Sadly, I must be rather blunt: Aristotle had almost no direct influence on the Founding or the founding generation…

Happiness: Did the Greeks 

and the Founders Share a Definition?

by Bradley J. Birzer

The Nicomachean Ethics, Founding Fathers, and Human Happiness 

The Question: What has the Ethics to do with the Declaration?

As the subtitle indicates, we are to examine whether or not Aristotle spoke to the founding generation. Sadly, I must be rather blunt: Aristotle had almost no direct influence on the Founding or the founding generation. And, when he did speak to them, he spoke through his logic and rhetoric first, his politics, second, and his Ethics almost certainly not at all.

This is not in any way to suggest that the ancients had nothing to say to the Founders. They had quite a bit to say, and the Founders had quite a bit to hear. Looking to the ancient world, through the eyes of a Christianized and reformed Europe, the founders overall desired a the purification of what they inherited: the western or European (Anglo-Saxon-Celtic, but larger as well) common wealth–a republic rooted in right reason, first principles, and the Natural Law.

As most Americans understood Providence in the eighteenth century, God had written the republican principles of the American drive for independence into nature herself. “We do not by declarations change the nature of things, or create new truths, but we give existence, or at least establish in the minds of the people truths and principles which they might never have thought of, or soon forgot. If a nation means its systems, religious or political, shall have duration, it ought to recognize the leading principles of them in the front page of every family book,” a leading Anti-Federalist wrote in the aftermath of the war for Independence.

Unlike today, the world of antiquity spoke volumes to the Americans of the 18th and early nineteenth centuries, with figures such as Cicero especially guiding gently by commands, encouragements, and prohibitions.

As Forrest and Ellen McDonald have written: when an American student entered college (usually at age 14 or 15) in the time leading up to the American revolution, he would need to prove fluency in Latin and Greek. He would need to “read and translate from the original Latin into English ‘the first three of [Cicero’s] Select Orations and the first three books of Virgil’s Aeneid’ and to translate the first ten chapters of the Gospel of John from Greek into Latin, as well as to be ‘expert in arithmetic’ and to have a ‘blameless moral character.’” [McDonald and McDonald, Requiem, pp. 1-2]

“Furthermore, Americans who had had any schooling at all had been exposed to eight- and ten-hour days of drilling, at the hands of stern taskmasters, in Latin and Greek. This was designed to build character, discipline the mind, and instill moral principles, in addition to teaching language skills. (Educated French military officers who served in the United States during the Revolution found that even when they knew no English and Americans knew no French, they could converse with ordinary Americans in Latin).” [McDonald and McDonald, Requiem, pp. 5]

Just to offer one example of the extent to which the average American (the MOST average American) understood the world of the classics: In 1786, when there was a dispute about Alexander Pope’s translations of Homer’s Iliad, The Massachusetts Spy printed Pope’s translation on one side and the Greek on the other, allowing Americans “the opportunity to decide for themselves” if it was good or not. [McDonald and McDonald, Requiem, pp. 5]

And, we can think of more tangible examples. The U.S. Capitol is a Roman Republican building–it is not patterned after the Hanging Gardens, or the Taj Mahol, or the Mayan Pyramids, or English Parliament, but after the architecture of the Roman Republic ; the employment of the term “Senate” (from Latin—“old man”); of Congress (probably from Latin for “come together”, but might be related to Anglo-Saxon “witan”); and the Fasces (Latin for “bundle”).

Or, perhaps, we might think of Alexander Hamilton’s pseudonym, later adopted by Madison and James Jay as well, “Publius.”

Even a relatively cursory perusal of The Federalist Papers (using the index to the Carey edition), though incorrectly believed to be important at the time (they became important, only in hindsight) reveals a number of interesting things:
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