Antiques.

 
I enjoy Homer in his own language infinitely beyond Pope's translation 
of him.... I thank on my knees, him who directed my early education, for 
having put into my possession this rich source of delight, and I would 
not exchange it for anything which I could then have acquired, & have 
not since acquired. 
Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Joseph Priestly, Philadelphia, January 27, 1800. 

The classical world obsessed the founding fathers. "The Roman republic," wrote Alexander Hamilton, "attained to the utmost height of human greatness." His generation--classicists who read Polybius, Plutarch, Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus--embarked on a perilous enterprise in establishing a republic, and for precedents they looked across the centuries to Greece in the age of Pericles and to Augustan Rome. The classics supplied a large portion of the founders' intellectual tools. They understood that intellectual and political independence were the defining characteristics of their Greek and Roman heroes, who had formulated the revolutionary theories of popular sovereignty, natural law, and mixed government. They learned from the political horror stories of the ancient historians that liberty was as precarious as it was precious.

The founders used classical symbols and allusions to communicate, to impress, to persuade, and to legitimize their cause. In late 1782, nearing the close of the war, the Confederation Congress officially announced that a new age had arrived and that a new historical era was at hand, summing it up with symbolic simplicity by inscribing the Great Seal of the United States with Latin phrases from Virgil: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM (A new cycle of the ages), ANNUIT COEPTIS (God has approved our beginnings), and E PLURIBUS UNUM (Out of many, one)--the last two, incidentally, composed of thirteen letters each.

The institutions of this first generation of the American Republic were also markedly Greco-Roman in inspiration. The senior legislative body was called the Senate--the name of the elders' council of the Roman Republic--and met in the Capitol--a building named after one of the Seven Hills of Rome. ...