This introductory chapter treats the early history of Rome’s literature, who was interested in the topic and when, and also how they approached the subject. It notes that from the start Roman literature was deeply imitative of Greek, and that the other peoples of the Italian peninsula also played important roles in the creation of a native literature. Indeed, many of the original writers of Rome were non-Romans. Covers the epics of Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius.

Chapter 1 begins with the problem of conflicting timescales in antiquarianism. At Pompeii, the question of human significance at the scale of geological deep time inspired writers to reconsider the material past and explore alternatives to traditional timelines. This chapter shows how Charles Dickens in particular experiments with nonlinear temporal forms in his travel narrative Pictures from Italy, which I argue uses a fractal temporal form to nest infinite pasts in present sites. A fractal is a nonlinear shape that repeats its structure even when viewed at fine scales. When Dickens deploys it as a temporal form, he necessarily changes the shape of history, offering alternative possibilities for Italian politics. Chapter 1 ends by considering the ethical ramifications of linear and nonlinear temporal forms in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage. This poem, depicting the Roman Republic of 1849, dramatizes English tourists’ attempts to reassert the historicism that casts Italy as past despite the Risorgimento. Ultimately, Chapter 1 shows how both Dickens and Clough respond to political potential in Italy by reconfiguring time.

This chapter works to historicize and materialize a family of ritualized practices (molk-style rites) related to the burnt offering of perinatal infants, their deposition in a sanctuary space (conventionally dubbed “tophets”), and the dedication of carved-stone monuments alongside the deposits. Instead of religious permanence or diffusion, it argues for four moments, each with distinctive dynamics, that led communities to embrace these rites. First, between the eighth and fourth centuries BCE, these rites were tied to Phoenician colonization; then, between the fourth and second centuries BCE, the adoption of molk-style rites was tied to migration from these colonial centers. But in the long first century BCE, the boom in molk-style rites was instead tied to the creation of a new, interconnected civic elite in the space between Numidian kingdoms and the Roman province of Africa. Finally, in the second and third centuries CE, migrations related to the Roman army drove the foundation of new sanctuaries to Saturn where stelae (and often molk-style offerings) were dedicated. Stele-sanctuaries were deeply entangled with the power dynamics and institutions of empire.

Chapter 3 focuses on some of the signifiers that have long been argued to provide proof for how Punic culture survived and persisted through molk-style rites, especially the “sign of Tanit,” the crescent, and terms like sufete. Instead of continuities, these signs were appropriated and visibly transformed by the new elite of the first century BCE. It was not meanings, significances, or interpretations that bound togther these worshippers from Mauretania to Tripolitania, but rather the signs themselves. Rather than veneers that can be dismissed as epiphenomena, signifiers had the power to create imagined communities, and they did so within a Third Space distinct from the markers of prestige embraced by Numidian kings and Roman authorities.

Polyarchies (rule of the many) require more social and political skills than monarchies (rule of one) and hence arose later – from monarchies rather than directly from tribes. Carthage, some Greek city-states, and early Rome are almost the only ancient republics. All were at or near the Mediterranean coast. These republics mostly were oligarchies (rule of the few), but even democracies meant rule of the many but not all: Slaves and free noncitizens often outnumbered citizen families. The Greek states, monarchies or republics, formed a mutual fighting community, often vicious. Republics depended on a committed citizenship and faced a size trap. If they remained small, they remained vulnerable externally. If they expanded, they lacked mechanisms to include subdued people as citizens and became fragile internally. Only Carthage and Rome attempted major expansion, and only Rome succeeded, but this was the end of the republic. It may also be the peak of chattel slavery in world history: Soon three out of seven million people in Italy were slaves. By the year 1, republics looked like evolutionary dead ends. Monarchies, hereditary or not, prevailed.

The structure of the Social Contract presents an intriguing puzzle. While the first three books argue for a republic of free and equal citizens, the fourth book seems to praise the Roman Republic, a state based on military expansion, slavery, class division, and an inegalitarian voting system. I argue that this puzzle can be solved if we understand the fourth book to be making an a fortiori argument in which Rousseau counterintuitively uses the flawed example of the Roman Republic to show the possibility of large republics in modern circumstances.

