Mortal Republic

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THIS BOOK GREW OUT OF a series of conversations with my children and my students about the ways in which antiquity can help us understand the challenging and occasionally alarming political realities of our world. Each conversation began with a question about whether history repeats itself, a question that has been asked much more frequently over the past two years as journalists and historians turn to the recent past to try to explain an unpredictable present. The past is no oracle and historians are not prophets, but this does not mean that it is wrong to look to antiquity for help understanding the present. The republics that are now so strained did not, like Athena, spring fully formed from the head of Zeus in the eighteenth century. Their founders modeled them on older, extremely successful republics that preceded them. Rome offered the oldest and most successful republic on which many modern states were patterned. The ancient Roman Republic is, of course, very different from a modern state, but the Roman Republic’s distribution of power and its processes for political decision making deeply influenced its modern descendants. The successes and failures of Rome’s republic can show how republics built on Rome’s model might respond to particular stresses. They also reveal which political behaviors prove particularly corrosive to a republic’s long-term health. I hope that this book allows its readers to better appreciate the serious problems that result both from politicians who breach a republic’s political norms and from citizens who choose not to punish them for doing so.

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