Good Day citizens and welcome to what would Jefferson do. Our wiggly opportunity to discuss

current American events with President Dan Grub of Richmond, Virginia, right in your neighborhood, sir.

And he is asking about the founders who read the histories of ancient Rome and how they use that knowledge when deciding how the American

government should be structured. Could you answer that, sir? Yes, it's a rich

topic and the more we talk about it the more we can understand my generation, the founding fathers,

what we intended, what we feared.

So all of us were well educated in the ancient world. It was the center of any curriculum then and

this involved the Roman Republic from its beginnings in 509 BC to its end

during the reign of Julius Caesar, the Civil Wars that ended the Republic,

and then the coming of the Roman Empire and all that that meant, and then the collapse

and fall of the Roman Empire. You know, Gibbons book, The Decline's book The Decline's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was You know Gibbons book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

was one of the most important books of the 18th century. He was my exact contemporary and the

first volume of that book appeared in 1776. So this was our obsession and what you can learn from it is a couple of things.

First of all, it takes character to lead a great nation. If you read Plutarch's lives, they're about character and people

like Solon in Greece or Cato and Cicero in Rome, but the notion is that it takes a person of extraordinary

virtue and a Commonwealth vision and moral courage and a deep understanding of what's at stake to lead a nation.

And so all of us, all of the founding fathers

were trying to pattern themselves in one way or another

after characters out of Plutarch.

So there's one element to it.

Another is that the Roman Republic was the,

wasn't a democracy in anything like a modern sense of the term,

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