Lore of the Founding: Cato And Give Me Liberty, Give Me Death

One Roman name keeps popping up wherever people argue about freedom, tyranny, and what a citizen owes a republic: Cato. We follow Cato the Younger from the final days of the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar’s rise forces a brutal choice between compromise and principle. Cato’s answer is extreme and unforgettable, and it raises the same question that keeps resurfacing in American politics: what does “republican virtue” actually demand from us?

From there, we trace how Stoicism shapes Cato’s public image. We talk about the Stoic ideal of the perfectly virtuous person, why Cato becomes known as the rare politician who cannot be bribed, and how integrity can create influence even when it costs you power. Then the story turns to the chaos after Caesar’s assassination: Mark Antony’s survival, the funeral speech that whips the crowd into a riot, and Cicero’s attempt to defend liberty with words through the blistering Philippics, echoing Demosthenes’ warnings from ancient Athens.

Finally, we connect Rome to the American founding through Joseph Addison’s 1712 play Cato: A Tragedy, the Valley Forge performance that helped steel Revolutionary resolve, and the surprisingly messy origins of “Give me liberty or give me death.” We end where civics always ends, with us: can a republic survive without virtuous citizens, and what does civic virtue look like when you’re not living through a revolution? If you enjoyed this, subscribe, share with a friend who loves history and politics, and leave a review with your take on what virtue means today.

Check Out the Civic Literacy Curriculum!

School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Welcome back to Civics in a year in locker welcome back to Civics in a Year. I'm your host, Liz Evans, and we're again in our Laura of the Founding with Joanna Kenti. And Joanna, I have just so loved this series. And today we're talking about Cato and Republican virtue. So when I hear the term when I hear Cato, I think of the Federalist Papers. Uh-huh. Who is Cato?

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Yeah. Yeah. Not the Hunger Games Cato. I, you know. We could go on a whole episode about that, but we don't need to do that. So Cato, we're talking about uh, we usually call him Cato the Younger. His his, you know, traditional Roman three

Welcome And Why Cato Matters

SPEAKER_00 1:34

names are Marcus Portius Cato, Porcius, is his family name. And there is a another like famous ancestor who is Marcus Portius. Cato, we call him Cato the Elder. He's like also a really interesting historian and political leader, but he's not the one we're talking about. We're talking about Cato the Younger. We brought him up last time when we were talking about Julius Caesar. So, Cato, when Julius Caesar is fighting a civil war against Pompey the Great, who is supported by most of the Senate in that civil war, Cato is initially an ally of Pompey. When Caesar wins that decisive battle, most of the senators surrender and are pardoned by Caesar and allowed to go home. The big exception is Cato, who takes a few of the kind of hardcore allies. They go off to North Africa and ally with some of the kings there to try and mount a continuing resistance to Caesar. Cato decides that it's really not possible to live consistently with his

Cato’s Stand Against Caesar

SPEAKER_00 2:37

values if Caesar remains in power as a dictator at Rome. Like those two things are not compatible. So he cannot do anything but continue to resist. It's gotten totally dysfunctional. Cicero prosecuted a few people for bribery, and he talks about like how rampant it is. And Cato is like the shining exception. He is the guy who will never do any of that, whether he wins or loses, and mostly he loses. So there's a certain amount of like influence he has because of that. And everyone has a lot of respect for him, even if they don't like him very much. This is part kind of a reflection of the fact that he was a scholar of Stoic philosophy, um, a sort of like daily life practitioner of Stoic philosophy. So Stoicism is a school of Greek philosophy. It's founded by a guy named Zeno in the city of Athens a little while after the death of Socrates. It's like in that same tradition. And it's called Stoic because they met in a building called the Stoa. So they're they're just named after their meeting space. When we talk about someone being stoic today, we're usually talking about someone who like doesn't show any emotion no matter what happens to them. They like project a lot of like strong and silent energy, I would say. That's sort

