Narrator: What if the key to understanding the American Revolution wasn't just about taxes and tea, but about a play? In the brutal winter of 1778, with the Continental Army starving at Valley Forge, General George Washington arranged for his soldiers to watch a performance of Cato, a Tragedy. The play, centered on a Roman statesman who dies for liberty rather than submit to the tyrant Julius Caesar, was a cultural touchstone. Its themes of virtue, sacrifice, and resistance to tyranny were not just entertainment; they were the very air the founders breathed. This deep, often overlooked connection to the classical world is the central subject of Thomas E. Ricks's book, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country. Ricks argues that to truly grasp the minds of the Revolutionary generation—their goals, their fears, and their profound contradictions—one must first understand the ancient ideas that shaped them.

Narrator: In 18th-century America, the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome were not distant, dusty subjects. They were a living part of the culture, shaping everything from architecture to personal relationships. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, designed his home at Monticello as a temple to classical ideals, with rooms reflecting Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian styles. When John Adams courted Abigail Smith, they wrote to each other using the classical pseudonyms Lysander and Diana. This immersion in classicism provided a shared political vocabulary and a set of core values, chief among them being "virtue."

For the founders, virtue was not about private morality but about public-spiritedness—a willingness to subordinate personal interest to the greater good of the republic. This concept, which appears over six thousand times in the founders' collected writings, was considered the "lynchpin" holding the new government together. However, their classical education was selective. They overwhelmingly preferred the Roman Republic to the perceived chaos of Greek democracy, admiring stoic figures like Cato and the orator Cicero. This preference would profoundly shape their vision for America, but it also came with a glaring blind spot. The classical world, which they so admired, was built on slavery. This allowed the founders to hold the contradictory position of championing liberty while owning other human beings, a hypocrisy starkly captured by Samuel Johnson's question: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

Narrator: George Washington, more than any other founder, embodied the Roman ideal of virtue. Lacking the formal university education of his peers, he was acutely aware of his "defective education." Yet, he compensated with immense discipline and a practical intelligence honed by experience. He consciously modeled himself after Cato the Younger, the Roman statesman celebrated for his integrity, self-discipline, and unwavering commitment to the republic. Washington cultivated a public persona of lofty distance and unshakeable honor, a strategy that commanded respect and authority.

This carefully constructed reserve is vividly illustrated by an incident at the Constitutional Convention. Gouverneur Morris, doubting that anyone could be truly familiar with the general, was challenged by Alexander Hamilton to slap Washington on the back in a casual greeting. Morris tried, placing a hand on Washington's shoulder. The general reacted with an icy stare, and Morris retreated, later admitting he would never dare repeat the act. This was not mere aloofness; it was the deliberate performance of a Roman-style leader, a man who placed the dignity of his office and his country above personal familiarity. By embodying the virtues of Cincinnatus—the Roman general who relinquished power to return to his farm—Washington established the crucial precedent of civilian control over the military, securing his reputation as the noblest Roman of them all.

Narrator: While Washington modeled himself on the stoic Cato, John Adams aspired to be the American Cicero. A brilliant and often prickly lawyer from Massachusetts, Adams was an unconventional founder. He never owned slaves, came from a more humble background than the Virginia planters, and was an early, fervent advocate for revolution. He believed the real revolution happened "in the Minds of the People" years before the first shots were fired at Lexington, and he saw his role as guiding that intellectual shift.

Adams was obsessed with the life of Cicero, the Roman orator who rose to power not through birthright but through sheer talent and eloquence. He saw a direct parallel between Cicero's defense of the Roman Republic against the Catiline conspiracy and his own struggle against British tyranny. In 1765, as the Stamp Act enraged the colonies, Adams wrote a series of anonymous essays urging his fellow citizens to "dare to read, think, speak and write." He called on them to study history and natural law to understand their rights. Like Cicero, Adams was also deeply self-aware, confessing in his diary that vanity was his "cardinal Vice and cardinal Folly." This blend of towering ambition and anxious self-reflection made him a profoundly human figure, a man who desperately wanted to be a great statesman and was willing to study the ancients to learn how.

Narrator: If Washington and Adams looked primarily to Rome, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison turned their gaze more toward Greece and the broader Enlightenment. Jefferson, a man of Romantic sensibilities who once told Adams, "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past," was particularly drawn to Greek philosophy. The Declaration of Independence, his masterpiece of political prose, is deeply infused with the ideas of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, especially in its famous phrase, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

James Madison, however, took the study of the past to a new, more systematic level. Concerned about the failures of past republics, he made a deliberate choice to attend the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, over the more traditional William & Mary. Princeton, led by the Scottish minister John Witherspoon, was a hotbed of radical political thought and drew students from across the colonies, fostering a uniquely "continental" perspective. There, Madison undertook a deep study of ancient and modern political systems. He concluded that the classical belief that republics could only survive in small, homogenous states was wrong. In his revolutionary argument in Federalist 10, Madison argued that a large, diverse republic was actually stronger because the multitude of competing interests, or factions, would prevent any single group from achieving tyrannical control. This was a radical break from classical thought and formed the intellectual bedrock of the new American Constitution.

Narrator: The brutal reality of the Revolutionary War severely tested the founders' classical ideals. At the outset, the cause was sustained by an appeal to public virtue. But as the war dragged on, Washington, watching his army freeze and starve at Valley Forge, came to a difficult realization. Virtue alone was not enough. "A small knowledge of human nature will convince us," he wrote to Congress, "that with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle." He argued that to sustain a long and bloody war, patriotism "must be aided by a prospect of interest or some reward."

This shift from relying on pure public-spiritedness to acknowledging the power of self-interest was a crucial evolution in the founders' thinking. It marked a move away from an idealized classical model toward a more pragmatic, modern understanding of governance. The British made the opposite mistake. When they evacuated Philadelphia in 1778, they abandoned thousands of Loyalists who had supported them, leaving them to the mercy of the returning rebels. This strategic blunder shattered Loyalist morale and demonstrated that in a war for allegiance, a government that fails to protect the interests of its supporters cannot hope to win.

Narrator: The election of 1800, which saw the peaceful transfer of power from the Federalist John Adams to the Republican Thomas Jefferson, marked the beginning of the end for the classical-republican era. The world of the founders, with its emphasis on a virtuous elite guiding the nation, was giving way to a more populist, democratic, and commercially-minded America. Figures like Alexander Hamilton felt this shift acutely, lamenting that "this American world was not made for me" shortly before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.

The unresolved contradiction of slavery continued to haunt the nation, culminating in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Jefferson heard the news of this debate "like a fire bell in the night," filling him with terror. He saw it as the "knell of the Union," regretting that the sacrifices of his generation were "to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons." As the 19th century progressed, American culture turned away from Rome and Athens. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans cared little for ancient history; they wanted to hear about themselves. The classical vision of the founders was being replaced by a new, more turbulent, and uniquely American reality.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from First Principles is that the United States was founded not just on Enlightenment ideals, but on a deep and purposeful engagement with the classical world. The founders were not abstract philosophers; they were practical statesmen who selectively used the lessons of Greece and Rome to build a new nation. They drew strength from classical examples of virtue and liberty, but they also inherited their fatal flaw in the acceptance of slavery. Ricks's work reveals that the founders' classical framework gave them a shared language and a set of principles to navigate the immense challenges they faced. The ultimate question the book leaves for today's readers is a challenging one: In an age of deep division and uncertainty, what are our first principles, and where do we turn for guidance?