What have we been changed into? Amid Rome’s civil war, the Numidian general, Syphax, questions the effects of Romanization endorsed by Numa, the prince of Numidia and ally of Cato the Younger in the fight against Caesar. This question is unsettling in part because answering it begins to undermine an assumption about the past upon which the question rests. The more one pushes the question, the more one realizes that there is no absolute beginning point, no from, but only ongoing experiences and memories that almost imperceptibly connect to identities. Yet cultures attempt to answer the question of identity definitively. Cultures naturalize, lending normativity to beliefs and actions that form identity. And cultures narrativize, giving constancy to identity over time. The assumptions that underlie these narratives – the symbolic resources that a culture draws on – rest in the background as something already familiar within which one remembers, makes sense of experiences, and forms expectations. To ask about these assumptions unsettles, laying bare the anxieties that underlie the question, “Who are We?”

We answer the question for America through familiar European categories that grow out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Questions of the American founding are organized around debates about its republican, liberal, or religious heritage. The space itself appears as an empty state of nature in which a new history (absent a feudal past) can begin. Belonging appears as a formal feature of the integrated nation-state (notably, citizenship) that is comprised of constitutional rights and sustained by market interactions. And the future is envisioned as a narrative of progress of reason, science, wealth, and rights. Early American social actors and observers defined it this way; scholars analyze America in these terms.

I provide a different lens for viewing the question of identity, one that originates in the dissonance of origins and appears in its premodern form in Rome. My argument is organized around a shared Roman and American founding legend that is neither located in a constitutional moment nor organized around a people united by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or land. Rather, the founding myth is defined by journeys of Strangers dislocated from their own histories and homes who come to a Strange land inhabited by Strangers. The defining symbol of these foundation myths, the Stranger, continually surfaces in different guises in Roman and American cultural attempts to answer the question, “Who are We?” The myths point to the promise of a new age, unbounded by space or time, and unencumbered by traditional categories of belonging. It is a powerful myth because it allows for continual incorporation and expansion. But the unboundedness is the basis of, at once, hegemonic swagger and also the vulnerability that arises from the permeability and unsettledness of identity. The founding experience, replayed in subsequent immigrant journeys, is one of traumatic dislocation and loss. There is not law but violent wildness. A We is not borne of deliberation but shaped through the conquest of land and people, a wild space transformed to a place through the sheer physicality of labor. The boundaries of belonging are not defined by formal categories of citizenship but by the construction of two types of dangerous Strangers among a community of Strangers: the corrosive Stranger who brings their own history and the wild Stranger who threatens to return the community back into wildness. The marks of the Stranger – the fissures of race, status, and class – are mapped onto the bodies of gladiators and boxers, as though civilization can be affirmed by safely confining the violence to the arena. But efforts to cleanse the founding identity of its rusticity and violence and replace it with ideals of cultivation and progress are continually frustrated by these spectacles that valorize the Strangeness of these rugged bodies as founding bodies. Ultimately, American democracy, like the Roman Republic, is confronted with a crisis of a government of Strangers, in which consensus is shirked and dissensus celebrated. Far from securing identity, the Roman and American foundings unsettle identity, leaving unresolved the answer to the question, “Who are We?”

Recalling Rome

The Romans have been part of the narrative of the United States since its break with England: the styling of a constitutional system after the Republic; the self-conscious adoption of neo-Roman architecture that provided a sense of gravitas for a new nation; coinage that bore the symbol of the freed Roman slave; and the phrases, Novus ordo seclorum and E pluribus unum, both appearing on the great seal of the United States and both adaptations of Virgil. Roman images resonated in the political language, as well: Joseph Addison’s play Cato: A Tragedy inspired Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” and was a favorite of George Washington’s; the anti-Federalists invoked Brutus and Cato in defense of liberty; and Jean-Antoine Houdon and John Trumble depicted George Washington as Cincinnatus, called from his farm to lead the nation and then returning to his modest farm when order was restored. This Roman past would be sustained by a classical curriculum and popular references that lasted into the twentieth century.Footnote ¹

