Traces of Ancient Rome in the Declaration of Independence
Umberto Vincenti
“Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome” by Giovanni Paolo Pannini, 1758 (US-PD-Art).
This article is part of a forthcoming series on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The issue of the cultural foundations of the Founding Fathers and of American constitutionalism in general is, perhaps, more apparent than real and, in any case, carries a note of ambiguity. A plurality of scholarly interpretations and previous political-constitutional experiences played a role: not only John Locke and the Second Treatise of Government, but also Niccolò Machiavelli and the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, James Harrington and Oceana, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon and the Cato’s Letters, among others; and then the constitution of Republican Rome, the statutes of medieval Italian communes, and the English constitution. However, some reject this pluralism, suggesting that we should account mainly or exclusively for Locke: Locke et praeterea nihil. There is also someone who, linking to Filippo Mazzei and overestimating his influence on the Founding Fathers, indulges in fantasy: the United States Constitution as a variant of the constitution of the Republic of Venice.
It would be necessary to agree on the meaning of the expression “cultural foundations”; otherwise, a certain ambiguity is inevitable. Take Locke, for example: there is no doubt that he was a guide for the American revolutionaries, just as Rousseau had been for the French. But not only were there other influences in America, as just noted; above all, Locke’s theory itself did not arise from nothing, as it was prepared and conditioned by a previous political tradition, at the base of which lie the archetypes of the Founding Fathers’ culture. Here, we will attempt to delve deeper, focusing on the Declaration of July 4, 1776. We will proceed starting from Locke’s Second Treatise, employing a sort of stratigraphic investigation of the text, tracing backward in time, both in England and in continental Europe.
In Boston, Puritan leaders chose classical culture for the education of the youth
We owe to Meyer Reinhold an observation as significant as it is true: the legal-political thought of Italian origin “landed” in North America at least one hundred and fifty years before the Revolution. The reference is to the Machiavellian tradition and to the classics of Roman republicanism, from Cicero to Livy and Tacitus.
In 1635, the Puritan leaders of Boston—many of whom were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge in England—founded the Boston Latin School, dedicated to the study of religion, Latin, and classical literature. After attending the Boston Latin School, it was customary to continue one’s studies at Harvard College, founded in 1636 and equally committed to preserving the classical canon. The reading of Roman sources, such as Cicero or Virgil, was, however, cultivated throughout all thirteen colonies. This widespread education familiarised the colonial élites not only with the ancient languages, but also with the forms and ideals of classical politics, especially those of Republican Rome. It is clear that, as this culture became consolidated over successive generations, a century later, the Founding Fathers had no real alternative but to rely on the classics when creating the institutions of the first republic of the New World.
Members of the Committee of Five, whom Congress had tasked with drafting the Declaration of Independence, also belonged to this cultural milieu. Benjamin Franklin had attended the Boston Latin School. As for Thomas Jefferson, the author of the declaration’s text, he was a staunch supporter of classical studies, to which he devoted himself daily, to the point of giving up newspapers; he admired the political institutions of democratic Athens and Republican Rome. In a letter dated August 19, 1785, he urged his nephew Peter Carr to select his books and begin with a text on Roman history, “reading everything in the original and not in translation.” The classics were, for Jefferson, an integral part of his existence, and he was tied to them both emotionally and intellectually: for him, they were indispensable, especially for anyone aspiring to prepare for public life and the assumption of political roles.
From ancient texts, Jefferson drew criteria for evaluation and guidance. This was true in his private life as well: when, on August 10, 1787, he wrote to his nephew that a farmer might resolve a moral issue better than a professor, Jefferson had in mind the praise of farmers he had read and reread in Cicero’s Cato Maior. But Jefferson behaved similarly in public life: when it was debated whether a public office holder should or should not receive a salary from the state, he invoked the Roman principle that the magistrate of the res publica should exercise his functions free of charge.
Locke et praeterea nihil?
Is this enough to cast doubt on the view that traces the Declaration of Independence exclusively to Locke’s Second Treatise? Let’s try taking three passages from the Declaration as examples and searching for their correspondence in the text of the Second Treatise. Afterwards, we will look for the possible archetypes of the attestations found in the Second Treatise.
