ABSTRACT
If ancient Greece for the American Puritan forefathers was a distant and detestable site of memory, due mainly to its heathen context, the case was not the same with Republican America. The infl uence of the Enlightenment and the ensuing trend of neoclassicism prompted Americans to mold their own republican ideals on the example of their own notion of GrecoRoman Antiquity. Leading enlightenment notions such as the surrender to the public duty, the subordination of individual gain to the glorifi cation of the state, which prevailed in the Republican American arena during the early nineteenth century, had taken as their basic reading the political and historical texts of antiquity. Adherent to the individuals’ reciprocal duty to the state, there was another leading part of the Enlightenment’s cultthe cosmopolitan outlook-as observation of strangers and acquaintance with other cultures, Americans believed, was an essential qualifi cation for prospective statesmen in order to develop a broad understanding of the diverse cultures they would be called upon to cooperate with and instruct. As a result, Republican Americans were eager to learn about the lands they were separated from “by a revolution as well as an ocean” (Bendixen 70).
