Capitol,
Cincinnati all evoked Rome, not those Athenian assemblies vibrating between tyranny and anarchy and becoming “a mob” even if they were populated by the Socrateses of the world. The Senate would not be an ecclesia; it would meet in the Capitol, a name adopted from the Capitoline Hill in Rome, rather than from the Pnyx, where the ecclesia met. George Washington, resigning his presidency after two terms, modeled himself on the Roman hero Cincinnatus, not Pericles.
Yet in the early 1800s America democratizes. White male suffrage expands, the Democratic Party is founded in the late 1820s, and the pejorative connotations attending
Yliaster (Paracelsus) (detail), by Marsden Hartley, 1932. Smithsonian American Art Museum, museum purchase made possible by the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program and by George Frederick Watts and Mrs. James Lowndes, 1988.
We are taught to pride ourselves on living in a democracy. At the same time, in a thousand subtle ways, we are taught that true democracy is probably impossible. Certainly, the history of democracy is always told in a manner that reminds us it is extraordinarily difficult to achieve. It is never taught, for example, as a history of habit (people collectively governing their own affairs) or of sensibility (the feeling everyone should have equal say in decisions that affect them), but rather as the history of a word: Greek δημοκρατία, Latin