Exclusive — Eugenia Manolidou on Reemergence of Classics: They Give Us ‘Direct Access’ to Questions Humanity Has Grappled for Thousands of Years

August 24, 2026
12:13 pm

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Eugenia Manolidou’s reminder that the classics offer “direct access” to the perennial questions of human life lands with special force for those who still believe the right to keep and bear arms is not a policy preference but a timeless principle. When Athenian schoolchildren once again parse Thucydides on the Mytilenean Debate or Aristotle on the armed citizen as the only reliable guardian of the polis, they are not merely studying grammar; they are recovering the original argument that political liberty cannot survive if only the magistrates are armed. That argument traveled from the hoplite phalanx to the Roman Republic, from Machiavelli’s citizen militia to the English Bill of Rights, and finally into the text of the Second Amendment—each link forged by the same conviction that an armed populace is the visible proof of popular sovereignty. The re-emergence of classical learning therefore supplies the 2A community with something more durable than polling data or legislative scorecards: an intellectual genealogy. When progressive pundits dismiss the Amendment as an eighteenth-century anachronism, the classical record answers that the Founders were consciously restoring a far older settlement—one in which the armed citizen, not the standing army, was understood to be the true foundation of republican order. Manolidou’s school is small, yet its project is vast: to let the next generation read the same passages that Jefferson and Madison read, and to recognize that the questions those passages pose about power, virtue, and self-government have not changed because the technology of arms has. For Second Amendment advocates, the lesson is strategic as well as philosophical. If the classics can again become part of the common tongue, the rhetorical field shifts from narrow debates over “assault weapons” to first principles about who may be trusted with force. A public fluent in Plato’s Laws or Cicero’s De Officiis will find it harder to accept the claim that only agents of the state should be armed, because that claim collides with twenty-five centuries of recorded skepticism toward concentrated power. In that sense, every restored Greek classroom is also a quiet redoubt in the defense of an armed republic.

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The re-emergence of classical learning therefore supplies the 2A community with something more durable than polling data or legislative scorecards: an intellectual genealogy. When progressive pundits dismiss the Amendment as an eighteenth-century anachronism, the classical record answers that the Founders were consciously restoring a far older settlement—one in which the armed citizen, not the standing army, was understood to be the true foundation of republican order. Manolidou’s school is small, yet its project is vast: to let the next generation read the same passages that Jefferson and Madison read, and to recognize that the questions those passages pose about power, virtue, and self-government have not changed because the technology of arms has.

For Second Amendment advocates, the lesson is strategic as well as philosophical. If the classics can again become part of the common tongue, the rhetorical field shifts from narrow debates over “assault weapons” to first principles about who may be trusted with force. A public fluent in Plato’s Laws or Cicero’s De Officiis will find it harder to accept the claim that only agents of the state should be armed, because that claim collides with twenty-five centuries of recorded skepticism toward concentrated power. In that sense, every restored Greek classroom is also a quiet redoubt in the defense of an armed republic.

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