ancient Rome. She might find an ode to Columbia, who is the personified goddess who represents the new world, discovered by Columbus, so hence Columbia. She might read to her children from Plutarch or Homer, both ancient authors. Those are books she might have read in a female academy when she was a teenager. She might go in the afternoon to a market with coins emblazoned with the goddess Liberty. So before we had Abraham Lincoln on our pennies in this country, we had Liberty, who is a Roman goddess of freedom. And then she would be walking in the shadow of classical buildings. Here I'm based out of Philadelphia. So the building I always think about is like the first national bank. Beautiful marble building, columns in the front, this triangular pediment on top, very Greek looking. And the coins that Caroline Winterer talks about also have Latin on them. So later we get e pluribus unum before they would declare that this new nation was Rome reborn in a novus order seclorum, a new order of the ages. So it was just all around people at that time. It was one of the things you learned about in school was Greek and Roman history, literature, the language, much more common as a part of education than it is today.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

It's so interesting because when you were talking about Colombia, I was like, oh, the District of Columbia. Like I was just in Philadelphia when you're talking about the first national bank, like I can very easily see all of these things. So when we're looking at, you know, influences on 18th century America and our founding and these Greek and Roman influences, can you speak a little bit more about that? Because again, I don't know a whole lot about it, but as you were talking, I like started to pick up on things. So what are some other influences, both Greek and Roman?

SPEAKER_02 10:58

I think a lot of the influences I taught a class when I taught at the University of New Hampshire about the political influence of Greece and Rome on the founders. So when they're thinking about writing a new constitution, as you said in your intro, like they don't want to start from scratch. They've been reading a lot of Enlightenment philosophy about the importance of individual liberty, life liberty and property, the rights of human beings and the social contract. So they have a lot of contemporary ideas, but they also look further back to classical Athens, which was a democracy, and to the Roman Republic, a period when the Romans also had a popular government. And they think those are really useful models to look at, both for what we should do and

Greece And Rome In The Founders’ Minds

SPEAKER_02 11:45

what we definitely don't want to do. So neither one of those regimes lasted forever. So, like, what caused them to fall apart? The Greeks also start this tradition of what we might call political science or political theory, like thinking about how humans relate to each other abstractly. And if you had to think theoretically, like what is the best form of government for human beings, what might it look like? And how do we decide what's best? Is it is the same form of government the best for all people? Or does it depend on what country you're in or even what climate you're in? Was the conversation they had. Like, what's the culture you're coming in with? And those conversations were very much on people's minds in the colonies as they're thinking about declaring independence. If we're giving up the British constitution, we now have to write our own. Like, how do we think about doing that?

SPEAKER_00 12:47

So, why then is Rome a more important model for the founders than Greece? Because I always thought that Greece was like Greek democracy, and that really was the foundation. But Rome is more important, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:04

I would say it is some of it is on purpose and some is by accident. Let's put it that way. So the on-purpose part, Athenian democracy had a lot of good things about it, but it was not a very stable form of government. And the Athenian democracy basically destroys itself from the inside with a series of like really bad decisions. Some of them are, you know, they go to war

Why Rome Beat Athens As A Model

SPEAKER_02 13:34

when they shouldn't. They treat their allies in wars very badly. And the the longer Athenian democracy goes, we have histories from that period. Uh Thucydides is the main one. And then Plato will kind of look back on it from a generation later and say it was just a time of really intense chaos that you would get this group of people together to make a decision about politics. And somehow their energy would feed off each other, and certain politicians would take advantage of them and whip them up into this frenzy and turn them into a mob. And you just had no idea what they would decide to do, and they weren't making good rational decisions. So, although the idea of democracy was very promising and for part of Athenian history, did a lot of very impressive things, produced incredible art, architecture, literature. But in terms of social stability and peace, kind of left something to be desired.

