The Lore of the Founding: Checks And Balances in Rome

A republic doesn’t fail only because of enemies at the gates. It can fail because someone inside decides the rules are for other people. That’s the tension we wrestle with as we explore checks and balances, starting with the Federalist 51 idea that still cuts through every civics debate: human beings are not angels, so a government must be designed to control itself.

We tell two Roman Republic stories that make the stakes feel real. Coriolanus shows what happens when pride, class conflict, and wounded ego turn public office into a personal grudge match. Cincinnatus shows the opposite: a leader granted near-kingly emergency power who uses it quickly, then gives it back without being forced. That legend becomes a major American reference point, especially in the way people compare Cincinnatus to George Washington stepping away after war and after the presidency.

Then we zoom out with Polybius, the historian who argues that Rome survives Hannibal and Carthage because its mixed constitution ties monarchy-like leadership, aristocratic deliberation, and democratic accountability together so no single part can run wild for long. We also take on the fear behind the theory: anacyclosis, the cycle that can drag aristocracy into oligarchy and democracy into mob rule. From there, we connect Rome’s model to the US separation of powers, the bicameral legislature, the original design of the Senate, the 17th Amendment, and the founders’ ongoing argument about natural aristocracy versus artificial aristocracy.

If you’ve ever wondered whether power can truly be balanced or only managed through constant adjustment, this conversation gives you a clearer vocabulary and better stories to think with. Subscribe for more, share this with a friend who loves history and civics, and leave a review with your answer: what check matters most when ambition starts to spike?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome back to Civics in a year. We have Joanna Kenti back with us, and we are talking about the lore of the founding. And again, I love doing this because I am learning so much. I am coming into this as a true learner. So today we're talking about checks and balances. And Joanna, the big question here, how do you build a government that can control itself?

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Yeah, this is like the eternal question, right? Of like how human beings who don't agree on everything can live in community with each other when they need to make decisions together. So one primary source that we're going to come back to is Federalist Papers 51 later on.

The Checks And Balances Question

SPEAKER_00 0:47

And it's such a good line. Either Hamilton or Madison, I think, in that one, asks, What is government? But the greatest of all reflections on human nature, because if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If we were all perfect, we wouldn't have laws to like tell us how to act with each other. We would just do it. So he says, if angels were to govern men, you also wouldn't need government. You wouldn't have to control government because angels control themselves. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this. You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself. So yeah, that's what we're going to talk about today. So great. So good. Yeah, this is like one of my favorite little tidbits of Greek philosophy, actually, Greek political philosophy, because I think it's super helpful. But yeah, I thought we might actually start with a couple of Roman stories. The Romans tend to think about everything through stories rather than theory, and which I love. And so, like in the last episode, we talked about the founding of the Roman Republic. So it's governed by magistrates. Mostly the two consuls are like the chief magistrates every year. They have a senate that's making a lot of the decisions, and then they have a popular assembly. So there's like a democratic element that's where the people, the populists, the kind of publica part of the republic is reflected. There are power struggles within those groups and like inside them, across them, all the time. Power struggles are just constant in

Coriolanus And Power Gone Wrong

SPEAKER_00 2:34

the Roman Republic because people with power do not always use it well. And that's another one of those like great eternal questions of human nature. So I like to think about this with two stories. Coriolanus is the first one, and Cincinnatus is the second. Okay, so we've got a good example and a bad example.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Which I have heard of Cincinnatus, but I have not heard of the other one.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Coriolanus, there is actually a Shakespeare play, Coriolanus, but it's not exactly the same as this story. There's a story, there's one version in Libby's history, and then there's a life of Coriolanus by Plutarch, a later Greek writer who wrote a lot of biographies. Coriolanus, he's like kind of your classic, arrogant patrician. And he's living under the Roman Republic, but I think like in his heart, he wishes he was born into a monarchy. Like that, that's he kind of missed his time. And he's a very powerful senator. He's been consul and he thinks that everyone should just do everything he says. He's pretty offensive to the people. The people are complaining that they're all in debt, they're all being oppressed by the senators and the wealthy citizens of Rome. It's very unfair. They're being asked to go to war too often and they're neglecting their own farms. So they actually end up kind of going on general strike and seceding and saying, We're not gonna come show up to fight in your wars anymore or participate in politics until you concede some protections to the people. There's a speaker, Menennius Agrippa, who gets up in front of them and says, This is basically like, you know, the stomach of the human body revolting and saying, like, you arms and legs, you think you're doing all the work, but you can't survive without us. So like we have to act as one body politic here and make sure that everyone has what they need. Coriolanus is like, no, I think they're being obnoxious. We shouldn't give them anything. Forget it. And so the people turn on him, essentially. And he says, Well, if you don't want me, fine, I will go join the other tribe down the road that's invading Rome, and I'm gonna come attack the city that I'm from. So, like, just maximum petulance and arrogance. Yeah. And actually, the only thing that stops him is his mother walks out of the city toward his invading army, calls him out, and says, like, I'm ashamed of you. How could you possibly do this to your homeland? And so he's so embarrassed that he stops. But so that's kind of like a bad example of how people react to having power. The good example is Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus has also been consul. He is very successful as a military commander, but what he really cares about is his like very small farm on the banks of the Tiber outside the city. So he goes and retires, he's farming. There's an invasion by another one of these kind of local tribes. The Senate says, We gotta appoint a dictator. A dictator is a six-month kind of emergency martial law sole commander. And we should go get Cincinnati to do it. He's the best commander, he's gonna sort this out in no time. So they go to his farm. He says, Hang on, I gotta put on my toga so that I'm like properly attired for politics.

