The Golden Age of the Classics in America by Carl Richard, Part IX (Ad Navseam, Episode 198)

This week the guys wrap up their look at Richard's trenchant book with his final chapter on the classics and American slavery. Richard teases out how both pro-slavery factions (John C. Calhoun, Thomas Dew, George Fitzhugh) and abolitionists (William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass) marshaled Greco-Roman thinkers to support their respective causes. The South argued that the flourishing of the arts and thought in Athens was a result of the elite classes being freed from work by the slave population, while the North saw slavery as Athens’ biggest flaw. What do Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero have to say about it all? Did they believe that some swaths of humanity were naturally servile? And, what does “natural law” suggest? Tune in and find out. There's plenty of room here for all of us to learn, even the Twainees.