The Roman Executive

Abstract

When in 1865 John Wilkes Booth leapt to the stage of Ford’s Theatre and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!” he unwittingly rehearsed a well-worn role. Opponents of a strong American presidency before and since have had a peculiar tendency to slip from plain English into Latin. A century before Booth, Roman tropes figured as the lingua franca in debates over the proper extent of government: the anti-federalists “Brutus” and “Cato” warned that the new Constitution might empower Caesars; Thomas Jefferson accused Alexander Hamilton of considering Caesar “the greatest man that ever lived,” and Hamilton urged vigilance against the “Catilines and Caesars of the community,” among whom he cast Jefferson.1 A century after Booth, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. echoed these Roman themes when he worried that the American republic had given rise to an “imperial presidency.”2 Nearly simultaneously, scholars such as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock restored our appreciation of the American founders’ avid classicism. Today, a spate of neo-Schlesingerians herald the “return of the imperial presidency,” while myriad books, articles, and even museum exhibits ask, more plaintively than proudly—Are we Rome? 3 Lurking behind this question is the memento mori of American classicism: perhaps the American founders’ careful consideration and correction of ancient republican vices were insufficient; perhaps some ineluctable yet inescapable law of eternal republican return dooms the American republic to the same fate that haunted its most renowned predecessor.KeywordsPolitical RegimeAncient WorldPolitical FormMixed RegimeAmerican PresidencyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.