Virtue, valor, & vanity : the Founding Fathers and the pursuit of fame / Eric Burns.
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- ISBN: 9781559708586 :
- ISBN: 1559708581 :
- Physical Description: xiii, 239 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : portraits ; 25 cm
- Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : Arcade Pub. : [2007]
- Copyright: ©2007
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Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-232) and index. |
Citation/References Note: | Kirkus 10/01/2007 |
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- 1 of 1 copy available at Evergreen Indiana.
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Version of Resource: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0720/2007022841.html
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Virtue, Valor, & Vanity
The Founding Fathers and the Pursuit of FameBy ERIC BURNS
Arcade Publishing
Copyright © 2007 Eric BurnsAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55970-858-6
Contents
Introduction The Crew of the Concord.............................ix PART I THE BEGINNINGS OF CELEBRITY Chapter 1 The Roman Republic....................................3 Chapter 2 The American in Paris.................................13 Chapter 3 Americans at Home.....................................25 PART II THE INGREDIENTS OF RENOWN Chapter 4 Ambition..............................................57 Chapter 5 Vanity................................................79 Chapter 6 Modesty...............................................91 Chapter 7 Jealousy..............................................105 Chapter 8 Image.................................................129 Chapter 9 Myth..................................................145 PART III THE LAST DAYS OF FAMOUS MEN Chapter 10 A Simple Epitaph......................................163 Chapter 11 The Tombstone at Red Hill.............................169 Chapter 12 An Early Death........................................175 Chapter 13 The Tourist Attraction................................181 Chapter 14 A Message to the Future...............................187 Chapter 15 John Adams Survives...................................193 Epilogue The Autograph of a Not-So-Famous Man.....................199 Acknowledgments...................................................207 Notes.............................................................209 Bibliography......................................................225 Index.............................................................233
Chapter One
The Roman Republic
The model for the country that would one day occupy the land Archer had seen, that would one day be known as the United States of America, was the Roman republic, which lasted from 509-27 B.C. The goals of the republic, as expressed by its most respected philosophers and historians, provided the rough draft for notions of equality, justice, and freedom in the British settlements of the New World. And it was the Roman system of government, more than any other document or set of ideals, that became the basis for the new nation. Michael Lind has written that John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, among others, believed the Roman constitution displayed "a stability missing from the faction-ridden city-states of ancient Greece and medieval Italy: a strong chief magistrate and a bicameral legislature with a powerful senate." Adams went further, claiming that "the Roman constitution formed the noblest people, and the greatest power, that has ever existed."
It was not hyperbole, not as far as learned Americans of the eighteenth century were concerned. They not only knew their history but were guided by it. The Founding Fathers succeeded in creating the United States in large part because they were students of the ancient world as much as innovators in their own.
They knew, for instance, that at the head of the Roman republic were two consuls, a check and a balance in its most basic form. Not all the power, however, was theirs. It also resided in two legislative chambers, with the more powerful being the Senate, and in the people - some of the people, at least. No law that the Senate proposed could be enacted until every citizen - that is, every free white male in the republic - had cast his vote. As Lind points out:
The very name "republic" was a version of the Latin res publica. The building that housed the legislature was called the Capitol, not the Parliament; the upper house was the Senate; a creek on Capitol Hill was waggishly named the Tiber, after the river that ran through Rome. The Great Seal of the United States includes two mottoes from Virgil: Annuit coeptis (He approves of the beginnings), and Novus Ordo Seculorum (a new order of the ages). In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay argued for the ratification of the federal constitution using the name of Publius Valerius Publicola, the first consul of the Roman republic. The enemies of republicanism that they described - faction, avarice, corruption, ambition - were those identified by Cicero, Tacitus, and other Roman writers.
Those enemies and others eventually brought down the republic. Rome gradually reached a point at which it had grown too large and had accumulated too many provinces to be governed from a central seat of power. The result was a regional diffusion of that power, which in turn led to inefficiency, dishonesty, and violence - the end of what seemed to the citizens of a distant future in the New World like a remarkable dream that had for half a millennium come true.
* * *
The noblest Roman of them all, as far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, was an orator and essayist, a philosopher and a schemer, a public official and public nuisance whom history knows, and knows well, as Cicero. Call him a realistic visionary, a man who knew when to compromise, when to stand firm, and when the best course of action was simply to change the subject. He lived his life as a pragmatist and ended it in a burst of tragic glory.
As a member of the Senate, Cicero led the resistance to the Catiline conspiracy, an attempt by one of Rome's viler denizens to overthrow the republic. Catiline was a known extortionist, the suspected murderer of his stepson, and the seducer of a vestal virgin. When his plans to seize the government were thwarted, his life was spared - perhaps in part because the evidence against him was scant, despite the popular perception of him. But Cicero ordered five of Cataline's fellow conspirators to be executed without benefit of trial, and they were strangled in front of a throng both awestruck and approving. An example had to be made. The sanctity of the republic had to be maintained. Cicero saw that it happened.