The recollections of Rome were never univocal. From the beginning, Rome was as much a model as a warning. Historiographies and political tracts extending to the current day both prophesied and lamented an American empire. For some contemporary writers, the lesson of Rome translates into an embrace of American triumphalism, an extension of pax Romana to an age of pax Americana and the spread of freedom.Footnote ² For example, Rome looms in the backdrop of Niall Ferguson’s romanticized defense of empire, in which he both suggests that expansion was built into America’s beginnings and laments the seeming lack of “an overtly imperial ethos” among the rising elite.Footnote ³ In a speech to the neoconservative Heritage Foundation, J. Rufus Fears embraces the American invasion of Iraq as the “burden” to spread freedom.Footnote ⁴ Recalling Edward Gibbon, Fears compares the promise of an American empire to “the one period in the history of the human race when mankind was happiest,” the second century ce, with the following characteristics: civil servants educated to govern “with justice and with individual freedom”; a small and efficient bureaucracy that minimized Caligula and Nero’s influence to “a small blip on the scale of imperial progress and the guarantee of individual rights”; an expansive free market economy; an efficient military; “social mobility”; and the rule of law.Footnote ⁵ The lesson of Rome, particularly as both Rome and the United States faced exhaustion in their ventures into the Middle East, is that “there is no drawing back” from the path to empire.Footnote ⁶ In a reversal of Ronald Syme’s dark portrayal of Augustus, Fears exalts Augustus as “perhaps the shrewdest statesman ever to live”; describes Rome as bringing forth “a series of leaders with few equals in history”; and celebrates the notion of a powerful “commander in chief,” the imperator who “governs the world.”Footnote ⁷ In comparison, Robert Merry sounds almost restrained in drawing out America’s similarity to Rome as a carefully calibrated “equilibrium of power” that has steadily expanded its “democratic promise,” but one in which the “fundaments of the system” must be carefully nurtured.Footnote ⁸ What those fundaments are – liberty? agrarianism? slavery? segregation? gender oppression? – and what they share with Rome is never explained.

For others, Rome serves as a dire warning of decline. Some identify the similar disparities in wealth and opportunities, which led to a “social and economic restructuring” of Roman society in the third century ce (shortly after Fears’ happiest days), that threaten to undermine “a formerly robust commercial world” and replace it with an oligarchy of wealth.Footnote ⁹ The United States is also seen as resembling, or risking resembling, Rome in the loss of traditional values with participation in the global orgy of wealth;Footnote ¹⁰ as a state “overwhelmed by immigrants”;Footnote ¹¹ in an impending economic collapse arising from government assistance programs, a new version of bread and circuses;Footnote ¹² and as succumbing to a mass consumerism that gives the façade of unity despite the “vast disconnect between the elites and the people.”Footnote ¹³ In a popular book that asked the question, “Are we Rome?”, Cullen Murphy points to the overreach and haughty attitude of the United States toward the rest of the world that ultimately threatens America’s own democracy.Footnote ¹⁴

Are we Rome? The short answer is no.Footnote ¹⁵ The question, however, raises a more fundamental issue of how one says something meaningful not just about the past but also about a contemporary relationship to a temporally distant and disconnected past. As Paul Ricoeur writes in Time and Narrative, to the extent that the past leaves a “trace” (in a document, for example, or a monument), it is seen as “stand[ing] for” this past.Footnote ¹⁶ But what is the status of these traces to the viewer? The question, “Are we Rome?”, suggests one type of answer, one that overcomes temporal distance and strangeness by seeing the past as “intelligible” by it “persisting in the present.”Footnote ¹⁷ We abstract the past from experience, understanding it by way of particular institutions, social structures, or ideologies, for example, or identifying transhistorical uniformities in which recognizable aspects of the past are repeated in the present (and are the basis of predictions of the future). What we lose is the Romans’ experience of themselves as they tried to make sense of who they were. But more than that, we lose a sense of how those experiences might have something to say about the Americans’ experience of themselves.