Cincinnatus And Returning Power

SPEAKER_00 6:14

They say, We need you to be dictator. He says, Okay. He comes back to Rome, he takes control of the army, and he defeats the enemy in 11 days and resolves the emergency. He's very efficient. At which point he says, I'm done. I came what I did what I came to do. I'm gonna go back to my farm. It's harvest season, like I got things to do, forget it. He has sold, he basically has as much power as a king ever had over Rome. He his term is six months, but he's like, I don't need it. I don't want it. This is not what's important to me. Cincinnati becomes a really popular sort of comparison for George Washington because I was gonna say, at the end of the Revolutionary War, I mean, he has just won us independence from Britain. He could have done anything, he could have had any position he wanted, and he's like, I just want to go home. I want to go back to Mount Vernon. I never wanted all of this, you know, fanfare. And then he kind of does the same thing when he retires from the presidency and he doesn't seek a third term. He certainly could have. And I don't think anyone could have beaten him.

unknown 7:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

But he's like, he gives his farewell address. There are a lot of things he's still concerned about, but he says, like, I've I've done what I can. I don't I didn't take this position for, you know, power unending. I don't think it's healthy. And so he chooses again to have that Cincinnati moment of handing back his power. It's actually a statue in the Capitol of Washington dressed up as Cincinnatus. I think it's in the basement because it was too heavy for the floor. It was supposed to be in the rotunda, but it was too heavy. So it's in the basement. Seriously? It's a very odd statue. It's it's worth Googling to like look at this thing. But he's handing back his sword, saying, I'm gonna retire and go back to Mount Vernon. So there are plenty of people in Rome who would abuse power if they could. That's the point. Like, this is normal for the Roman Republic. People have a lot of pride. They have they become famous for doing great things in the Republic, especially in the military. They gain a lot of wealth that way. And sometimes they like get a big head and somebody has to take them down a peg. However, the Roman Constitution itself, not it's not a written document, but like their system of government also has like a system of checks and balances built into it that was very influential on the US Constitution and on the constitutions of our states, and in that period of like the Enlightenment in general. So I wanted to get into that a little bit too. For this, this is mostly coming from a historian called Polybius. He's Greek, he's living a little bit after the classical period, and he's actually taken prisoner by the Romans when the Romans conquer Greece. And so he's living in Rome, but he's not from there. And he's kind of looking at Rome as an outsider, and he decides he wants to write this history of how Rome came to be the superpower in the Mediterranean, how it came to conquer that whole area within a very short period of time. So he says, like 53 years, you go from never heard of Rome to it's the only imperial power in the Mediterranean.

