How did American concepts of self-formation change in the early republic? Historians have long known that Americans during the revolutionary era looked to the republic of ancient Rome as a model for national and self-development. Americans, steeped in Virgilian letters, would become virtuous citizen-farmers and thereby create a new Rome in the wilderness. This paper charts a revolution in ideas of self-formation in the antebellum era: the shift from Rome to ancient Greece as a template of self-development.
Specifically, the paper examines a neglected but important group of antebellum Americans: classical scholars. The study of ancient languages had dominated American higher education since the seventeenth century, imbuing Americans with a love for classical antiquity, and especially Roman antiquity. Classical language continued to dominate the curriculum in the antebellum era, but with a crucial difference. It was now ancient Greece rather than Rome that dominated the curriculum. Influenced by a revolution in scholarship emanating from German universities, American classicists now turned to ancient Greece as a site of new possibilities for forming the self. They added wholly new studies to the college curriculum, such as Attic tragedy, as a way to allow American students to encounter the Greeks.
Hellenism was much more than just the study of ancient Greek texts, however. It was a wholly new program for reforming the self and thereby purging the nation of noxious new trends. To "be Greek," as some classicists liked to put it, was to resist the cant of an emerging industrial, democratic society. Specifically, classicists feared materialism, machines, and rampant egalitarianism. In numerous public lectures and national publications, they argued that by chasing Mammon and wallowing in populist mediocrity, Americans had lost sight of higher goals of self- and national development. Becoming Greek was an antidote to this. By studying Greek texts, art, and artifacts, Americans would transport themselves back to the ancient Greek world. In doing so, they would imbibe the ancient Greek "spirit" and thereby purge themselves of the relentless acquisitiveness and anti-intellectualism that made the young republic prey to scheming demagogues. To become Greek was a newly secular ideal of self-formation, allowing Americans a chance to perfect themselves in the earthly sphere. How were these goals different from the Romanism that had dominated the eighteenth century? Eighteenth-century Americans had only imitated the Romans: they wanted to be like Cicero, like Caesar. In the nineteenth century, that rhetoric subtly but significantly changed: Americans wanted not just to imitate the ancients, they wanted to "be Greek." This paper charts the classicists' success in making Hellenism a new ideal of self-formation, erudition, and citizenship in the early republic.