Classicism and the American Revolution
The symbols, slogans, ideas and architecture of the Founding Fathers were saturated in the world of Ancient Greece and Rome.
In 1778, the year of Saratoga, the grammar school in Norwich, England, received a new set of ordinances containing this requirement: 'That no Language he taught in the said School but Latin and Greek'. A generation later, in the Leeds Grammar case of 1805, Lord Eldon ruled that the headmaster of an endowed grammar school could not legally be compelled to teach anything but Greek and Latin. It is not always remembered that the American Founding Fathers, though educated on colonial soil, were similarly grounded in the classics.
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