19 America's Greco-Roman Legacies w/ Caroline Winterer
Ancient Greece Declassified
Dr. Lantern Jack
4.8 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At a time when kings and emperors ruled the world, the Founding Fathers of the US were striving to resurrect a millennia-old dream: that of a free republic. Drawing inspiration from ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, and Carthage, they helped craft a society that was at once radically new and rooted in antiquity.
Joining us to explore the influence of classical models on early American history is Caroline Winterer, professor of American History and of Classics at Stanford University and director of Stanford's Center for Humanities. Winterer is the author of American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason and of The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 among many other books and articles exploring the connections between antiquity and the early American experience.
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The intro to this episode was provided by hosts Bry and Fry of the Pontifacts podcast, offering a humorous history of the papacy from Peter to Pope Francis. Check out their show here!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, listeners of Ancient Greece Declassified, I'm Fry from Pontifax. |
| 0:05.9 | And I'm Bree, and in our show, we are ranking the popes from Peter to Francis. |
| 0:10.4 | And if you're enjoying Ancient Greece Declassified, we invite you to come check us out. |
| 0:14.9 | In each episode, we go over the life, contributions, scandal, appearance, and interesting unknowns of a single pope, and then rank them, |
| 0:22.4 | based on our very serious categories. |
| 0:25.8 | In the end, our best popes will battle it out to be the popiest pope, and take the keys of the |
| 0:31.2 | pearly gates away from St. Peter. |
| 0:33.2 | You can find Pontifax at pontifax.podbean.com and all major podcatching services. |
| 0:46.8 | Hi. Thanks for tuning in to Ancient Greece, Declassified. |
| 0:54.4 | Episode 19. |
| 0:57.1 | America's Greco-Roman legacies. |
| 1:01.8 | When the founding fathers were drafting the U.S. Constitution, the world around them had been |
| 1:07.0 | dominated by kingdoms and empires for almost two millennia. |
| 1:11.4 | But the founders looked back in time to before even the birth of Christianity, |
| 1:15.5 | to an unusual moment in ancient history that we now call the classical period, |
| 1:19.6 | where they saw a network of states that had defied monarchical rule. |
| 1:24.5 | These states had no king. |
| 1:26.3 | They were run by citizens. |
| 1:29.7 | They were wealthy and powerful. And in the eyes of the founders, they were free. The founding fathers looked to those models and said, |
| 1:34.2 | that's what we want. It was an extremely bold move to try to implement a political system that had |
| 1:40.0 | not been attempted in over one and a half thousand years. But they didn't just copy the ancient models. |
| 1:46.3 | They also tried to improve on them and fix some of the systemic weaknesses that had led |
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