Stoicism And Real Virtue

SPEAKER_00 4:32

of like a like a whisper of what stoic philosophy actually is. Um stoic philosophy is like super interesting and wide-ranging. It includes a lot of really interesting natural science, the ideas of like atoms and and how atoms interact with each other. They imagine that all human souls are kind of like cosmically connected to one supreme divinity. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in Stoicism. But where we get this, what we would now call like a stoic person, the Stoics talked about what it meant to be like a truly good person. A perfectly good person. They imagine that the true philosopher is someone who is perfectly virtuous all the time, never does anything bad, doesn't have bad thoughts or bad impulses. And so they imagine the satisfaction that comes with that, the kind of confidence of the virtuous philosopher. So that when bad things happen to them, they would say, Well, you know, I've never done anything bad. So this is happening to me, but I don't need to get upset about it. I don't need to feel bad that it might be my fault. And really the important thing in the grand scheme of things is that I'm a virtuous person. So physical pain or bad situations, I don't need to get upset about them. I can't control those things, but I can control my own response and I feel good about my response. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, this is hundreds of years later than what we're talking about. He's probably the most famous, famous Stoic philosopher, purely for the reason that most of the earlier Stoic philosophers' writings don't survive to today, but Marcus Aurelius' meditations do. And that's like his daily journal of trying to implement Stoic philosophy in his daily life, which is tough for a Roman emperor. And this idea of being the true philosopher who's perfectly virtuous, the Stoics weren't really sure if anyone ever achieved that or could. But, you know, that's what they're trying to get to. So this is the school of philosophy that Cato espouses. And so he is trying to be perfectly virtuous in all of his actions. And so this opposition to Caesar, you could say, comes out of that, that he is uncompromising in saying, I need to live as a free person, and I need to protect the freedom of my fellow citizens. And so, like, surrender is not an option. So Cato takes some legions, some followers to North Africa. They are mounting a resistance there, they end up being defeated on the battlefield at a city called Utica. Not the New York one, one in North Africa. And you know, surrender is not an option. So Cato decides to die by suicide rather than return to Rome.

unknown 7:33

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Caesar is reportedly extremely upset by this, like upset to have lost Cato as kind of like a fellow political figure. Cicero is very upset. He's back at Rome by this point, and he hears about it, he's very shocked. But also really admires what Cato did and writes this eulogy that becomes kind of a point of tension under Caesar's dictatorship.

Utica And The Refusal To Surrender

SPEAKER_00 7:59

And I mentioned last time Brutus is married to Cato's daughter, and he's thinking a lot about Cato's philosophy as he is kind of plotting the assassination of Caesar. Cicero, despite writing this eulogy, I mean, he's kind of given up on political leadership at this point. He's like, the dictatorship is what it is. I can't really do any good at this point. So he's just kind of like waiting to see for an opening, I guess. And on the Ides of March, Caesar is assassinated. All of a sudden, Cicero thinks it's it's happening. Like the restoration of the republic is now an option again. We're back. We're gonna have free and fair elections to normal political offices, and like the people elected to those offices are actually gonna be able to do what they're supposed to be doing instead of a dictator telling them what to do. The Senate is gonna have influence again and is gonna have like authority and self-respect as a governing legislative body. Unfortunately, that's not exactly what happens. So at the time of Caesar's death, he's consul, and his co-consul is uh Marcus Antonius, who we know as Mark Antony. He's called Mark Antony by English readers. So, like in Antony

