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The discovery by Cardinal Angelo Mai in 1819 of extensive portions of Cicero’s De Republica aroused great interest in the United States. Within a decade Americans had published an edition of the Latin text and the first English translation of the new work as well as numerous articles about its contempo­rary relevance. This paper analyzes how conservative intellectuals found in De Republica support for their critique of democratic trends in American poli­tics connected with the popularity of Andrew Jackson, whom they viewed as a potential military dictator like Julius Caesar. Also highlighted in the article is the tension between this traditional approach to the reading of a Ciceronian text and the historicizing tendencies of the new German philological scholar­ship that was beginning to make itself felt in the United States in the 1820s.

This paper publishes the text of “The Essence of Greek Culture,” the first public address delivered by Werner Jaeger after his immigration to the United States in 1936. It was part of the program of a symposium sponsored by the Trustees of the University of Chicago in May, 1937 and provides important evidence indicating that Jaeger had begun to adapt ideas he had long supported in Ger­many to conditions in the United States. The text of the paper is preserved in the Archives of the University of Chicago and is published with its permission.