I identify a different trace, one that accounts for how individuals recognize themselves in time. What I mean by this is that individuals within communities do not experience themselves as abstractions; rather, individuals situate and recognize themselves by way of culturally mediated, incomplete, and open-ended perspectives that bring together “the expectation of the future, the reception of the past, and the experience of the present.”Footnote ¹⁸ Who we are and what we value are answered, in part, by some imagined narrative relationship of the past to the present and future.Footnote ¹⁹ But the narrative, itself, is a response to different experiences of vulnerability; a search for some reassurance of who I am in my relationship to others. We do not often think of the obnoxiously confident, imperial cultures of Rome or the United States as consumed by anxieties about identity, let alone notions of vulnerability. But beginning with and growing out of a shared founding myth, the Roman experience provides a different lens to view America’s own struggle with identity. This struggle continually recalls the dislocation of both those who immigrated and those who were here, the attempts to overcome the humiliation of origins, the centrality of violent conquest over humans and nature in affirming identity, the spectacle of the physicality of rugged and wild (rather than reasoning and civilized) bodies, and the inability to resolve the anxieties of a nation comprised of Strangers.

Lived Experience and Narrative Identity

I provide here a brief account of how I am approaching questions of identity. Narratives of identity emerge from (and in turn revise) the cultural understandings that form what in phenomenology is called a lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Lebenswelt is originally employed by Edmund Husserl to refer to the pregiven (vergegeben) or self-evident world of objects that is the basis for shared human experience. The world of perceived bodies is immediate to the senses and makes possible theoretical and scientific abstractions. I do not follow Husserl in his view of the pregiven as an a priori essence of the perceived world. More helpful is Jürgen Habermas’ extension of the concept (of which there are hints in Husserl) to the background context of human interaction that allows for shared understandings, cultural meanings, and stabilized patterns of action.Footnote ²⁰ Habermas defines the lifeworld “as represented by a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns.”Footnote ²¹ I find his revision of the operation of the lifeworld helpful. Where Husserl begins with the conscious ego whose isolated experience of the given structures of the lifeworld makes possible social experience (as I recognize that other egos also experience the lifeworld), Habermas sees more mutuality as individuals make sense of situations, and make sense of themselves, through communication within the understandings made possible by the cultural givens of the lifeworld.Footnote ²² Stated more simply, the self arises as a social experience. The shared cultural understandings that operate in the background of human action allow one to imagine oneself as part of something more.Footnote ²³ As Habermas writes, “Every new situation appears in a lifeworld composed of a cultural stock of knowledge that is ‘always already’ familiar.”Footnote ²⁴ A lifeworld exists as a simultaneous aspect of a cultural and individual identity that is constitutive of the references by which interpretation and common understanding are possible.Footnote ²⁵ Individuals always move “within the horizon of their lifeworld.”Footnote ²⁶ Yet the interpretations of both cultural and individual identities are not identical; they are familiar and yet vast in their “incalculable web of presuppositions,” aspects of them “changing from situation to situation, set into relief at any given time against a background of indeterminacy.”Footnote ²⁷ These interpretations are the We by which individuals imagine solidarity, convey familiarity, and communicate understanding.

I depart from Habermas in a fundamental way, however. Habermas argues for the orientation of individuals within the lifeworld by normative ideals of communicative competence that aim at mutual understanding and the emancipation of these understandings from distortion and repression. My focus is on communicative dissonance: the irresolvable anxieties, tensions, and contradictions in one’s understanding of oneself as a We.Footnote ²⁸ In fact, I am closer to Augustine in the sense that an aspect of our finitude lies in our mutual vulnerability and incomprehensibility, which creates a distance within the self and between the self and others.Footnote ²⁹

We encounter each other as embodied beings. That encounter occurs through a complex process of identification and disidentification in which we interpret and make judgments and comparisons about particular markers of identity that draw from both individual and cultural narratives of identity: an accent, vocabulary, mannerism, gait, posture, hair, skin color and complexion, clothing, etc. But these processes are not uniform. Comparisons are complicated by who sees and who is seen, and how they are compared. Different experiences, fragmented memories, misperceptions, and uncertain projections all enter into these comparisons. Nor are these processes static and unreflective. Instead, in these encounters there is a mutuality of “two bodies at once seeing, seen, visible and unseen, as well as touching, touched, touchable and untouchable.”Footnote ³⁰ The body on display perceives the judgments of others and can respond in ways that range from adopting to adapting to resisting. Moreover, the observing body is also aware of being on display and judged. That individual may seek to have affirmed the boundaries of individual or cultural identity or bear different memories that interrupt narratives of sameness and difference: experiences of loss, sacrifice, or violence that unsettle identity and render the observing body permeable. To return to the Roman and American contexts, I argue that their shared founding narratives are premised on dislocated identities that underlie efforts by individuals to define, resist, and transform the boundaries of belonging.

