‘A Republic for Expansion’: The Roman Constitution and Empire and Balance-of-Power Theory

Abstract

Ancient Rome looms far larger in the modern Western political inheritance and historical imagination than any other ancient or nonWestern system. For medieval and early modern Europeans, the sprawling monumental ruins of imperial Rome served as the inescapable and ubiquitous marker against which they measured their decline and then their progress. For the Roman Church and Holy Roman Empire, the late Roman Empire served as a source of legitimacy by descent. Many of the landmark works of medieval and early modem thought wrestled with the Roman legacy and its meaning (Millar, 2002). For Augustine, the sack of Rome by barbarian armies served as the template for the vanities and futilities of human aspiration. For Machiavelli the early Roman Republic offered a model for political renewal held up against the decadence of the Roman Church (Sullivan, 1996). For Montesquieu (1965 [1734]) and the Enlightenment, Roman militarism served as a model against which the progress of the moderns could be measured. And Rousseau launched the counter-Enlightenment with an appeal to the rustic virtues of the early Romans. For the American founders the collapse of the republican constitution exemplified a problem to be solved. For two millennia no serious thinker of the first rank could afford to write without an interpretation of the Roman political experience.