In the opening lines of the twenty-third book of his universal history, Diodorus Siculus praises his native Sicily as “the fairest of all islands, since it can contribute greatly to the growth of an empire.”1 Sitting at the intersection of prevailing maritime routes, the island served as a natural landing for ships plying their way between the Mediterranean’s Eastern and Western Basins. Its broad coastal plains supported large urban centers and entrepôts that opened onto the Tyrrhenian Sea to the north, the Ionian Sea to the east, and the vast Libyan Sea to the south and west, inviting contacts from the Italian Peninsula, the Greek mainland, and North Africa. Indeed, located at the heart of the Mediterranean basin, Sicily has occupied an equally central place in the geopolitics of the region across much of the last three millennia.

In the chapters that form the first part of the book, I asked the reader to view the monarchy of Hieron II as one fundamentally akin, in both principle and practice, to the forms of autocratic rule familiar to us from the Successor kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. The surviving evidence – both literary and material – offers clear witness to the flexible approach taken by Hieron and his court in service of legitimating his political authority over the cities of southeastern Sicily. Moreover, it reveals that the modes of communication and display emanating from the royal capital at Syracuse were fashioned in a manner receptive to contemporary trends taking place in the courts of the Successor kings. We see this, for instance, in Hieron’s early efforts to wrap his claims of legitimate political authority in the cloak of military power, grounded in demonstrable success on the battlefield.

This paper explores the relevance of the concept of revelation in Roman augury. Although augury is often regarded, not without reason, as being preoccupied with matters of narrow import and significance, it is a craft based on the detection and interpretation of divine signs, and thus builds into its operating process the question of the extent and quality to which the gods disclose to mankind their will and their attitudes. Revelation thus proves a productive vantage point on the workings of Roman augury, and more broadly of Roman public divination.

In 211 BC, the Romans were embroiled in a multi-front war with the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, and despite surviving the disastrous battles of the early years of the war, the Romans continued to face significant setbacks. In the Iberian Peninsula that year, the last-minute defection of Rome’s Celtiberian allies led to the deaths in battle of Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, along with many of their soldiers. This was a disastrous blow to Rome’s war with Carthage, since the campaign in Iberia had been the only successful front in recent years.1 It is perhaps surprising, then, that the Romans minted a coin in Iberia that year that was stamped with symbols of Roman victory (Figure 19.1). The coin shows the Roman god Jupiter on the obverse (front) wearing a laurel wreath on his head, and the goddess Victory standing before a Roman trophy on the reverse (back).

In the early first century AD, the democratic institutions of Athens dedicated an honorary statue to the Roman senator Lucius Cassius Longinus.1 In the process, they re-used a monument consisting of a bronze statue and a marble base from the Classical period.2 Elsewhere, I have investigated why Athenians rededicated such old statues to Roman senators in this period. I have shown that old statues, that is statues from the Classical (and Hellenistic) period, were particularly suitable honours for Roman benefactors because of their shape and the cultural memory attached to them. I have detailed the manner in which they were employed as a political strategy both to engage powerful Romans and to manoeuvre them into a position of patronage and support for the city.

Chapter One discusses the contrasts between ancient and modern democracies. First, it describes the current crisis of political representation, the causes of which are structural in nature. After briefly outlining the potential scenarios of postdemocracy and authoritarianism in the Global North, it examines in greater detail a counter-hegemonic project that especially relies upon democratic innovations and aims at democratizing democracy. It then proceeds with an overview of how selection by lot operated in Antiquity, a crucial reference point for advocates of sortition. Describing its political use in ancient western Asia, it elucidates how after Aquinas, two types of sortition came to be differentiated, divinatory and distributive, in addition to the procedure’s use in games of chance or science. Although it partly emerged from divinatory practices, sortition became a secular practice during its Golden Age in Athens, a distributive democracy in which the legitimacy of sortition derived from its impartiality and its radical democratic logic. Political sortition was widespread in Rome but quite different, with a ritual and symbolic dimension that enabled peaceful competition among elites in the name of the Republic and the common good. These contrasting examples establish the fact that sortition can be used according to diverse rationales.

The introduciton opens my exploration of Cicero’s notion of will. I argue that the will is an original Latin contribution to the Western mind. Cicero’s letters, speeches, and treatises show how his skill for language gave him a subtler take on events and a richer repertoire of persuasion. Practical uses of will are foremost: mapping alliances, winning elections, and navigating the “economy of goodwill.” From his earliest writings, however, voluntas emerges in normative claims about law and politics: that Rome’s mass of precedents could be rationalized through Greek ideas. Chief among these is Plato’s precept that reason must rule, and thus an alliance of philosophy and tradition can save the dying Republic. Transmuting political failure into philosophical innovation, Cicero lays the foundation for an idea – the will and its freedom – with tremendous consequences for Western thought. For Cicero, voluntas populi becomes the binding force of a nominally popular but functionally aristocratic constitution. If this state of affairs looks familiar in today’s “democratic” republics, we have Cicero in part to thank. Insistence on the singularity of popular will and mistrust of the common citizen lie at the heart of today’s political crisis and will require Ciceronian creativity to fix.

