With In Rome’s Long Shadow, historian Jamie Gianoutsos offers a brilliant new take on the republican tradition, exploring the Roman republic and its legacies through the revolutionary beginnings of modern republics in the 17th and 18th centuries. Diving into stories of ancient tyranny and contemplating how republics have fallen into crisis and collapsed – cyclically, over time and across borders – she offers insights into timeless patterns of corruption.
As she tells the riveting stories of ancient Romans from Lucretia to Cato to the Brutuses to Julius Caesar and examines how later revolutionaries in America, Britain, France and Haiti re-envisioned themselves as Romans for a new era, she provides a fresh perspective and a critical assessment of the strategies that citizens pursued to create lasting republics.
As Gianoutsos elegantly shows, modern activists in the long republican tradition defended new liberties, such as the free press, freedom of expression and conscience, and true equality under law, as an extension of Rome’s long tradition and a modern bulwark against corruption, decline, and tyranny. But could this shared republican tradition bring hope for our institutions and for ourselves as citizens longing for a just and equal society?
With verve and deep knowledge, she argues that by exploring key moments from the past, we are able to better see ourselves, and our own problems, afresh and with clearer eyes.
