In Cincinnatus Garry Wills described the way in which post-revolutionary Americans sought to create a suitable image to represent George Washington and, by extension, the entire revolutionary generation.1 The result was the presentation of Washington in a toga, a visual statement of the republican nature of the American Revolution. The Revolution’s leader, tall and strong, carved in chaste white marble, wearing a toga was the incarnation of the true spirit of the Revolution, the representative of the sturdy farmers who left the plow to take up weapons against imperial oppression, and who then, like Livy’s hero Cincinnatus, their task accomplished, returned to their farms to continue the humble work of plowing and planting.
The image of Washington as Cincinnatus is a compelling one and yet in most details is quite wrong. In the first place, the statue itself, cold white marble, a striking reflection of Washington’s personality, is wrong, based on a misunderstanding of the actual appearance of ancient Roman statues. In fact, as art historians have demonstrated, Roman statues were not pure, chaste marble but painted in colors that we would label garish.2 In the second place, Washington was not a simple republican farmer but the owner of a large, slave-worked estate, the kind of wealthy individual characteristic of the imperial age of Rome, the people who acquired the small farms of men like Cincinnatus and combined them into latifundia worked by gangs of slaves.3
Finally, when the representatives of the Roman people came to request Cincinnatus to save them in their hour of crisis he was, according to Livy , “at work on his land – digging a ditch, maybe, or ploughing.” He was asked “to put on his toga and hear the Senate’s instructions,” so “he told his wife Racilia to run to their cottage and fetch his toga. The toga was brought, and wiping the grimy sweat from his hands and face he put it on ….”4 No one could imagine Washington wiping sweat from his face, digging a ditch, plowing a field, or sending Martha on an errand.5 In fact, representatives of the American rebels did not even have to come to Mount Vernon to offer Washington command of the army. He was present at the First Continental Congress and, lest anyone misunderstand his intentions, he “had brought with him from Mount Vernon a red-and-blue uniform he had worn in the French and Indian War … and now he was wearing it daily, as if to signify to his fellow-Delegates that he believed the time had come to take the field.”6 By wearing the uniform, he was also indicating to the other delegates who, in his opinion, should lead the army.
The image of Washington in a toga reflects a not uncommon practice of clothing one’s heroes in what is thought to be appropriate garb. Medieval saints’ lives often attributed similar miracles to saintly individuals of the same category, archbishops for example, on the grounds that all saintly archbishops are likely to have possessed the same characteristics and performed the same miracles.7 In the case of Washington and Cincinnatus, about the only action that they shared was that each one retired to his farm once he had saved his people from their enemies. This symbolized the link between republican virtue and agrarian society. Livy’s Cincinnatus was an implicit criticism of the decline of the traditional Roman family and with it the virtues that gave rise to Roman greatness.8 A similar romantic view of the small farm characterized many of the leading American revolutionaries as well.9 Washington, of course, was anything but a small farmer.
The cloaking of one reality in the imagery of another is not restricted to individual heroes. The same can be said of entire historical eras as well. The image of Cincinnatus reflects not only Washington but the general role of images drawn from the classics, especially the Latin classics, to illustrate the moral qualities of the revolutionary generation. Classicists have done much to spell out in detail the ways in which classical concepts and images provided the revolutionaries with a vocabulary to articulate their conception of politics.10 Newspaper articles and pamphlets “with contributions from anonymous citizens writing under the nom de plume of Cato, Caesar, Brutus,… and the like,” reflected the American desire to identify with the virtuous Roman Republicans.11
Eran Shalev has developed this concept in a more sophisticated fashion, asking: were the Americans expressing the “truths of antiquity dressed in an American guise, or those of America dressed in togas?”12 There is a paradoxical quality to the revolutionaries’ identification with the ancient republican tradition. While they did create a republic and they certainly praised the virtues associated with ancient agrarian republics, they did not seek to create a government headed by annually elected consuls, to re-create the Roman Senate , to base the new government on the comitia centuriata, or to divide the population into patricians and plebians. In other words, they did not desire to recreate the Roman Republic .
What the revolutionaries demanded as the basis of their polity was a set of principles and institutions that were not ancient at all. They were in fact from medieval Europe and reflected not the practices of the Romans but of medieval feudal society.13 This underlying medieval infrastructure of eighteenth-century American political thought is reflected in four fundamental assertions that the colonists made to justify their position. In the first place, they asserted that there could be “No taxation without Representation,” a claim that was derived from the Roman Law principle that Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur, that is, what affects all must be approved by all. Originally the phrase was not a statement of political principle but “originated in the law concerning guardianship. Where multiple guardians exercised tutela, it could not be dissolved without the consent of all.”14 In other words, the phrase dealt with private law not with constitutional issues. The phrase had received a great deal of discussion and application in the Middle Ages when lawyers picked it up and employed it in their discussions of the relations between bishops and their cathedral chapters and later kings and their subjects. When a ruler sought to act beyond the boundaries of his traditional jurisdiction he required the consent of those who would be affected by his action.
In the second place, in order to implement the claim that a king required consent to some actions, the American colonists demanded recognition of their right to participate in their own governance, that is, the right either to places in the English Parliament or to a Parliament of their own, and not be subject to laws and taxes imposed by an English Parliament in which they had no direct representation. Here again, the colonists were demanding rights that had come into being during the Middle Ages, not in the ancient world. The writing down of traditional customs, fixing them so that the king for example could no longer manipulate them to his own advantage, meant that changes had to be negotiated.
Magna Carta (1215) was the classic illustration of the written text to which the colonists could appeal to defend their claims. In the third place therefore, the colonists demanded what they called the ancestral rights identified with Magna Carta, a vague claim not always articulated in detail but carrying a powerful image. In a broader sense, they sought what James Otis described as our “rights as men and freeborn British subjects” and they appealed to various charters and other legal documents to support their position.15 Here again, in making a claim to rights they were acting in a way alien to Roman practice but central to medieval political practice.16
Finally, the colonists were asserting claims that were based on the constitutional history of England and the British Empire as evidenced in royal proclamations, parliamentary statutes, and longstanding traditions and practices. This in turn generated the fourth assertion, namely that the relation of the colonists to the king of England was based on contract as demonstrated in the colonial charters. Here again, there was no ancient precedent for such a claim but there were numerous medieval precedents for it.17
In claiming their rights the colonists were not articulating principles from the ancient world even when these claims were drawn from Roman law and expressed in latin. For example, even though consent to laws affecting them was expressed originally in terms of Roman law, it was Roman law as developed and understood by medieval writers who applied the phrase to the political order. Although the revolutionaries often clothed their demands in classical Roman republican language and incarnated this language in statues and in the architecture of the city of Washington, they were calling for a governmental structure that was essentially medieval in origin, not ancient. The language and images drawn from the ancient world masked the medieval origins of political regime that the colonists sought to establish.
Were the colonial polemicists aware of the paradox when they composed their pamphlets and wrote their essays for newspapers? The answer to this questions lies in the eighteenth-century American understanding of the Middle Ages, an understanding rooted in the hostile critique of the Middle Ages that Italian Renaissance humanists , Protestant Reformers, and Enlightenment philosophers had generated over several centuries. While there were important differences among these schools of thought, on one point they were in profound agreement. They all agreed that the medieval era was an age of intellectual, spiritual, and moral collapse, useful only as a source of examples of artistic, spiritual, and political corruption.
The Italian...