About this Event
We are delighted to welcome Professor Jamie Gianoutsos from Mount St Mary’s University (USA) to speak on:
Who Owns Rome? Ancient Republics and their Afterlives
Contemporary discussions of Rome may lead us to believe that the Roman legacy has consistently centred on imperial domination, and interlocking ideas of masculinity, violence, and oppression. And yet, in the eighteenth-century revolutions that shaped our modern world, Rome was reclaimed by a surprising range of activists who advocated for liberty, equality under law, and the end of slavery. Focusing especially on the classical stories of Cato and Portia and their re-telling, this talk will explore how republican writers in Britain and America advanced notions of radical equality. More broadly, the talk considers the centrality of storytelling for republics, and argues that storytelling made possible the flexibility of republican thinking and its endurance over time.
This lecture is open to everyone – the public, staff and students, so please do spread the word and come along. This Public Lecture has been organised by the Newcastle School of History, Classics and Archaeology, and celebrates the publication of Professor Gianoutsos’ new book:
In Rome's Long Shadow: How the Classical Tradition Shaped the Modern World (Penguin 2027)
Julius Caesar, Lucretia, Cincinnatus, Augustus, the Gracchi brothers: Roman figures have had an extraordinary influence on modern republics from America to France. Here historian Jamie Gianoutsos traces the Roman republic and its afterlives through the revolutionary birth of 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, and via the revolutionaries of America, 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 renewed 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.
This event is co-organised by the History Department Research Seminar Series and Newcastle University Public Lecture Series. School of History, Classics and Archaeology | School of History, Classics and Archaeology | Newcastle University
Event venue & nearby stays
The Boiler House, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
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