The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment by Carl J. Richard (review)

98Rocky Mountain Review indulging in a melancholic reaction to the extinction of traditional elegy, refusing to let it be dead by proving how it haunts contemporary poems? Does the perception of genre conventions in otherwise non-formal poems help to redefine the genre, or simply confuse theme (of loss) for form (of elegy)? The labeling of a poem as elegy seems to be a readerly act more than a writerly one. What is at stake in proving the perpetuation of a genre? If poetic form does have a cultural function—and Ramazani argues that it does—it also has a politics. Patrolling genre boundaries simply creates literary outcasts; Paula Gunn Allen argues, as in her introduction to Spider Woman's Granddaughter, that western definitions of genre exist for exactly that purpose. Perhaps for Ramazani genre definition is a way of making his noncanonical choices (e.g., he opens by quoting Countee Cullen) more palatable to conservative audiences. If so, his book reinforces Allen's argument for examining the politics of genre—and the power of the critic's genre-act. CYNTHIA KIMBALL State University ofNew York, Buffalo CARL J. RICHARD. The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. 295 p. 1 he excitement must have been nearly unbearable. When British subjects in North American colonies opposed, then took up arms against King George Ill's "tyranny," and thereafter, victorious in rebellion, created, strengthened, and managed an American "federal republic," their leaders were consciously making history. They made, Carl Richard's book argues, a modern history by learning much from and in many ways emulating the history of the ancient Greeks and Romans, with whose states and statesmen the American leaders were closely acquainted. The Greek and especially Latin secular classics that had been the foundation of their schooling (and of most of their higher education) as gentlemen of the Enlightenment became now their predilection for entertainment, for moral edification, and for practical political caution and counsel. Cicero and Plutarch, above all, were demonstrably present throughout the Founding Fathers' thoughts, their speeches, and their writings both formal and informal; the anarchy of Athenian democracy (as criticized in the aristocratic sources) and the humble origin and rise of Rome, her decadence and fall, were at least as familiar to them as the English history of the preceding century, and seemed in some ways more pertinent to their American project. "It is my contention," Richard writes in the introduction, "that the classics exerted a formative influence upon the founders, both directly and through the mediation of Whig and American perspectives. The classics Book Reviews99 supplied mixed government theory, the principal basis for the U.S. Constitution. The classics contributed a great deal to the founders' conception of human nature" and provided them with "a sense of identity and purpose, assuring them that their efforts were part of a grand universal scheme" (7-8). This ambitious, impressive, and thoroughly satisfying book belongs less to literary than to political and intellectual history; for one thing, the classical authors most often cited are the historians and the statesmen, with ancient poets (other than Virgil) seldom mentioned, and playwrights noted very rarely indeed. Such a study will be particularly attractive to Americanist scholars—but fascinating also, one may hope, to all Americans who are at all curious about the foundation of the U.S. and about its founders themselves. Classicists will enjoy almost everything here and admire much, as will political philosophers and (non-statistical) political scientists . Students of the history of education should also take note of the major discussion of "The Classical Conditioning of the Founders," which constitutes chapter 1. Although over twenty "founders"—all men—are treated, and several of the more limited discussions are quite memorable (e.g., of George Washington and Addison's Cato, and of Washington as Farmer Cincinnatus), fewer than ten receive most of the author's attention: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Benjamin Rush. Jefferson, by far the best Hellenist and most sensitive antiquarian of them all, is predictably in the forefront, yet remains elusive. His thoughts on racial differences (96-98) are...