Both on the historical issue of the extent of the American founders’ indebtedness to classical antiquity, and on the normative issue of the value of the classical legacy, I think we’re all agreed that it’s a complicated mix. So what I have to offer in this comment is not really a bold salvo of any sort, but just a few observations and quibbles. C. Bradley Thompson rightly points to Jefferson’s and Adams’s skeptical attitude toward the merits of Plato as a political thinker; but I don’t think we should infer from this that the influence of the ancients upon the founders lay mainly in the ethical rather than in the political sphere. For most of the criticisms that Jefferson and Adams make of Plato’s