Caesar Assassinated And Antony Turns The Crowd

SPEAKER_00 9:15

and Cleopatra, that's why his name is Antony. It's sort of an anglicized version of it, and it's like the familiar version of his name. So I'm just gonna call him that. Okay. So Antony is not in the Senate. He's right outside when the assassination happens, and he just runs for his life. He thinks they're coming for him too. And actually, they had talked about whether they should or not. Brutus is the one who doesn't want to. But the next day he wakes up, he's not dead. He is now sole consul. And Brutus comes to him saying, I want to work with you to provide an amnesty to all of Caesar's assassins. Like, we're not gonna be punished. We were trying to save the Republic, but we're just gonna not deal with it legally. And Antony says, Okay, this is surprisingly good for me. I get to stay alive and be consul, fine. Brutus also agrees to let Antony deliver a eulogy for Caesar in the forum, which turns out to be like one of the great bad calls, because this is what Shakespeare turns into the Friends Romans Countryman speech. So Antony starts out, you know, sober enough, but then starts reminding all of the people in the forum of how much they loved Caesar and why. And so as it goes on, the people are getting more and more upset about having their beloved leader taken away from them. And then Antony concludes by holding up the bloody toga of Caesar with all of these like stab wounds in it. And the people riot. Brutus has to flee the city. He is never able to come home. Like the tide turns very quickly. A comet appears in the night sky, and someone yells, It's Caesar becoming a god. And that just becomes accepted truth. So Cicero's hopes that the Republic is going to be restored. Not what happens. Brutus hopes he's going to be seen as a liberator. Not what happens. Like his ancestor, Lucius Brutus, who we talked about, that's not how it goes. Brutus ends up also losing a decisive battle to Antony, and he dies by suicide in the same way Cato did. We get this mostly from Plutarch's biographies. So he says that on the day Brutus died, after taking each one of his friends by the hand, he smiled and he said he was actually filled with a great joy because not one of his friends had ever failed him. And he only blamed fortune, not for his own sake, but for his country's sake. And he thought that fate was kinder to him than to the victors, not only in the past, but even in this moment, because he was leaving behind him a reputation for virtue, which his conquerors for all their arms or their wealth could never rival. The world would come to know that wicked and unscrupulous men who put to death the good and the just were themselves unfit to rule. So it's like this perfectly stoic idea that even in defeat and death, his virtue is intact, and that makes him superior to his conquerors.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Like there's so there's so much here. I didn't know this is a podcast that people cannot see my face, but the whole time I'm just like, oh my gosh, are you serious? Like this is insane. So is Hato like is he responsible for kind of this term that we've heard? The give me liberty or give me death? Like, where does this kind of all start to come up, if you want?

SPEAKER_00 13:09

So I mean, sort of indirectly, via a British playwright, Joseph Addison. So in 1712, so before the American Revolution, he writes this tragic play called Cato a Tragedy. And it's the story of Cato's resistance to Caesar and ultimately his death. You can find it pretty easily online. It's like in the public domain now. You do, if you read it, have to get through some like very goofy romantic subplots that he just like felt like would keep people interested in the whole thing, I guess. Why this play is important is very popular in the colonies, also in the 18th century. But specifically, when George Washington is stuck with his army and Valley Forge in the winter of 1777 into 78, they're

Addison’s Cato Sparks Revolutionary Language

SPEAKER_00 13:55

freezing, they're starving, the soldiers don't have clothing or boots. It's like the coldest winter on record. They have lost like all of Massachusetts and New York to the British at this point, who are just like happily sitting by firesides in occupied Philadelphia. Things are as bad as they could be. And Washington decides at that moment to sponsor a production of Cato a Tragedy for his officers at Valley Forge. And in the play, Cato, when he is prepared to sacrifice himself and his army in this like fight for freedom, we get this famous line: it is not now a time to talk of aught but chains or conquest, liberty or death. And so that line is sort of semi-quoted by Patrick Henry in 1775 when he's talking to the Virginia Assembly, trying to get them on board with this idea of declaring independence from Britain, and concludes, give me liberty or give me death. And it is a very Catonian sentiment that, like, either we're gonna free ourselves from tyranny or we're gonna die trying. And that is an acceptable outcome. In fact, those are the only two acceptable outcomes. I spent a long time living in New Hampshire and saw brain.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

Live free or die. That's right. Sorry. Is that on their license plate?

SPEAKER_00 15:31

I think. Live free or die on every license plate. Like and really it's a whole, it's a it's a way of life up there in New England. So in Cato, a tragedy, the other kind of famous line that shows up in the revolution is uh comes on later. He reminds his friends, he he kind of talks about freedom as the inheritance that's been passed down, the laws, the rights, the generous plan of power delivered down from age to age by your renowned forefathers. So dearly bought the price of so much blood, though let it never perish in your hands, but piously transmit it to your children. Do thou, great liberty, inspire our souls and make our lives in thy possession happy, or are deaths glorious in thy just defense? And towards the end of the play, one of Cato's two sons dies in battle, and the body is brought before him and his other son. And instead of grieving, he's kind of like Brutus in that moment of his death. He's happy. He says, How beautiful is death when earned by virtue? Who would not be that youth? What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country? And he says, Thy life is not thy own when Rome demands it. So we kind of sacrificed his son for the cause of Roman freedom. That line, what pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country? That's supposed to be the last thing said by Nathan Hale, who is a school teacher in Connecticut who was a spy for the Patriots and the Revolution, and he's caught by the British and hanged. And this is the last thing he says. So that the play, Cato, and these like lines are I used to ask students, like, you know, if you had to like pick a line from this play to like have tattooed on yourself, like that that's the level of inspiration that people are taking from the play, this idea that independence is worth fighting for even to the death. It's even like, it's, I think you could call it radicalizing. And it's sort of easy to forget that it was so dangerous to declare independence. And for these men fighting on the battlefield, I mean, truly, like risking their lives for the cause of independence. There was nothing kind of measured or like pragmatic. They're not like sitting there carefully calculating the next rational step. They're just throwing themselves into it with complete abandon. Cato like gets them fired up to do that.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