Later, after the assassination of Julius Caesar, in which he played no role, Cicero preached to his fellow senators about the perfidy of Caesar's ally, Mark Antony. As a result, Antony soon fled into exile, dismissed to the provinces, and defeated in battle. For a time, Cicero's eminence in the capital was unquestioned.
But politics was an even more treacherous game then than now. Eventually, Cicero's maneuverings landed him on the wrong side of the power structure. He was condemned to death and then killed while trying to escape from his home. "Come here, soldier," he is supposed to have said to Herennius, the leader of the mob that overtook him. "There is nothing proper about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly." Moments later, despite what seemed to be sincere misgivings, Herennius slit Cicero's throat.
In the subtitle of the most recent biography of Cicero, Anthony Everitt refers to him as "Rome's greatest politician." For a time he was. At the end of his life, he was not. But he was unarguably the republic's greatest and most enduring man of letters, his writings considered "masterpieces of popularization [which] were one of the most valuable means by which the heritage of classical thought was handed down to posterity." Among his masterpieces were volumes on law, history, culture, political education, and the proper organization of government. In many of them he endorsed the quest for fame.
His full name was Marcus Tullius Cicero, and he was born on January 3, 106 B.C. His father was a scholar - wise, but neither healthy nor wealthy. Of his mother we know little. The orator's name sounds grand to us now, but that is because we know what he became. As Everitt points out, the Latin word cicero literally means "chickpea" and was given to the boy, according to several accounts, because an ancestor had a growth at the tip of his nose that looked like a chickpea, perhaps even larger: "When Marcus was about to launch his career as an advocate and politician, friends advised him to change his name to something less ridiculous. 'No,' he replied firmly, 'I am going to make my cognomen more famous than those of men like Scaurus and Catalus.' These were two leading Romans of the day, and the point of the remark was that 'Catalus' was the Latin for 'whelp' or 'puppy,' and 'Scaurus' meant 'with large or projecting ankles.'" As things turned out, Cicero was true to his word. The Chickpea became much better known to history than either the Puppy or Large Ankles.
And it was no accident. Cicero worked at renown, desiring "fame and good men's praises," deciding on the best methods of achieving them, and then putting those methods into practice with tireless dedication. For him, this meant a career as an advocate, a lawyer, a more respected position then than it is today. A Roman advocate took an oath to defend his clients only if he believed they were honorable men engaged in honorable pursuits. The clients' ability to pay was not an issue.
Cicero had no reservations about the oath, and his knowledge of the law, combined with his brilliant rhetoric, both improvised and rehearsed, soon made him one of the most highly regarded advocates in the republic. The courtroom, however, was not just the shop in which he worked; it was also the stage on which he performed.
Despite the fact that the theater was not regarded as a respectable profession, Cicero was fascinated by it and later became a close friend of the best-known actor of his day, Quintus Roscius Gallus. Although he always insisted that oratory and drama were different arts, he modeled his style on Roscius's performances and those of another actor he knew, Clodius Aesopus (who once became so involved in the part he was playing - that of King Agamemnon, overlord of the Greeks - that he ran through and killed a stagehand who happened to cross the stage).
Cicero never got that carried away. Nonetheless, his monologues at trial were gems of theatrical art: superbly delivered, well-reasoned models of clarity and logic that more often than not resulted in victory for his side. He began to build a reputation, but was impatient for it to grow, and, like his fellow stars of the ancient world, was determined that it last the ages. He asked his friend Atticus what history would think of him after a thousand years. Could fame, which sometimes seemed so ephemeral, a quality carried on the faintest of breezes, last a millennium? Atticus could not say.
In search of an answer of his own, Cicero studied his audience. "Once I had realized that the Roman People was rather deaf," he wrote early in his career, "but sharp-eyed, I stopped worrying about what the world heard about me. From that day on, I took care to be seen in person every day. I lived in the public eye and was always in the Forum. I would not allow my concierge, nor the lateness of the hour, to close the door on any visitor."
By this time, Cicero had grown into a handsome, if not particularly robust, young man, "with full lips, a decisive nose, and beetling brows," features that distinguished him for the rest of his years. He had also grown into a master of self-promotion, studying its fine points as Machiavelli would later study the fine points of political manipulation. Cicero memorized the names of as many well-placed Romans as possible, so that he could greet them as friends - whether he knew them well or not. He also found out where they lived, both their city homes and their country residences, and he would often stroll in front of those structures, hoping to be noticed, always deep in thought (or seeming to be), always the man of substance, his true-to-life role. Sometimes, if the man he hoped to impress was outside, he would greet him warmly, stopping for a few minutes of conversation. He was a glad-hander, a backslapper - but always with a reserve of decorum.
