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.