Meta Description: Discover Ad Navseam Ep. 183 as Dr. David Noe and Dr. Jeff Winkle explore antebellum nationalism, American history, and the classical legacy of George Washington.
Welcome, classical gourmands, to episode 183 of the Ad Navseam podcast. This installment offers another delectable discussion of Greco-Roman civilization, stretching from the ancient Minoans and Mycenaeans straight through the Renaissance and right down to the present day.
Broadcasting from the Parnassus Vomitorium Central—the true belly button of the world—devoted hosts Dr. David C. Noe and Dr. Jeffrey T. Winkle return to the microphones. With the Michigan weather finally pushing into the sunny seventies, the hosts are eager to emerge from the bunker and enjoy the impending summer.
A Lesson in Syllables and Penultimate Athletics
Before diving into the heavy lifting of historia Romana (Roman history), the episode opens with a linguistic detour courtesy of Jeff’s quest for a structured summer activity. Seeking some low-impact exercise to keep from driving his family crazy with his restless wandering, Jeff signed up for a recreational floppy-disk-throwing league. However, he quickly noticed his team was always scheduled to play at the second-to-last time slot of the day. After calling the organizers to complain, Jeff realized he had not signed up for “Ultimate Frisbee,” but rather, Penultimate Frisbee.
This naturally leads the hosts into a brief, entertaining lesson on Greek grammar. When determining the placement of an accent in a Greek word, only the last three syllables matter: the ultimate (the final syllable), the penult (the second to last), and the antepenult (the third from last). It is a genuinely clever grammatical joke, even if it took Dave decades of teaching lingua Latina and Greek to finally hear it utilized in a sporting context. As Dave notes, adding the word “ultimate” to anything—whether it is Frisbee, water-cup filling, or extra-crunchy peanut butter—is a hilarious linguistic escalation.
A warm, well-deserved shout-out goes to Lisa Parnell, an extraordinary Latin teacher at Greyfriars Classical Academy (home of the Griffins) in Matthews, North Carolina. Dave recently visited the school—woefully underdressed in a Hawaiian shirt and sandals compared to the sharply attired, eager young students—and was immensely impressed by the quality of their Latin and Greek program. The hosts extend their deep gratitude to Lisa for keeping the classical flame alive on the ground.
Defining Nationalism: Oxford vs. C.S. Lewis
The core of today’s episode revolves around Chapter 4, “Nationalism,” from Carl Richard’s insightful book, The Golden Age of Classics in America. To set the stage, Dave and Jeff attempt to define the term “nationalism,” noting how it has become something of a third rail in modern political and social discourse.
The discussion starts with the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines nationalism as an identification with one’s own nation, “especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.” Jeff points out that this definition borders closer to outright jingoism than a natural love of one’s home.
For a more nuanced and charitable view, the hosts turn to C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. Lewis describes the love of country as a natural extension of the love of home—an affection for familiar sights, sounds, smells, open fires, and local dialects. He argues this patriotism is not inherently aggressive; it only becomes militant when protecting what it loves. Crucially, Lewis notes that true patriotism allows one to recognize that foreigners love their own homes just as fiercely. He also adds a necessary dose of historical realism:
“The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings… Hence a patriotism based on our glorious past is fair game for the debunker.”
Dave notes that a basic sense of contentment allows individuals to appreciate their history without needing to idealize it excessively or fall into total cynicism. Just as one might look back fondly on grueling college years without actually wanting to repeat them, one can love their country while honestly acknowledging its historical flaws.
The Founders vs. Classical Heroes
As Richard’s chapter explores, antebellum Americans heavily utilized the auctores classici (classical authors) but deliberately placed their own Founding Fathers on a much higher pedestal. As Richard puts it, just as the ancients differentiated between primary and secondary gods, early Americans viewed founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as nearly divine, while classical heroes like Cicero and Demosthenes were relegated to a slightly more flawed, secondary status.
In 1776, pamphleteer Thomas Paine urged Americans to abandon their inferiority complex regarding antiquity. He argued that the Greeks and Romans possessed the spirit of liberty but not the principle, noting they employed their power to enslave mankind. Paine proudly asserted that the new American era was “blotted by no one misanthropical vice”—a staggering claim of Enlightenment optimism completely blind to the reality of American slavery taking place at that exact moment.
This fervent American exceptionalism was pervasive. Edward Everett, speaking in 1825, asked why Americans should look to obscure Greek and Latin texts for patriotic virtue when they had the sacrifices of their own fathers. Famed rhetorician Daniel Webster even explicitly linked the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock to the heroism of the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon, suggesting both were ultimate turning points in the history of human freedom.
