給隨風的 英文文章

第一張圖 (標題不打了)
window dressing for educated Britons on both sides of the Atlantie; they were in fact the principal source of their public morality and values. All plitiical morality was classical morality;people could not read enough about Cato and Cicero . Every lawyer aspired to be another Cicero,and Cato-well,there was no ancient hero like him.Addison's play Cato was one of the most plpular in the English-speaking world;Thomas Gray even declared it to be a better model for English tragedy than anything by Shakespeare"In America the play went through at least eight editions before 1800.George Wasgington saw it over and over and incorporated its lunes into his correspondence; he learned from it what it was to be a stoical classical hero and an uncorrupt public leader.
The clasical past helped to form nuch of eighteenth-century politi-cal theory in the English-speaking world-from the ideal of balanced government to the conception of virtuous citizenship. According to the antique republican tradition, man was by nature a political being,a cit-izen who achieved his greatest moral fulfillment by participating in a self-governing republic. Public or plitiical liberty-or what we now call positive liberty-meant participation in government. And this political liberty in turn provided the means by which the personal liberty and pri-vate rights of the individual-what we today call negative liberty-were protected. In this classical republican tradition, our modern distinction between positive and negative liberties was not yet clearly perceived,and the two forms of liberty were still often seen as one.
Of course,the English did not need ancient Rome to tell them about liberty-at least, not about negative liberty.An acute sense of their liber-ties and rights,expressed and reinforced by their common law,had been a central part of their culture from time immemorial-from before the Nor-man conquest and,some said,from before the Roman invasion.Yet how-ever little the classical republican con ception of liberty may have affected English law and culture on the home island,it did have important effects on some of the North American colonists. To the extent that colonial Americans thinking about liberty was affected by the classical past and made positive and republicanized,so was liberty made compatible with