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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 collapse in ancient Rome to moments of crisis in early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, Gianoutsos uncovers recurring patterns in the rise and fall of republics. Through vivid portraits of figures from Cato to the Brutuses to the revolutionaries of the United States, Britain, France, and Haiti who consciously cast themselves as modern Romans, she offers a fresh and critical assessment of the strategies citizens pursued in their struggle to build lasting republican institutions.
As Gianoutsos shows, modern activists in this long republican tradition defended new freedoms—of the press, expression, conscience, and equality before the law—as a bulwark against corruption, decline, and tyranny. With verve and deep historical insight, Gianoutsos argues that by revisiting the past, we gain a clearer view of ourselves—and of the challenges republics continue to face today.
“Ancient Rome never fell—or at least, as Jamie Gianoutsos teaches us, it never vanished from the palaces and parliaments, salons and libraries where educated men and women argued about politics. Over the centuries, historians recorded unforgettable Roman tales, whose powerful protagonists and complex results provoked endless debates. As republicans and monarchists, revolutionaries and tyrants, advocates of slavery and apostles of feminism retold and recast these stories, they created the modern Western heritage of political thought—a debate without end, as durable as Rome itself.”—Anthony Grafton, author of Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa
“All roads lead from Rome in the Western imagination, and not only reactionaries but radicals too have never ceased replaying scenes from its history—to angle for land reform or imagine slave revolts, or simply to ponder how to live in a republic the endurance of which is never guaranteed.”—Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War
“An illuminating tour of ancient Rome’s republican tradition and its profound influence on the early modern revolutionaries who shaped our modern world. Sophisticated yet accessible, this book vividly shows why Rome’s legacy both inspired and cautioned for centuries—and why it still resonates today. A dazzling achievement from a gifted historian.”—Jonathan Gienapp, author of Against Constitutional Originalism
“Republicanism—the kind of government, not the American political party—is usually explained as an abstract set of ideas: civic virtue, rule of law, popular participation, common good. This extremely accessible, wide-ranging study shows, in a compelling narrative, how those ideas came about. Dynamic and clear-headed, this exposition has cumulative persuasive force and is acutely relevant in the twenty-first century.”—Nigel Smith, author of Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon
“In Rome's Long Shadow is a magnificent book in the Roman sense—vast in scale, compelling and elegant in style, thoroughly eloquent, as instructive as it is enjoyable to read, with argumentative punch. A more relevant work in our very Roman times could hardly be imagined.”—Richard Whatmore, author of The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis
“For centuries, the Roman Republic lived in the imaginations of its admirers through its stories, from the self-sacrifice of Lucretia to the assassination of Julius Caesar. Retelling those stories with verve and insight, Jamie Gianoutsos explains what they conveyed to Romans themselves, and to the historians, playwrights, poets, and political thinkers of early modern England and revolutionary America, when republicanism offered a radical alternative to monarchical despotism.”—John Robertson, author of The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760
“Jamie Gianoutsos vividly recaptures the excitement that the Roman Republic inspired at successive nodal points of world history and offers fresh ways of engaging with it today.”—David Norbrook, author of Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660
“Given the fragility of modern democratic structures, In Rome's Long Shadow is a timely and insightful intervention. Gianoutsos engagingly reconstructs the myriad ways in which subsequent generations have repeatedly returned to classical Rome, finding both inspirational models and cautionary omens in equal measure.”—Clare Jackson, author of The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of King James VI and I
"In Rome's Long Shadow offers a powerful and engaging account of the Roman Republic and its early modern legacy in Britain, France, and America. Jamie Gianoutsos exposes the hierarchies, prejudices, and oppression that informed and shaped that tradition, while simultaneously celebrating the myriad ways in which the stories of ancient Rome were used by the victims of those hierarchies, prejudices, and oppression to craft narratives of emancipation for themselves."—Rachel Hammersley, author of Republicanism: An Introduction