In Rome's Long Shadow: How the Classical Tradition Shaped the Modern World

Julius Caesar, Lucretia, Cincinnatus, Augustus, the Gracchi brothers: Roman figures have had an extraordinary influence on modern republics from the United States to France. Historian Jamie Gianoutsos traces the Roman republic and its afterlives through the revolutionary birth of these modern republics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to reveal how ancient ideas of liberty, virtue, and corruption shaped the political imagination of a new age.

Moving from stories of tyranny and col...