Jeff astutely asks why these early Americans did not look to the Italian Renaissance as a benchmark, given that the Renaissance also built upon Greco-Roman foundations. Dave theorizes that while the Renaissance was an artistic and intellectual triumph, it never produced an expansive, lasting political superpower comparable to the Roman Empire—which the Americans were actively trying to emulate and surpass.
What to Do with Washington in a Toga?
This nationalist fervor profoundly influenced neoclassical art, leading to a fierce debate over how to artistically represent George Washington. During this discussion, Dave offers listeners a helpful mnemonic device for remembering the chronological order of classical column designs: DICE. This stands for Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Etruscan, with the tricky fifth “composite” order trailing behind. This architectural revival served as a visual metaphor for what the early American project was attempting to achieve.
Should the Father of His Country be depicted as a Roman statesman or an American general? Frederick Porcher of Charleston aggressively attacked neoclassical art, arguing that portraying an American hero in ancient garb was insulting to his unique greatness. He cited the public’s disappointment with Hiram Powers’ statue of John C. Calhoun in a toga, and Horatio Greenough’s heavily criticized, half-naked statue of Washington in similar dress. Even Davy Crockett chimed in regarding Sir Francis Chantrey’s semi-classical statue of Washington in Boston, famously complaining, “They have a Roman gown on him, and he was an American. That ain’t right.”
The favored depiction became Jean-Antoine Houdon’s (transcribed locally as Whedon’s) incredibly lifelike Carrara marble statue in Richmond, Virginia, which presented Washington in his actual Continental Army uniform. Washington himself explicitly preferred this over the “garb of antiquity.”
Yet, artistically dressing him in modern clothes did not stop biographers from cloaking Washington in classical attributes. Parson Weems, in his famous biography, offered an absurdly comprehensive laundry list of comparisons, declaring Washington was “as pious as Numa, just as Aristides, tempered as Epictetus… undaunted as Hannibal, as Cincinnatus disinterested, to liberty firm as Cato, and respectful of the laws as Socrates.”
Expansionism and the New Rome
Not all Americans were comfortable with this aggressive, expansionist brand of classical emulation. In 1845, during the buildup to the Mexican War, abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner pushed back. He warned against imbibing the “selfish and exaggerated prejudice of country” found in the heathen patriotism of Greece and Rome. Quoting Cicero and referencing the victim of Verres whose cry of “I am a Roman citizen” failed to save him, Sumner argued that true humanitas required looking beyond the borders of a single empire to embrace universal mankind as neighbors.
Despite Sumner’s warnings, many antebellum thinkers proudly viewed America as the ultimate heir to the classical legacy. Henry David Thoreau likened America to the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, suggesting the exhausted European powers were being revitalized on savage shores to build a “New Rome in the West.” Walt Whitman similarly penned a poem calling for the Muses to migrate from the snowy rocks of Parnassus to the “better, fresher, busier sphere” of the American domain, leaving the old tales of Troy, Achilles, and Aeneas behind.
Adding to this chorus, Thomas Dew wrote that Americans were “enacting Greece, if I may use the expression, on a grander scale,” boasting that the nation would have millions of free men where the Athenians only had thousands. Jeff points out the uniquely American cliché inherent in this mindset: the assumption that bigger automatically equals better.
Even Basil Gildersleeve, a monumental figure in American classics, boasted in an 1878 address that Americans could understand the ancients better than Europeans because of their shared inventiveness—rattling off cultural stereotypes about “pedantic” Germans, “skeptical” English, and “erratic” French in the process.
Sponsors and Support
Before wrapping up, a massive thank you goes out to the sponsors keeping the Ad Navseam bunker fully operational.
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For those wanting to take their own journey from neophyte to erudite, head over to latinperdiem.com for self-paced Greek and Latin courses. Whether tackling MossMethod for Greek (featuring the beloved Friday Moffice Hours) or diving into a Latin master class on Cicero or Calvin, Dave will serve as the psychopompos guiding students through the languages from the absolute ab initio stage. Use the code 10PLUS for 10% off any order. Additionally, do not forget to download the Calvin’s Latin Bible App to practice restored classical pronunciation.
Credits & Gustatory Parting Shot
A huge thank you to the podcast’s audio wizard, Mishka, for her top-tier engineering, and to Jeff Scheetz for bringing the ultimate rock energy to the intro with his track, Thrillseeker.
The episode concludes with a Gustatory Parting Shot, pulled from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Collected Stories:
“People would eat a boot if it was homemade.”
Thanks for reading, and be sure to catch the next episode as the hosts dive into a review of introductory Greek textbooks!
