Opening paragraphs.................

      The classical world was far closer to the makers of the American Revolution and the founders of the United State than it is to us today.  Nowadays the Greeks and Romans are remote to us, their works studied by a few in college and then largely forgotten even by most of those readers.  But Greco-Roman antiquity was not distant to the leaders of the American Revolution. It was present in their lives, as part of their political vocabulary and as the foundation of their personal values.  In short, it shaped their view of the world in a way that most Americans now are not taught and so don't see.

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our County

thanks Jon