In exploring these questions of identity, I navigate between two views. On the one hand, I treat the Romans on their own terms, exploring some of the tensions in the Roman understanding of themselves. This stands in contrast with two approaches. One approach, which is often referred to as neo-Romanism, looks at the Romans by way of an early modern interpretation employed against monarchical authority. The limitation of this view is that it flattens out the range of ideas, concerns, and conflicts that arose in Rome’s conception of itself. We understand the Romans, instead, by way of a civic republican, transatlantic tradition, distilled through the ages, that is reduced to notions of virtue, liberty, and law. The second approach, prominent in cultural studies, views the Roman past by way of its cultural appropriation (and distortion) in the present. This approach invariably yields fascinating results, but we end up with a present without a past.

On the other hand, I depart from versions of relativism and historicism that resist the view of the past as “usable” to the present.Footnote ³¹ In part, the Roman past plays a part in framing the present. As Mary Beard writes, “Roman debates have given us a template and a language that continue to define the way we understand our own world and think about ourselves.”Footnote ³² I agree with Beard, though I hope to complicate the picture of how both Rome and the United States thought about themselves. The lens the Romans provide is not just a matter of inheritance. They reveal a struggle with the dissonance of their own self-narratives that do not resolve themselves as a theme but as complicated questions and representations that point in contradictory directions. The questions they asked, the debates they engaged in, the ways in which they framed fundamental questions of identity are not only part of our own vocabulary but also reveal some of our own assumptions about the organization of community life and how to represent those assumptions to ourselves. These assumptions are not immediately accessible. “Lifeworld knowledge,” as Habermas notes, “conveys the feeling of absolute certainty only because we do not know about it.”Footnote ³³ In this interaction with the Roman past, we are in some sense occupying a different perspective in our relationship to our lifeworld, like Syphax (in Addison’s play) to Roman culture. We are comparing the incomparable, to recall Marcel Detienne, in order to bring this cultural imagination into relief, to open up the “prejudgmental power” of the lifeworld to interpretation.Footnote ³⁴ The result is not a historical lesson but something more perplexing, and one that requires that we rethink how we even understand the American founding.

We place that founding in a constitutional moment that gave American expression to Roman ideas of checks and balances, liberty, and, for the most hopeful, virtue. I locate the founding not in a historical moment but in a mythology reenacted in the cultural imagination. In that narrative, which America shares with Rome, the community is continually reconstituted by ongoing refoundings of Strangers who are dislocated from their own place and past. Where foundings are usually placed in service to securing an identity, whether of a people bound by ethnicity, language, religion, or land, the Roman and American foundings unsettle identity. The declaration “This is who We are” becomes for the Romans and Americans a more unsettling, searching question of vulnerability, “Who are We?”, since We are continually comprised of Theys. The attempts to answer the question, and the disruption to these answers that arise from the founding itself, lead us far afield from the categories we are used to employing. Questions of who We are cannot be answered by recourse to claims that We are a constitutional republic or that identities melt into belonging as citizens of a nation-state. Rather, attempts to answer who We are dissolves into a dissonance about our origins. Like Rome, America is comprised of Strangers who came to an already inhabited land. Like Rome, America is without a history and distrusts the Stranger who retains one. Like Rome, the absence of history makes possible a new age of civilization, but it is an age rooted in violent conquest over nature and other people. Like Rome, American elites struggle to temper their rugged, rustic origins against their sophisticated counterparts, Greece and England. Like Rome, American elites fail. Whatever the promise of a new age meant, it is challenged by the popular embrace of the spectacle of the violent, rugged body that recalls the founding. And like Rome, American democracy faces its own dissolution as people divide into Strangers to each other.

