
What America’s Founders Learned from Antiquity
A Republic of Farmers: America and Early Rome
S1 E2:
In the 1760s, ancient Rome became politically relevant to Colonial Americans. Grasp how colonists, predominantly farmers, drew upon Roman thinkers’ notions of the farming class as the backbone of civic virtue, independence, and freedom. Note the ways in which the Roman republic became a language of opposition for Americans to oppressive taxation by the globally expanding British empire.