Commentary   A span of over a thousand years separates our last writer, the Roman historian Tacitus (who died about 120 C.E.), from Niccolò Machiavelli. You might wonder: Was there no one during that time period worth covering? And, why Machiavelli? Wasn’t he an exponent of the ruthless politics the American Founders rejected? The answer…

Commentary The authors discussed in this series impacted the Constitution both directly and indirectly. Citations to the authors by participants in the constitutional debates of 1787–1790 are evidence of direct influence. Indirect influence occurred in at least two ways. First, over the course of centuries the insights of men such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Polybius…

Commentary The previous (ninth) essay in this series identified three Roman poets quoted by participants in the constitutional debates of 1787–1790—Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. The essay explained why Virgil was the most influential: “If the American Founding had a poet laureate,” I wrote, “he would be it.” This installment outlines Virgil’s influence on the constitution-makers…

Commentary The constitutional basis for most federal regulations is the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause. A new historical study shows, however, that the Interstate Commerce Clause is nowhere near as broad as federal officials claim it is. In other words, much of the federal “administrative state” is unconstitutional. The Background It established law that the federal…

Commentary The previous installment in this series outlined the life and career of the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero. It described how John Adams relied on Cicero’s work in the preface to the first volume of his survey of republican constitutions. Although Adams was in Europe when the Constitutional Convention met, his volume circulated among…

Commentary The first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth essays in this series addressed the influence on the Constitution of four leading Greek thinkers. There is one more Greek on our list, the biographer Plutarch. He lived much later, however, so to retain chronological order, we now turn to our first Roman. Marcus Tullius Cicero…