First, in the Declaration of Independence, we read that all men are created equal and that their Creator has endowed them with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The correspondence in the Second Treatise (7.87) is almost literal: men are born endowed with natural rights which they enjoy without limitation, including life, liberty, and property Locke had already discussed happiness extensively in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2.21.43). Second, the Declaration of Independence establishes the right of the people to resist, a right legitimately exercised against a tyrannical ruler. In the Second Treatise (18.209), Locke writes that it is the right of the people to resist illegal force used against them. Third, in the Declaration of Independence, supreme power is entrusted to laws enacted by representative assemblies elected by the people. Similarly, Locke, in the Second Treatise (11.134), states that the legislative power is the power of the state and is sacred and unalterable.
Going further back in time, one discovers that the themes common to the Declaration and the Second Treatise, as indicated above, have a precise counterpart in Roman sources. Regarding rights, one might think that neither the Declaration of Independence nor Locke could have taken them from ancient Rome. But this is not the case: Roman law protected the life, liberty, and property of the Roman citizen, assigning the title to him to these rights (iura). Moreover, in Rome, rights were denied to slaves—just as in the American colonies, whose elites resembled the ancient Roman senators who governed the republic: both were slave owners who used slaves to work their large estates. This did not escape Jefferson, himself a slaveholder at his Monticello farm. As early as 1774, in the Summary View of the Rights of British America, he had urged the King of England to grant civil rights to slaves and, even earlier, to ban their importation from Africa. Later, in the Declaration of Independence, he included an accusation against King George III for promoting slavery in the colonies; but this passage was removed from the promulgated text.
Also in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson describes rights as “truths to be self-evident,” but the statement is preceded by “We hold”. Thus, as Hannah Arendt noted in a chapter on “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (246), the evidence derived from nature is presented as an opinion. In other words, rights are indeed natural, but they must then be recognized by the people and, on their behalf, by their representatives. In De re publica (1.32.48) Cicero argued the same thing when he affirmed that, in a republic, only the people “are arbiters (dominus) of the laws, of trials, of peace, of international treaties, of the life and property of every citizen”. On June 12, 1776, twenty-two days before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Declaration of Rights was promulgated, which stated (sec. 2) unequivocally that “all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people.” Jefferson was a Virginian.
The right of resistance also has its origins in Roman republicanism. Also in De re publica (2.25.46), Cicero states clearly that every citizen must always be ready to act “when it is necessary to preserve liberty”, because no one in the defense of the republic can consider himself merely a private citizen. Since the absence of tyranny is what makes political liberty possible, the people are truly free only if they have no master, regardless of how fair he may be (2.23.43), and for this reason all are appointed as guardians of libertas.
The foundation of the res publica in ancient Rome lies in the leges (laws): in Roman sources, the transition from monarchy to republic is highlighted precisely by the subsequent primacy of public legislation—the rule of law (imperia legum potentiora: Livy 2.1.1)—over the authority of men; and the laws are presented as the primary guarantee against the danger of sliding into despotism and tyranny.
Let’s consider another comparison, perhaps the most interesting one, as it concerns a rule whose violation triggered the colonists’ revolution against the English motherland.
It is necessary to begin with the text of a resolution adopted by the city of Boston in May 1772, as reproduced, non by chance, by Philipp Pettit in his books Republicanism (34):
An exterior Power claims a Right to govern us, and has for a number of Years been levying an illegal tax on us; whereby we are degraded from the rank of Free Subjects to the despicable Condition of Slaves. For it is evident to the meanest Understanding that Great Britain can have no Right to take our Moneys from us without our consents unless we are her Slaves.
Now, in the Declaration of Independence, the King of England would be accused of imposing taxes on the colonists without their consent. In the Second Treatise (11.142), Locke had similarly stated that the government cannot levy taxes on the people’s property “without the consent of the people given by themselves or their deputies.”
If we were to stop at these three texts, we might conclude that the American revolutionaries—and Jefferson—drew their momentum from Locke. But the principle in question—from which the principle of “no taxation without representation” derives—is much older. In England, it appears in the Magna Carta of 1215 (per commune consilium) and is reiterated, with a formula that was to become canonical (namely, quod omnes tangit ab omnibus adprobari debet), in a writ of Edward I from 1295. It also recurs in the Bill of Rights of 1688.
