A voice from a distant past, the Roman Vitruvius offers many of the same assets to urban planners and cultural historians that he does to architects. His book offers a glimpse into the urban world of a decisive moment in classical antiquity—and into the mind of a man who quite literally helped to shape it. [...]
Leon Battista Alberti’s work remains a guidebook for those who value the traditions of both classical and post-Renaissance European architecture. To read Alberti today is to discover an essential link in that long and living tradition. Like a signal from the past, Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria—On the Art of Building, completed in 1452—transmitted [...]
What happens to the Romans in the absence of their greatest man, Camillus? Crushing losses, near-obliteration. Not to honor what is best and highest—in fact, to insult it, to belittle it, to attribute base motives to it: What can follow except an arrogant forgetfulness that preludes disaster? Titus Livius (or Livy), the Roman historian whose [...]
The Sons of Remus provides a window into not only how European identities were formed, but how all societies engage in a constant process of negotiation and renegotiation in determining who they are, where they came from, and where they are going… The Sons of Remus by Andrew C. Johnston (432 pages, Harvard University Press, 2017) Our conception [...]
Exactly how the Roman republic came into existence remains shrouded in mystery. Critically so. As with our tradition of English common law and the necessity of knowing that its origins are “beyond the memory of man,” from “time immemorial,” “ancient beyond memory or record,” and “time out of mind,” so it is with the best [...]
Join Boris Johnson, Britain's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and Mary Beard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, as they debate the significance of the world's most timeless civilizations: Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Mr. Johnson defends the culture, art, and philosophy of Ancient Greece, while Dr. Beard argues for the supremacy [...]
The Roman Road is nothing less than the royal road of all adult historical consciousness. That road is the way of the imaginative conservative, who does not throw away the all-connecting vision of childhood, and then replace it with another, “more sophisticated” way of thinking. Thomas Hardy’s mother died in 1904 at the age of [...]
Caesar has crossed the Alps, his mighty soul Great tumults pondering and the coming shock. Now on the marge of Rubicon, he saw, In face most sorrowful and ghostly guise, His trembling country's image; huge it seemed Through mists of night obscure; and hoary hair Streamed from the lofty front with turrets crowned: Torn were [...]
There is a classic passage in Vergil’s Aeneid in which Anchises commends to future Romans what is, in effect, the “mission statement” for the Roman Empire. In these lines, the father of Aeneas is telling us what his son Aeneas, the Trojan who has journeyed from the fallen city of Troy, will set in motion [...]
We in the West are deeply formed by how the three great cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome dealt with the meaning of human existence, and in turning back to these sources, we rediscover the resources for cultural renewal and the reversal of our present decline. Aboard the Arbella in 1630, John Winthrop penned “A [...]
Now that school is back in session, I will shortly be resuming a study group that began last year on Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. I thought I might say just two things here about the particular excellence of this great book—that it fuses history and philosophy, and that it promotes the [...]
The West finds itself materially prosperous but culturally adrift and fearful. What will it take for the West to redeem itself? Civilizations come and civilizations go. While some prove capable of inner renewal, there’s no guarantee that any given culture will maintain itself over long periods of time. Today, we continue to admire the achievements [...]
The Roman Empire was unique because it espoused the principle of moderation in politics. This is what permitted the unique dynamism of a uniquely changing but uniquely enduring political form: from city, to empire, to nation. And that dynamism may still propel us today as a principle of rebirth, if only we recapture its essence. [...]
A look back at the disintegration of republicanism in the Roman Empire yields important lessons for contemporary American government. Will we demand actual liberty—including the authority truly to govern ourselves—or be content with its image? As the celebration of Constitution Day attests, Americans still honor our Constitution. But is it alive and well and with [...]