Curricular core..........................

     If there was a curricular core to the emerging education for citizenship, it was the study of ancient history - Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, Sallust, and of course, Thucydides, the great historian of ancient Greece.  "The classics" was not a subject, like geography or history, but rather a lens through which to examine and understand life around you.  Here one could learn of the rise and fall of empires and of republics as well, and learn that they often died not from the outside but from the inside - from corruption and sloth, just as despotic and grasping England had begun to do.  Rome was everything - both the very type of overweening empire (like Great Britain) and the great antecedent to America.  Roman vice was English vice, but Roman patriotism, the love of the republic, was the great model for America.  The Adamses revered Cicero, the brilliant orator, senator, and sage who sacrificed himself for the good of Rome.  They recoiled at the tyrant Caesar and admired the courage of Brutus, his assassin.

-James Traub,  John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit