doomed the Roman Republic, and, accordingly, if England wished to main-
tain its own commonwealth, it would have to embrace the agrarian move-
ment (Nelson 2004 , 87 – 126 ).
We see, then, that the battle between Rome and Greece deWned the
development of republican political theory throughout the early-modern
period. It was a battle waged over the central values of political life: freedom,
property, and the nature of human beings. Both neo-Roman political theory,
with its commitment to the sovereignty of the individual will, and the Greek
tradition, with its passion for the rational ordering of the political commu-
nity, would cast imposing shadows over eighteenth-century political thought
in Europe and the emerging American republic. But, as between them,
perhaps it was the Greek account’s tantalizing mixture of radical means and
hierarchical ends that more conclusively captured the Whig imagination.
After all, it was Thomas JeVerson in 1776 who sponsored a set of redistribu-
tionary inheritance laws in order ‘‘to lay the axe to the Pseudo-aristocracy’’ of
wealth, and ‘‘to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent,
which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society’’
(JeVerson 1984 , 32 ). ‘‘That form of government is the best,’’ he fully believed,
‘‘which provides the most eVectually for a pure selection of these natural
aristoi into the oYces of government’’ (Cappon 1959 , 390 ). Neither More nor
Harrington could have said it any better.
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208 eric nelson