I propose that the young Roman orator Cicero, lacking a political base, cleverly positions himself as defender of the “people’s will”: It is fundamental, justifying all power wielded in its name; it is singular, despite the many conflicting “wills” within it; it is fallible, especially when misled by demagogues; and it is thus dependent on wise elites like Cicero. I then take up the treatises De republica and De legibus, which argue for popular sovereignty and against popular power. His theory differs from the mixed constitutionalism of Polybius and Aristotle. Cicero’s innovation is rational trusteeship: The people own all of the Republic, and the senate and magistrates represent all of the people. The trusteeship principle from Roman law (ius civilis), filtered through Platonic rationalism and Stoic natural law, creates an entirely new constitutional dynamic: A rational elite guides the people’s will, which elevates them in turn to high offices of state. He watches Caesar exploit his notion of voluntas populi to remake Rome around his own brutal will. Yet it is Cicero’s “will of the people” – reliant on a ruling class, limited to voting – with which, for better or worse, we find ourselves in modern democracies.

This chapter draws on Cicero’s letters to propose the existence of an “economy of goodwill” in the late Roman Republic. Through voluntas mutua, the mature statesman handles sensitive transactions and vouchsafes his allies’ support. I examine potential antecedents to Cicero’s goodwill in Aristotle’s theories of friendship (eunoia and philia), as well as in the system of “friendly loans” (mutuom argentum) in the comedies of Plautus. Cicero’s economics of friendship, though informed by these others, aim at problems particular to Rome’s fast-growing empire. Unlike normal currency, “spending” voluntas only increases one’s supply of it, allowing for mutual reinforcement of political support over time. Additionally, voluntas may be exchanged regardless of facultas, facilitating long-distance governance by low-cost trades of support across the empire when concrete beneficia are unfeasible. In his philosophical works, finally, Cicero shows an intriguing ambivalence about the economy of goodwill that served him so well in practice. Are reciprocal favors a defensible part of friendship? Though he excludes the possibility in De amicitia, in De officiis, voluntas mutua is redeemed in decorum, the ideal by which proportion and mutuality yield virtue.

In this chapter, we see how Cicero, as a rising Roman politician, uncovers hidden lines of influence, pinpoints shades of political support, and frames partisan divides in the Roman Republic. Here, Cicero uses voluntas both to analyze politics as he finds it and to argue for its rational improvement. Descriptively, Cicero uses voluntate and summa voluntate to identify subtler shades of opposition or support and to trace lines of unseen influence among Rome’s leading men like Pompey and Caesar. Through his gifted pen, will becomes a measurable force as it had seemingly not been before. To measure will is to rationalize it, and Cicero builds new philosophical arguments for the primacy of voluntas over violence and for a vision of politics that transacts power rationally by the intersecting wills of magistrates and people. I use powermapping, a tool of modern advocacy, as a lens to examine Cicero’s political strategy and use of language. This vision, at once old and new, is upended by the ascent of Caesar, whose sole voluntas undoes Cicero’s rational framework, exerting will by brute force and eliminating the old pluralist order.

With the Tusculan Disputations, willpower enters Western thought. This chapter departs from a peculiar decision Cicero makes in his account of the human soul. In previous centuries, Platonists and Stoics had bitterly disagreed on whether the soul was unified or divided into rational and nonrational parts. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero announces that he will combine Stoic moral stricture – predicated on the soul’s unity – with Plato’s divided, self-moving soul. The result is a new narrative of inner struggle in which voluntas gains a formal definition at last: “that which desires with reason” (quae quid cum ratione desiderat) (Tusc. 4.12). While drawing importantly on the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, the Latin “force” of volition is foremost. Here, Cicero links together lines of debate that in Greek had run in parallel, rendering hekon, boulesis, and prohairesis by voluntarius and voluntas. His “struggle for reason” thus moves originally beyond Greek accounts of askesis, moral training that emphasized education and cognitive clarity over present effort. An orator zealous to persuade, Cicero paints his account of reason in Roman colors of honor, endurance, and painstaking progress.