When Horace first published the Odes in 23 BCE, in an edition comprising the eighty-eight poems of books 1–3, Ode 3.30 stood as a self-reflexive epilogue in which the poet surveyed his work and announced the achievement of his own goals. Its clear and confident claims to poetic immortality resonate pointedly in form and tone with Horace’s earlier statements. The first two lines of the poem are particularly forceful, and feature one of the collection’s more memorable images and more durable phrases.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

Chapter Six explores the third and last constitutive stage of human dignity in international criminal law. Human dignity’s first manifestations coincide with the adoption and entry into force of the Hague Law (1899 and 1907) and the largely symbolic, in retrospect, Article 227 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, under which the German Kaiser was to be brought to justice, although that did not happen. In 1945, with the Nuremberg Statute, human dignity is unequivocally enshrined in legal form, both in the definition of international crimes, including ‘against humanity’, and in the necessary corollary of an international prosecution of such crimes. The institutional and legal criminal framework of the 1990s, however, provides a more solid basis for the consolidation of human dignity through international criminal law, vesting it with an actionable nature. Aside from the expansion of conflict-specific international tribunals, the conclusion in 1998 of the Rome Statute establishing a general International Criminal Court, defining both crimes and institutional processes for the prosecution, consolidates the incremental approach prevailing until them in international criminal law.