And I think that, you know, especially when we look at America 250, sometimes people romanticize the revolution and romanticize a lot of these things, but that they essentially were committing treason. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Yeah. I mean, they they said that at the time. Franklin says, you know, we'll hang for this. We might as well hang for this together, because otherwise we'll definitely all hang separately. Like we are doing, we are committing capital crimes here. But if you win, you know, you're the liberators.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

So okay. So now I know of this play, which I am gonna look up and probably read the romantic parts too, because it'll probably make me laugh. Yeah. So I've heard a lot, like a lot in this play, and a lot about you know Cato himself. How does Patrick Henry again pull this give me liberty or give me death? Is it is it the play? Is it Cato? Like, is it another speech? Because it sounds to me like the founders really are pulling a lot from the Roman Republic.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

Yeah. Many of them are. I mean, Patrick Henry is not one of the more like highly educated of the figures at the American founding. So the the way he comes to quote this play is like actually very complicated. So Patrick Henry's speech, as we now know it, is based on other ancient speeches as well as Cato. It's based on Cicero's speeches, the Philippics, which are themselves based on speeches by Demosthenes, a Greek orator, also called the Philippics. I'll explain that in a second. However, Patrick Henry isn't the one who wrote the speech down, and he didn't write it down before he gave it. Instead, what we have is

