Leonidas’s Three Hundred Spartans in the New World: Joel Barlow and the U.S. National Foundation

By focusing on Joel Barlow’s epic poem The Columbiad (1807), the essay investigates the “rising glory poems” and “imitative epics” which were written in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. The paper aims to show how these patriotic texts reiterate and expand in the new world and in a new epoch the ambitions of the other Western epic poems recounting the nationalistic and imperialistic aspirations of the Old World civilizations. By re-elaborating the classical theory of the translatio studii et imperii, American epic poems not only define in literary terms the principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but they also celebrate the foundation of the United States and the vision of a global world led by the new country. On the other hand, the transnational and nonexceptionalist perspective of contemporary American Studies makes evident how American epic poems do not avoid the logic according to which every civilization and every epic text has always considered itself as the final and exceptional stage of the progress of mankind.