This was not, in his view, mere vanity. "Public esteem is the nurse of the arts," he wrote on one occasion, "and all men are fired to application by fame, whilst those pursuits which meet with general disapproval always lie neglected."
That he sometimes seemed to care too much about public esteem was obvious to some at the time and to many later. As a young man, he had served the republic admirably as a magistrate in Sicily. But when he returned to Rome, no one congratulated him. No one proposed that a coin bear his profile. Few people even seemed to know where he had been in recent months or what he had done. So indifferent a reception, he admitted, troubled him. Cicero was "intemperately fond of his own glory," wrote the Roman historian Plutarch about this incident a few generations later. "By his insatiable thirst of fame," opined the British poet and dramatist John Dryden in the seventeenth century, "he has lessened his character with succeeding ages."
Cicero received reactions like these in his own day, too. He was rightly accused of braggadocio as much as accomplishment. He also knew that the best way to deal with such charges was to admit them and to confess his self-aggrandizement in a self-deprecating manner. Once, while reviewing his own performance in a public debate, he couldn't help opine that he had done well - yet he did so wryly.
I brought the house down. And why not, on such a theme - the dignity of our order, concord between Senate and equites, unison of Italy, remnants of the conspiracy in their death throes, reduced price of grain, internal peace? You should know by now how I can boom away on such topics. I think you must have caught the reverberations in Epirus, and for that reason I won't dwell on the subject.
He further tried to disarm his foes by pointing out the hypocrisy of those philosophers, himself among them, who wrote books in which they criticized the quest for fame and then boldly inscribed their names on the title pages. But lest he go too far down the path of self-effacement, he continued: "The striving for praise is an universal factor in life, and the nobler a man is, the more susceptible is he to the sweets of glory."
Yet Cicero was not indiscriminate in his quest for those sweets. He wanted them badly but, in his view, justly, for the right reasons, for what he believed to be the most virtuous of causes. He wanted to be known for his support of the issues he thought important to the success of the Roman republic. He craved admiration for his vision of the republic's future. It is what we would today call enlightened self-interest, the realization by a gifted individual that he could satisfy the cultural and political needs of the community at the same time that he satisfied the needs of his own ego. For this reason, the men who created the American republic looked on him as one of their own. Dryden's opinion notwithstanding, Cicero's character didn't suffer in the least.
Perhaps none of the founders looked up to Cicero more than did John Adams. Certainly none read his works more assiduously. "In all history," Adams declared, "there was no greater statesman and philosopher than Cicero, whose authority should ever carry great weight, and Cicero's decided opinion in favor of the three branches of government was founded on a reason that was timeless, unchangeable." Well before the Revolutionary War, Adams said he was proud that in choosing the law as a profession, he had chosen the same field as Cicero. He was also proud that his friend Jonathan Sewall believed him to be destined for greatness, no matter what his occupation, although he thought Sewall tended to excess when he wrote to Adams that "in future ages, when New England shall have risen to its intended grandeur, it shall be as carefully recorded among the registers of the literati that Adams flourished in the second century after the exode of its first settlers from Great Britain, as it is now that Cicero was born in the six-hundred-and-forty-seventh year after the building of Rome."
And long after the war had ended, Adams was still reading Cicero, some essays for the second and third times - appreciating the stateliness of the prose, reflecting on the precepts of republican government as the Romans had worked them out and the honor that Cicero claimed for his contributions to the cause. Adams believed that these writings prepared him well for the presidency, and after leaving office he quoted Cicero on the conduct of the ideal public official. "Such a man will devote himself entirely to the republic, nor will he covet power or riches.... He will adhere closely to justice and equity, that, provided he can preserve these virtues, although he may give offence and create enemies by them, he will set death itself at defiance, rather than abandon his principles." It is how Adams liked to think he had behaved while serving as the nation's second chief executive.
Adams's cousin, the fiery revolutionary and shady journalist Samuel Adams, wrote his calls to arms in the Boston Gazette under a variety of pseudonyms. Several of his articles, railing against the presence of British soldiers on the streets of Boston, a presence that eventually led to the Boston Massacre, were signed "Cedant Armae Togae," which means that weapons should yield to togas; i.e., the military should obey civilians. It was one of Cicero's favorite phrases.
Alexander Hamilton, another founder who was at times as much a journalist as a politician and who also took an assumed identity in the press, wrote a series of essays signed "Tully," the English version of Cicero's family name.
John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton, called his country home "Tusculum," giving it the same name as Cicero's villa.
Benjamin Franklin cited Cicero as his authority on a variety of matters, such as the importance of virtue to a public man and the duty of a society to care for its less fortunate citizens. In 1744, while still a newspaper man, Franklin reprinted Cicero's essay on aging with a preface he had written himself. A few years later in Poor Richard's Almanac, he quoted Cicero's opinion that "There was never any great man who was not an industrious man."
(Continues...)
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