The Messy Origins Of Liberty Or Death

SPEAKER_00 20:00

a speech his friend William Wirt wrote down like many decades later from memory. And William Wirt definitely knew the Philippics like a lot better than Patrick Henry would have. So what we have may be sort of a mishmash of what Patrick Henry actually said, and then these quotations from Cato, Cicero, and Demosthenes. And we don't really know which one. The Philippics. So Cicero in the aftermath of Caesar's assassination, he's like not giving up on the idea of restoring the Republic. And so he wants to take Mark Antony down. He seems to hit sees him as the main obstacle to restoring the republic. And so he writes this absolutely scathing attack on everything about Mark Antony, his personal life, his childhood, his sex life, his wife. It like gets into like all everything. And that's also when we learn about how Antony like tried to give Caesar a crown and supported him in becoming a tyrant. Cicero gives a lot of these speeches. It's 14 total, only 13 of them he actually delivered. One of them is just written. But he writes up copies of them after the fact and he sends them to Brutus and he sends them to others of their friends who are in exile and were just not participating in the Senate at that point, to show them like, I'm trying to make a stand here and continue your work without you. And he titles them Philippics. The original Philippics are Greek speeches from about 300 years earlier, delivered by Demosthenes, who is the greatest orator that Athens ever saw, according to the Athenians. This is kind of like the sunset of Athenian democracy, like really not the classical, like prosperous Athenian democracy. And King Philip II of Macedon, so the country to the north of Greece. It's not, it's part of modern Greece, actually, but then was not. He is starting to invade the cities of Greece. And he says he is not intending to conquer Greece. It's just like he's having territorial disputes with a few cities here and there. Demosthenes goes in front of the assembly and he says, Philip is lying, and he is paying Athenian politicians to lie for him to say that he wants peace. He obviously doesn't. What he is planning is that by the time you figure out he doesn't want peace, it'll be too late and you won't have any allies left, and he is just going to divide. Conquer and pick us off one by one. He has a lot to say about Philip being a barbarian because he's Macedonian and not Greek. He says, We are Athenians. We have this legacy of freedom. We owe it to our ancestors to protect what they created for us and maintain for us. And we have to stand up and fight against Philip. And Athens follows his advice. They try to resist Philip's invasion. They don't win. Philip's son, Alexander the Great, is the better known conqueror, but like Philip II conquered most of Greece. But Demosthenes even maintains after that, like that was worth doing. That's an enterprise worth undertaking. So when Cicero goes up against Antony, even though Antony is an enemy from within rather than an external invader, he sees this as his big Demosthenes moment. And so he calls these speeches his Philippics. He like he talks about Antony as this psychotic cornered animal. He's like, we've almost got him. We just he wants to make us all slaves. He wants to drink our blood. He goes like all in against Mark Antony. These speeches are not Cicero's most interesting or creative. They're kind of one note, but there's a lot of them. And so what he's trying to get the Senate to do is declare Antony an enemy of the state. But the Senate just doesn't want to declare for one side or the other Republic or Antony. They just kind of want to sit back and wait and see what happens on the battlefield because, like, there's no reward for choosing the losing side at this point. And Antony does, in fact, return to power. And one of the first things he does is condemn Cicero and a lot of his other political enemies to death. So Cicero is kind of hunted down, and his head and hands are nailed to the speaker's platform in the forum. That's Antony's way of saying, like, this is what I think of your free speech. This is what I think of your Philippics. There's also a rumor that his wife attacks the body with a hairpin for what Cicero said about her in the Philippics. And so Cicero kind of ends up dying for freedom as well, or at least, you know, like speaking out for freedom. He's not fighting on the battlefield, but I mean he does make his last stand. And that's one of the moments where we say, like, the republic is no more. Once that happens, that's kind of it. So that's how we get. I mean, Cicero, he doesn't have the same integrity or uncompromising quality to him as Cato does. He compromised quite a lot. And because we have his personal letters, we also know that he was very indecisive about whose side to choose, even though he kind of knew who the right side was. So Cato is a much clearer example and like more inspirational example for most people, except for John Adams, who is like a lifelong Cicero fan. And so he writes this letter to his friend Benjamin Rush, where he says, I think Cicero, Cato, and Brutus were the only three patriots in that generation of the Roman Republic, that last generation. And he said, I think Cato and Brutus were honest, but with great aberrations, and neither of them very able as a politician. Cicero had the most capacity and the most constant, as well as the wisest and most persevering attachment to the republic. And he says, almost 50 years ago, when I was young, I read Conyers Middleton's biography of Cicero with great pleasure. And now I'm reading it again. And I have even more pleasure now because I understand it better. And I seem to read the history of all ages and nations in every page, especially the history of our own country for 40 years past. So this is 1805. So this is like the period of the revolution and the Constitution. He says, if you change the names, every anecdote is applicable to us. I said I read it with pleasure, but it was a melancholy pleasure because the triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, the other of Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus, those triumvirates, their intrigues and cabals have analogy enough with Hamilton's schemes to get rid of Washington, Adams, Jay, and Jefferson and monopolize all power to himself. So those like backroom deals that Caesar was engaged with, the corruption, Cicero, Cato, and Brutus are the Patriots like trying and failing ultimately to resist all of these corrupt schemes. So this is like Adams being cynical in his later years.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

It's so interesting. John Adams is coming up a lot lately for me. Not a founding father that I know a whole lot about. And I've always had my opinions about him, and I feel like they're changing the more I learn. This is, I think, why I love primary sources too, like that letter to Benjamin Rush. So I guess the final question then can a republic survive without virtuous citizens.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

I was like really ruminating on this question a lot. This also reminded me of a John Adams letter. This one's to Thomas Jefferson. I will say, by the way, I think the first biography of a founding father that I read was David McCullough's John Adams. And it has a lot of letters in it. And so Adams was like my entry point into this period of history. And I think I have the greatest sympathy with him because of. So it's sort of funny, like what angle you're like, it's not that I identify with his politics most, it's just that I know his personal story the