unknown 14:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:46

And Greece had a radical direct democracy where citizens were voting regularly on politics. At certain points, they were choosing people to make political decisions by lottery. So anybody in Athens might be called to serve. The Greek world was pretty vast, but included what had been the Persian Empire after Alexander the Great went on his conquest through Persia. He got all the way to like Pakistan or India before he had to turn around because his soldiers mutinied. But he so there's a huge Greek world out there. Many languages spoken within it, but Greek was kind of the official language. The Roman Empire conquers and to some extent absorbs that half of the empire. And then the Roman Empire also includes the West, so France, Spain, eventually England, North Africa. On the Western side, like Latin is widely spoken, but Latin doesn't quite take root on the eastern half. And as the Roman Empire goes on, this is post-republic, this is while emperors are ruling, the empire is too big to be controlled centrally from Rome anymore. And it splits in half. And functionally, it's a Greek half and a Latin half. The Latin half falls, Rome is sacked by invaders, the Goths, and kind of turns into what we now know as like European countries and a series of different kingdoms. The eastern half continues going, like is still the Eastern Roman Empire up through the fall of Constantinople. So we call it the Byzantine Empire, but they called themselves the Roman Empire. Anyway, it's the Eastern Roman Empire that is still speaking Greek after the city of Rome is sacked. And the western half of the empire forgets how to read Greek for the most part for like a thousand years. Oh until the Renaissance, when it's sort of rediscovered. A lot of scholars actually come over when the Byzantine Empire falls, they come into Europe bringing Greek with them. But yeah, for that, so the sort of intellectual tradition of classics in in Western Europe was mostly Latin and not Greek. Greek is also like a more challenging language and has a separate alphabet. And you know, for all those reasons, it wasn't taught as widely as Latin was. So that's the accidental reason why Rome is a more important model.

How The West Lost Greek

SPEAKER_00 17:53

So if I am a teacher and I am looking for some primary sources that kind of talk about the classics and connecting them to my classroom, where could I look for our founders?

SPEAKER_02 18:07

So two of the letters I quote from a lot, you I mean, you'll see allusions to classical literature and history all over the place in the founding documents. John Adams has a lot of really great quotations about the classical past. John Adams was like a lifelong Cicero fanboy. This is one of the things I really appreciate about John Adams, is that he and I really love spending time with the works of Cicero. Because Adams had been a lawyer like Cicero.

Founder Sources Teachers Can Use

SPEAKER_02 18:40

He was also an orator and a politician like Cicero. So he wrote to his friend Benjamin Rush, the famous doctor. I should as soon think of closing all my window shutters to enable me to see, as of banishing the classics to improve Republican ideas. So the classics are like a window into the idea of how to set up a government for people to govern themselves. So that's one of Adams' letters. He also writes in 1804, he's kind of looking back on his time at Harvard and remembering what he was doing then, what he was reading. I mean, he's watching his kids and grandkids grow up and thinking about their education too. And reflecting on his time at Harvard, he says that mathematics and natural philosophy attracted most of my attention when I was there, which I have since regretted because I was destined to a course of life in which those sciences, mathematics and natural philosophy, have been of little use, but the classics would have been of great importance. And I think this is so funny. John Adams is like, you know, I actually studied too much STEM at Harvard is the main problem. Because I don't need STEM in my day-to-day work. My day-to-day work is government. And for that, like classics would have been more practical. I think that's very funny because we think of classics as less practical today. But it turns out when you're writing constitutions and governing a country, you know, Greek and Roman political theory, pretty, pretty good stuff to read.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Yeah, well, and you say that, and I'm thinking back to the Federalist Papers. Like we've done a bunch of episodes on the Federalist Papers, and I feel like there are tales within the Federalist Papers of these, you know, founders of Madison and Hamilton and John Jay saying, like, here's what's happened. Like, again, we're not starting from scratch. We have these lessons from, you know, Rome and from Greece. I want to ask another question too. So, one of my very favorite things is I love presidential libraries and I love presidential houses. And I don't know that I have a favorite because I feel like there's pieces of all of them that I love, but Monticello, right? Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and being able to be on the campus of UVA and looking at that, those are that's classical architecture, correct?

SPEAKER_02 21:17

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you'll see a lot of classical architecture around DC, around our federal building. The Capitol, I don't know if you've ever looked at like the Capitol kind of pediments, the triangle above the columns where all these statues are. Yes. There's like a statue of liberty. I mean the Statue of Liberty, also a classical