There was, therefore, a long English tradition preceding Locke. Yet it was not entirely native. It came from continental Europe: in the Middle Ages, the principle was widespread, from the parliament of Sicily under Frederick II, to the parliaments of Friuli and the Marche of Ancona, and then to many communal parliaments. It is stated in rule 29 of the Liber Sextus of Boniface VIII and in a decretal of Innocent III (I.23.7 § 6). It is present in the Oculus pastoralis (IV, col. 128). Marsilius of Padua formulates it exactly in the Defensor pacis (1.12.7): quae igitur omnium possunt tangere commodum et incommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et audiri.
The principle –or more precisely, its literal wording- is found in a law of Emperor Justinian (Cod. Iust. 5.59.5.2): quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur, that is, “what affects everyone must be decided by everyone”, which is perfectly equivalent to the modern principle of “no taxation.” The case concerned a ward who had multiple guardians: according to the law, all guardians were required to participate in decisions that affected everyone, such as whether it would be in the ward’s best interest to be adopted. As can be seen, our principle has Roman origins. It originated in private law and was extended to public law, where it was not entirely new: in the Roman Republic, whenever decisions affecting the entire people were to be made, all citizens were summoned to deliberate in the popular assemblies.
Republican Rome as a Model for the Founding Fathers
It is time to draw the threads of the discussion together. The maxim Locke et praeterea nihil has proven to be misleading in relation to the Declaration—not so much because other schools of thought are present in it, but because it is Locke who revives the tradition of Roman republicanism. Certainly, in the Second Treatise, there is no explicit reference to the republics of antiquity, and it would be interesting to discover why Locke chose to omit any mention of Roman republicanism. Yet, if we dig beneath the text, the archetype underlying Locke’s construction emerges: it is—and above all, it is—the model of the res publica of ancient Rome. This is hardly surprising: a philosopher of Locke’s stature would have known Machiavelli very well. The English translation of the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius dates back to the second half of the sixteenth century, and the English—Harrington above all—drew plentiful inspiration and arguments from it to formulate a republican political proposal. Though Locke did not envision a republic for England, many of the themes in the Second Treatise found their immediate precedent precisely in Machiavelli’s Discourses.
Republican Rome was loved and mythologized by the American élites: classical studies had spread a common culture from which the Founding Fathers drew the values and institutional frameworks they would use as building blocks for the structure they designed and then realized. The Roman model would seize the Revolution and its revolutionaries. They would be inspired by the popular heroes of republican Rome and identify with them and their way of being. Institutional sites and institutions would assume Roman names. The Constitution of 1787 would take its foundations from the constitution of the res publica of ancient Rome. When, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was decided to fresco the Capitol, the task was entrusted to the Roman painter Constantino Brumidi: his first fresco, not by chance, would be The Calling of Cincinnatus from the Plow.
One final note. Rome appealed to Americans not only for its free republican institutions and its love of libertas—a constitution and public ethic to be imitated. Rome was also admired for the intelligence and skill employed in constructing a world empire in which any inhabitant was offered the real possibility of integration and of rising to the highest ranks of administration and government: emperors such as Trajan, Septimius Severus, and Diocletian were born outside Italy (Septimius Severus in Africa); the same can be said of jurists and officials like Papinian and Ulpian.
The Founding Fathers foresaw that, in the decades to come, the United States of America would be affected by successive waves of immigration and that it would be necessary to find a bond capable of uniting such diverse peoples into a single culture. Even from this point of view, Rome had shown the way, indicating patriotism and widespread public spirit, as Tocqueville would later perceive. ♦
Umberto Vincenti is a full professor of Roman Law at the University of Padua, where he teaches the courses “Constitutional Models of the West”. He has served as director of the Department of History and Philosophy of Law, dean of the School of Law, and president of the Law School at the University of Padua. He is the author of numerous books and essays.
Recommended Citation
Vincenti, Umberto. “Traces of Ancient Rome in the Declaration of Independence.” Canopy Forum, August 26, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/08/26/traces-of-ancient-rome-in-the-declaration-of-independence/.
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