Can A Republic Survive Without Virtue

SPEAKER_00 28:47

best. That's your entry point. Mine's Madison. I mean, he and I share an obsession with Cicero, so that helps. There you go. In any case, he once he's like writing to Jefferson again, once they've patched up their friendship in their later years, he says he's he remembers reading a work of a Scotchman about the court of Augustus, in which he undertook to prove that had Brutus and Cassius been conqueror, they would have restored virtue and liberty to Rome. But Adam says, I don't think that's what would have happened. Have you ever found in history a single example of a nation thoroughly corrupted that was afterward restored to virtue? And without virtue, there can be no political liberty. So I guess he thought it was like already over for the American Republic and you know the early 1800s. So I guess the positive is that he was overly cynical, and that turned out not to be the case. Cato is like a funny example of civic virtue, I think. We also talked about Cincinnati as an example of civic virtue, and he might, he's like kind of a better example in some ways. Because I don't think dying as a freedom fighter is really like the mindset you need to live in a republic or a democracy. You may have to do that to win your freedom in a revolution or to unseat a tyrant who has overthrown the constitution. But then once you have self-government, the civic virtues you need are very different. And that transition, I think, was really difficult for a lot of people who participated in the American Revolution. It's really hard to then go into governing and maintain the same insistence on the principles that they had risked their lives for. So even when anti-federalists start using Cato's name, breaking out that liberty or death rhetoric again in 1788 to resist the federal constitution, like that's not functional democratic deliberation, particularly, to start delivering Philippics against the Constitutional Convention. It's not that's not what we would call civil discourse. So I think a republic does need virtuous citizens, although we've talked before about no men are angels as one of the principles of constitutional design that James Madison held. You have to deal with the reality that all citizens are not virtuous all the time. Virtuous leaders are pretty great to have, but you're also going to have ambitious and conniving leaders. And the virtuous leaders you want aren't necessarily virtuous like Cato was virtuous. I mean, for one thing, Cato was not a successful politician. So people don't elect those leaders very often. And maybe the virtuous citizens aren't the same as your prominent politicians, that's possible. I think what Cato does represent that's really important is integrity and incorruptibility, even while the world around him, the political world, is very corrupt. He chose to stand apart and do his own thing, even when people got really annoyed about it. Even Cicero made fun of him for it. And he also was insisting on freedom as something worth fighting for, and freedom from domination in particular, which is part of what democracy is all about. And he saw those as non-negotiable. Cicero's got a lot of other writing, we're gonna get into this next time, about virtues like justice, generosity, honesty, decorum, what he called kind of behaving appropriately in particular moments. So, like broadly speaking, I think those are examples of the civic virtues that the Roman Republic did need and that the Roman Republic kind of celebrated and embodied when it was at its best, instead of in this moment of collapse.

SPEAKER_01 33:04

And I'm glad that you brought up our next episode will be on Cicero because again, I know myself, I had to do it. But I think that you know, we're learning so much about how the Romans really influenced the founders. And for so long, like I I mean, I've heard the give me liberty or give me death and just made the assumption that it was based on something, but again, have learned so much in this kind of again, lore of the founding and how it was misremembered, maybe because I think you know, especially as time goes on, memory is not always the most reliable thing. And so you said there there might have been this mesh, right? And I I I mean, I guess, you know, that last question too, I think that that is an interesting thing for people to just to think about like what is a virtuous citizen now? Because as you were talking, I was thinking of some examples in American history, right? Of people who acted virtuous. I don't know that somebody can be virtuous all the time. I don't know that that's human nature, but again, I think that is a great talking point. But there are examples, and I do actually really appreciate that Cato was not a politician because oftentimes we think of people who are influential, and a lot of times they are politicians. They are people who have held office, but there has been a theme toward this last part of the podcast of people who are not elected to office, but still, you know, contributed and had that kind of civic humility or civic care, which again are not my words. They are words that other scholars have used during this. So again, Cato, super interesting. And now I want to go back and read the anti-federalist papers that used Cato to see like if I can figure out why they use that name, you know, based on what I know.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

Yeah, there's Brutus ones, also Brutus, a little bit of a softer personality than Cato. But yeah, evoking that same, I mean, it's the opposition to Caesar. So part of it is the part of the game is like, who are they calling Caesar? And a lot of the times it's Alexander Hamilton in particular for reasons we're talking about, but that relationship and saying, like, we're in this moment where someone is trying to establish a dictatorship and take away free self-government that we just fought so hard for, like that reference to that historical moment. In a sense, like I get the sense that the founders are both trying to establish a new republic, like the first Brutus, while also trying to stop it from collapsing like the second Brutus at the same time. And that's a a really interesting way of thinking about the role they were playing for their country.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

I love that. Joanna, thank you so much. Again, I learned something new every time. And now I'm excited to learn more about Cicero in our next episode.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

Yeah, definitely go read Addison. I mean, Plutarch's biographies are like also really fun, but you know, maybe you'll like the romance subplots too. You never you never know. No judgment.