Polybius On Surviving Hannibal

SPEAKER_00 9:47

At one point in Rome's history, he says it really looked like it was all over. And it's when Rome is invaded by Carthage. Carthage is a city in North Africa, it's where Tunisia is now, and it was also governed by a form of republic. We don't know that much about it, but it was another one of these ancient republics that like James Madison, John Adams talk about as an example of popular sovereignty. So Carthage has an empire too and controls most of Spain. In the year 218 BCE, they fight with the Romans over Spain, and the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca wins, and he decides he's going to invade Italy. So, together with his war elephants all the way from Africa, he marches them over the Alps. They've actually found maybe archaeological evidence of this happening, and just rampages through Italy. Roman generals keep trying to fight him off, and he is this military genius who will just pin them down in unfavorable landscapes. He like catches them in fog, he catches them in a dust cloud, just mowing down Roman armies up and down Italy. And it's terrifying. You've got people like running through the streets of the city of Rome screaming about military disaster. And at that point, Polybius is like, let me take a step back here. This is when you have to really appreciate the Roman constitution and their system of checks and balances. Because a weak system of government does not survive this. Like it falls. We never get Rome the superpower. But their constitution allows them to survive because it brings the whole people together and lets them kind of work together to solve the crisis. So Polybius is like, you know, any of you who have read your Plato and Aristotle, you know that there are three basic systems of government. There is monarchy, so rule by one king. There is aristocracy, which is rule by a select group of a few elites. Aristocracy, aristocracy means rule by the best, Aristoi. And then there's democracy, which is rule by all of the citizens together. The demos is the people. Those philosophers all argue about which of those systems is best. They come up with different answers. So some people do think monarchy is the best. But they all agree that any one of those three systems can be good or bad. So if you have a good king, that's great. Like some people think that's the best form of government. You've got one very smart, principled leader who is making great decisions. Everything he says gets done. Everyone prospers. But if you have a bad king, that is maybe the worst possible form of government because he is violent, he's cruel, he's unfair, he makes decisions that no one can see coming. He like changes his mind from day to day, he's wasting money, and nobody can stop him from doing any of that. So that's really bad. With aristocracy, it's great when those people are actually the best, like the best educated, the most principled, but usually they end up hating each other and fighting amongst themselves, or they hoard money and power. One bad version of that is when it's just a few people who are not the best. That's an oligarchy. So then the whole country suffers under that bad form of government. And then with democracy, sometimes you end up with basically mob rule, where it's like a lot of people making a decision together, but they are not good decisions or guided by good principles. So Polybia says, you know, we've got the three systems of government and then their three bad forms. Polybia says, actually, if you study the world's constitutions, you will find that a state will cycle through all of these systems of government from good to bad in a certain order every time. And he calls this anaclosis. He thinks, you know, human beings probably started out with a monarchy because they were, you know, living in caves or whatever, and one man was stronger than the others. And so he ended up in charge of everything. And then at one point, like maybe that person or maybe the like son or daughter who took over for them, they started thinking, well, of course I should be the king. I can do whatever I want. And they started abusing their power.

The Cycle From Good To Bad

SPEAKER_00 14:56

So a few other slightly less powerful, but still powerful people banded together and said, We're going to work together to take that person down. Then you end up with an aristocracy. Those people have a good idea of what they want to do differently. Maybe they like govern pretty well for a while. Maybe like they or their descendants stop being the best. They start just being the few. They're not so great either. And then the body of people will rise up to overthrow them and say, we want to spread things out, spread out the power, spread out the money more equitably. Same thing happens. Democracy degrades into mob rule. And at that point, the only thing that can bring the society back together is a single strong ruler, and you revert back to monarchy. So Polybius thinks we're all just like doomed to this wheel of ancyclosis, of like cycling through forms of government. So this is where Polybius picks up the Romans. He says, here's the real genius of the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic is actually a mix of all three forms of government. So they sort of have a monarchy. If you, if all you saw in Rome, if you were visiting from another country and you saw the consuls in action, you'd be like, oh, Rome's a monarchy and that's the king. But if you went to a meeting of the Senate instead, you'd be like, oh, it's an aristocracy, because this is a few very wealthy elite citizens gathering together and ruling in a small group. But then you might go out and see an election and think, oh, wait, this is a democracy. And so actually, Rome

Rome’s Mixed Constitution Explained

SPEAKER_00 16:43

has a mixed constitution that incorporates the best elements of all three. And all three depend on the others to get anything done. And that's really important. That's the checks and balances part. So the people have the power to elect magistrates. So they choose the consuls they want. And they can give like special honors to the ones who do really well, or they can punish the ones who aren't good. They also have their own leaders, the tribunes who can veto some legislation. The Senate, most magistrates end up in the Senate after their terms of office. So, like, you kind of want to treat the Senate well. You're going to have to spend the rest of your life with those people. The Senate also can refuse to send money for military campaigns, somewhat like the U.S. Senate. And then the magistrates can tell the Senate what they need to talk about, what laws they ought to pass. And they're the ones actually conducting warfare. So there's this mixed constitution. Polybia says is why all of these elements of society were able to come together and face the threat of Hannibal and like hold together and say, no, we can still win this. And in fact, they do. They kind of have to take the winter off and like gather themselves and just like play for time for a little while. But eventually they get it together and they defeat Hannibal. That's the end of Carthage. Well, if they fight another war with Carthage later on, that's the end of Carthage. And so Rome becomes the superpower. So that's their like their version of checks and balances.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

I mean, that's the three branches of government, right? Like kind of. Kind of. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