Jefferson And Neoclassical Architecture

SPEAKER_02 21:38

reference, but there's an image of the goddess liberty of justice. So they're borrowing a lot of classical imagery. But yeah, Thomas Jefferson like takes this obsession to a very different level. He he said, so he spent a lot of time in France during the Revolutionary War, and he went to the city of Nîmes, and he talks about like falling in love, like Falling romantically in love with this building, the Maison Care, which is an Augustan Roman temple, that just this perfect little temple with columns and white marble. And he he said, you know, everyone in the city of Nîmes must have thought he was insane because he would just sit there staring at this building for hours. When he comes home, I should say part of the irony of these classical buildings now is that we do imagine them as white marble. In antiquity, they were actually very brightly painted. And so they would have looked quite different. There are a lot of like reconstructions if you go on Google some of these temples looked at looked like. But Jefferson didn't know that. So we get his sort of imagined version. So he comes home, he helps design the Virginia State House based on the Maison Care. And then for his own home at Monticello, as you described, he's also looking at a classical building. In that case, he's looking at the Pantheon in Rome. The Pantheon, the first pantheon, was built under the Emperor Augustus, but the one we know now was built under the Emperor Hadrian. So after the time of the Republic. And it's supposed to be kind of a temple to all the gods. But if you've been there, it's a huge circular building with a dome. The construction of the dome is really interesting, how they constructed a dome in antiquity. And there's a hole, a round hole in the center of the dome called the Oculus, the eye. So light comes into the pantheon that way. And Jefferson looked again at the pantheon and sort of fell in love with it. And so he decides to build one for himself at his home in Monticello. He makes some adjustments to it, but the general principle is the same of a porch, a rectangular porch in the front with columns in it, and then this dome behind it. And UVA, the University of Virginia, which he is instrumental in establishing, uh, he also built a replica, essentially, of the pantheon, which is the rotunda at UVA. Both of them have more brick, so it looks a little bit more federal, federalist architecture rather than straight classical. But yeah, we get mini pantheons all over the states.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

It's just so cool because I remember the first time. I've been to Monticello a couple times, but I remember the first time going and being like, this is not something because I again I'm on the West Coast. We do not have a lot of Greek architecture out here. Um but it was it's so interesting again how how the founders were so influenced, you know, by these Greek and Roman, so not even just literature, but thought and architecture. So, my kind of closing here, what happens when a republic looks backward in order to move forward?

SPEAKER_02 25:09

I think one of the good things that can happen is that they're trying to draw on lessons from the past about the types of challenges that arise when people try to govern themselves. In antiquity, there's a really great passage in Herodotus's Histories. He's a Greek historian, the one of the first historians. In fact, we call him the father of history. He imagines Persians in the Persian Empire debating what the best form of government is. And we get

Looking Backward To Move Forward

SPEAKER_02 25:44

versions of that debate in a lot of later works too. And they sort of agree like monarchy is pretty great when you have a good king, but you often don't. And when you have a bad king, it's pretty bad. Yeah. You could sort of spread power out among a few people. Think of it as an aristocracy, a rule by the best. But often those few people will fight amongst each other. Sometimes they're just like not actually the best people, they're just the wealthiest people. Sometimes they don't really serve the interests of the whole society. So actually, if you want to serve the interests of the whole society, you really want the whole society to have a voice in government, popular government, which is democracy and rule by the people. That kind of thinking, thinking about what kind of government will achieve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for a population, it's really helpful to look back in order to look forward and think about, you know, how are we going to set ourselves up for success? The other part, I'm thinking of a book, a couple of books by Carl Richard about classics and the founders. And he says he gets the sense sometimes that, you know, they're sitting in the Continental Congress, they're saying, we got to write a declaration of independence, we got to write constitutions. We want to differentiate ourselves from England, right? Like the whole point of this exercise is to get away from English government. There are a lot of things about English government we like, but we don't want to acknowledge that. Let's look at this further ancient model. And also the ancient model, you know, the the classical past carries a certain amount of like cultural capital with it, right? So if you're in the 13 colonies on the borders of, you know, the wilds of North America, it might make you feel a little bit better about yourself. If you can say, yes, we're living in the wilds of North America, but you know what? We can still build classical buildings and invoke classical literature and have a serious, quality, rigorous education in Latin. So he says that he thinks there's a little bit of defensiveness in the founders choosing to say this is the heritage we are invoking, we are quoting from classical models. It's not just that we have inherited them, but they're the ones we want you to focus on. So it's a little bit of a bait and switch, potentially.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

It sounds so petty. And this is again, this is why I love digging into things like this, because I think that we often have these visions of like who our founders were, and you know, these like demigods, but I mean, they're just people, right? And Joanna, I'm so I'm just so excited to explore. I have like post-it notes everywhere because I hear something and I want to do these deep dives. So we're doing again some really fun Lord of the Founding episodes. So, our next episode, we're actually going to talk about the founding of the Roman Republic and kind of this, you know, story about overthrowing a king. So, Joanna, thank you so much again for giving us this introduction and listeners, get ready for episode two.

SPEAKER_02 29:30

Well, thank you for letting me like nerd out about Greek and Roman things, my favorite thing to do. Thank you so much.