So I mean, yeah, so we think of the three branches of government as executive, legislature, and judicial. The weird part about the Roman Republic, and actually it's not a great feature, is that they don't have a separate judiciary. So the judiciary is just like nowhere in this system. Yeah, it's a little confusing. What we did in our system was separate our legislature into two parts. So we have a bicameral legislature. Congress is the legislature, and it's split into the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senate is supposed to be the

Rome Versus Three Branches

SPEAKER_00 19:16

aristocracy in our mixed constitution. The Senate is smaller, it's like more prestigious, it's more select, it has more powers of appointments, impeachment. And then the House of Representatives is our democratic element because we're electing our representatives to go serve. And actually, if you read Article One of the Constitution, you'll see that when it was originally written, the Senate, the senators weren't directly elected at all. They were chosen by the state legislatures of their respective states. This is changed later on. So this is changed by the 17th Amendment, which is why we elect our senators now. But originally the idea was if you want to have an aristocracy in the Senate, it doesn't make sense for the same people to be electing them. You want the real experts in policy, so the state legislators, to elect the best and brightest among them to the Senate. So that was the idea behind Article One.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

So how does how do founders like John Adams use what Rome was doing and kind of create the system that we know as the American constitutional system?

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yeah, so I it seems pretty widespread as we come to Europe and the Americas at that point. It seems pretty widely agreed that a mixed constitution is the best. They have a mixed constitution too. And so in the United States, as soon as they declare independence, they start writing the state constitutions. Most of the states choose this bicameral system. So they have a Senate, just like the Roman Senate, that's supposed to be aristocratic. And then most of them also have a House of Representatives. I think eventually they all adopt a bicameral system, but they don't start out that way. And then so this Senate was supposed to be aristocratic. It's not really clear that it works out that way. So John Adams says in his defense. Of the constitutions in 1787. So this is leading up to writing our federal constitution. He says the rich, the wellborn, and the able in the United States acquire an influence among the people that will be too much for simple honesty and plain sense in a House of Representatives. And so the most illustrious of them must therefore be separated from the mass and placed by themselves in a Senate. So you're like sticking them in their own little corner so they can fight it out amongst each other, essentially. This is pretty

Adams And The Senate As Guardrail

SPEAKER_00 22:34

different from the sense of an aristocracy in Europe because we don't have landed gentry in the United States. We don't have titles. We don't have earls and barons and dukes running around. That said, we do still have people who are much wealthier than their neighbors, much more powerful. We have families with well-known names and politics who attract more like fame and support. So those people, when they get too much influence, he's like, stick them in the Senate. That's our solution. That only sort of works. So Jefferson, even before the federal constitution is written, he says in Virginia, like it's just not working out the way we wanted it to. Basically, we're getting the same group of people in both bodies of the legislature. The Senate is not different from the House in the way that it was supposed to be. And this is part of why we get the constitutional amendment, although it takes a long time to change the way the Senate is elected, because it's just it just doesn't pan out the way they hoped it would. And Jefferson and John Adams are actually still arguing about this as old men. So they like famously did not speak to each other for many years after Jefferson ran against Adams for president and beat him.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

But when they when they start talking again, I was gonna say they stopped talking because there was some mean stuff said in that election.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

Yes, they were yeah, not on speaking terms for a long time. But by 1813, they've like made up, mostly because now the people who are in charge of politics both of them hate. And so as old men, they can write judgy letters about no, everyone is making mistakes now, and no one is living up to the founding generation. So they're still writing about like what do you do with aristocrats in a in a democratic republic? And so Jefferson says, we agree that there is a natural aristocracy among men on the grounds of virtue and talents. So some people legitimately are better as political leaders than others. Jefferson is very engaged in making sure those people have free education so that they can rise to their full potential and become leaders. But he says there's also an artificial aristocracy that's founded on wealth and birth. And many of them do not have virtue or talents. The natural aristocracy, you really want to promote. You want to give those people pathways to advancement so you can benefit from their talents and their virtue. The artificial aristocracy, he says, is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. And Jefferson says, like, you've always said, John Adams, we can just stick them in the Senate and that will be fine. That will reduce their ability to wreak havoc on the rest of government. Jefferson says, I think that's not really enough. And so Jefferson actually favors direct election of the Senate because he says it is best to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, that is the fake best people, the artificial aristocracy. He wants the people to separate the wheat from the chaff and elect the real good and wise. In some instances, he says wealth may corrupt and birth may blind them, but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society. So he hopes that if you have the whole electorate choosing their aristocrats for the Senate, they might make better choices. It's not really clear that that worked either. But you know, it continues to be a problem of, you know, how do you empower the people with the most virtues and talents, but limit more problematic kinds of influence that you don't want.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

And and I think like looking back to Rome and like looking at our there's no perfect system, right? There's always going to be these bad actors, if you will, because we can look throughout American history, we can look throughout Roman history. And the conversation, I think, between the founders is really interesting, right? With with the Federalist Papers and the you know, the group of anti-federalists, these letters from Jefferson to Adams, which I think that whole the way they were against each other in the election of 1800, and then kind of this like almost healing because they had a mutual mutual hatred of who was running the government,

Jefferson On Natural Aristocracy

SPEAKER_01 27:38

right? Yes, you know, it really is. But it's interesting to look at the conversations that are had because you know, going back to that quote in Federalist 51, like men are not angels, right? And so it's never going to be perfect, but the conversations and the the trying things, and you know, the passing of the 17th amendment in 1913, like there's always remedies to it, but it is it's interesting. And I do want to ask, because I don't know that every listener knows you use the word oligarchy and you explain the other ones. What is like how do you define an oligarchy?

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Oligarchy is a rule by the few, and rule by a few, it sort of distinguishes from the others by number, so it's not mono, it's not one, and it's not many or the people, it's not demos. So oligoi just means few, but it is usually, especially by polybius, used to as kind of the counterpoint to aristocracy, so not the best, but a few who are not the best, gotcha, are in control of everything.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

So I guess some the kind of that closing is can power ever be truly balanced? Yeah, or is it just managed?

SPEAKER_00 29:13

Yeah, I there's a quote I really like from Cicero that John Adams actually uses in his Defense of the Constitutions, where Cicero talks about harmony between the orders of society, so like different classes of society as being like musical harmony. So he says different instruments in an orchestra, they all have different sounds. They might play in different keys, they have different tones, but when you get them all playing one piece together, it can sound very beautiful when they're all kind of listening to each other and contributing to the same project. But you're also making me think it's because I'm a baseball fan,

Harmony Through Adjustment And Ambition

SPEAKER_00 29:56

baseball is often called a game of adjustments. So, you know, hitters fall into certain habits and like get on a roll, but pitchers from opposing teams are like watching tape to see what those hitters like to hit, and then they stop throwing it to them. And so the good hitters adjust. And it's this constant back and forth, right? Constitutions are like that too, where one part of a mixed constitution might become too powerful or misuse its power for misuse its power in an irresponsible way, or an individual person like Coriolanus comes along and says, I don't care what I'm supposed to do. I don't have respect for other parts of this society. I don't have the sense that the body politic is one body that like survives or dies together. And adjustments have to be made in that case. The adjustments might always be different. Jefferson and Adams think that this problem of the artificial aristocracy is just something you have to keep adjusting to over time. Danielle Allen actually talks about this in modern constitutions, too. The oligarchy problem that systems, power tends to accrue to a certain group of people. And once they have power and money, more power and money flows their way. And that's a fact of life that constitutions have to constantly adjust for. So Madison, in that Federalist 51, the great line there is ambition must be made to counteract ambition. So you want to put people in our system in all three branches of government, the judiciary, the legislative, and the executive, who are gonna push as much as they can and be ambitious to do things in their branch of government. But then you've got two others to check them and say, no, we have ambition to be powerful. And so you can't tread on our powers. We're gonna use our powers to limit yours. So it doesn't always look like harmony. Sometimes it does look like branches fighting with each other or saying no or blocking something or fixing a transgression that one of the other branches has made.

unknown 32:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

I'm going back to the Cicero quote, you know, when you said that, all I could think about was the third graders who are learning to use the recorder and how they're all just kind of like, that's like the sound I I heard in my head. And I'm glad you're talking about like right, you monitor and you adjust, because time shows, you know, sometimes there's bad actors, sometimes there's good actors, and sometimes things need to change. And that's why our constitution has 27 amendments to it and why laws get passed or repealed because it's a constant, a constant thing. And that's why our constitution says more perfect, not perfect.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Yes. No final victories is yes, I've heard that described.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

Yeah. Ooh, that's a good one. No final victories. Thank you so much. Again, I just I love hearing these stories. And as as you're telling them, and even with Cincinnati's, like I had heard of him, and I know that like him and Washington were compared, but I never, you know, knew the story. And I I just love hearing all of this and starting to put all of these threads together. And now, even like a lot of the primary sources, you know, we talked about the letters between Adams and Jefferson, but now, even more, I'm starting to just understand them. And this is why we're doing this, right? The more information we have, yes, the lore is so good. Joanna, I am excited for our next episode. We're gonna be talking about Julius Caesar and the fall of the Republic.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

Talk about threats to constitutional balance. He is the big one.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Joanna, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

Thank you.