The Organization of the Book

The founding myths of both Rome and the United States introduce a cultural dissonance about questions of identity, memory, and belonging. In using this phrase, I am drawing from the psychological notion of cognitive dissonance, first conceptualized by Leon Festinger, that posits that individuals seek to resolve the tensions that arise from holding inconsistent or contradictory beliefs. I explore different attempts to resolve this dissonance. But that dissonance cannot be resolved precisely because the contradictory elements form a core aspect of identity.

In Chapter 1, I explore the founding myths of Rome and the United States unconventionally by way of Virgil and the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales. I place Josey next to the Aeneid to provide a reading of the American founding that departs from attempts to trace its origins to either the Puritans or to the colonists assembled in Philadelphia. The myths provide a particular structure and array of images that connect where we come from with who we are. They are premised on a community of Strangers – a rabble – who are dislocated from their own place and past, rather than a collectivity bound together, as in other foundings, by ethnicity, land, history, language, genealogy, or religion. I read the myths as traumatic experiences of disparate bodies, most of all (but not exclusively) as threats to male bodies, dislocated from both place and time, who enter an already inhabited space with a past but must construct a community without a past. The permeable boundaries of identity are extraordinarily powerful as a mechanism for both incorporation and expansion, serving as a point of pride in each community’s conception of itself. But the myth haunts these communities with a simple question: If everyone can potentially be Us, then who are We? Answering this is tied to a corollary question: Who are They? The question betrays a deeper dissonance that lies at the core of what it means to imagine oneself as a We that is comprised entirely of Theys.

The myths themselves attempt to answer both questions. I explore how, within these stories, commonality is organized not by an idea that somehow transcends these lowly origins but by loss. The disparate Strangers find a common past in the shared experience of dislocation, expressed in moments of collective mourning. And they plot a common future in two bodily dispositions: labor, which manifests itself as a violent conquest and control of wild nature; and personal trust, as an ability to make and keep a promise. In this mix of Strangers, a type of Stranger – the individual who is proximate but somehow threatening to this newly imagined commonality – emerges as the body marked in two ways: as the body tied to some other past; or as a wild body, outside the narrative of civilization, that cannot be trusted.

Rome and the United States continually reenact their own founding stories, blurring boundaries of genealogy and geography, and then having to re-sort and differentiate who is and who is not really one of us. All communities have to do this just by the nature of settlement, migration, expansion, and interaction. But what makes the Roman and American cases so interesting is that their identities are premised paradoxically on this permeability: on the incorporation of new groups both as its space expands and as new groups enter. I explore how the dissonance of these founding images – the humiliation of lowly origins, the vulnerability to violation and loss, and the strangeness of one’s surroundings – plays out in Roman and American culture. We see the construction of different versions of the Stranger as a mechanism for purifying the founding and securing the boundaries of belonging by seeking to forget or exclude the lowly origins. But the untidiness of the myth continually resurfaces as memories persist, and as the wild body is valorized and incorporated into the founding body.

In Chapter 2, I focus on the relationship of identity to time and the construction of the corrosive Stranger. Rome and the United States face questions of how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, situates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? Both Rome and the United States provide a formal answer to this question of identity: individuals are integrated as juridical beings with a particular legal status into a civitas or state. That is, a national identity is presumably conferred by state membership, a resolution attributed to the rise of the modern nation-state, but also one that shares features with Rome. The founding narratives are seen as contributing to formal belonging: the myths shape a notion of belonging by identifying a shared journey and destiny that are premised on a dislocation from the past, thus preparing individuals to be citizens.

But there is no such tidy synthesis of formal membership and national identity. Where the possibility of a new history rests on a dislocation from the old, so the threat to this identity arises from the persistence of memory; specifically, an ascribed continuation of one’s connection to a past that is seen as challenging how the new community locates itself in time. I suggest that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to the connected questions, Who are We and Who are They? The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity but is used to construct an imagined purity that both gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look at two critical moments in the construction of a national identity: the consolidation of Roman control over Italy, and the decades following the American Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution. In both cases, it is not an issue of state power; rather, it is anxiety about the incorporation of a mix of people with their own histories that underlies the efforts to craft a genealogy of national identity by Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans, and Noah Webster, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois in the United States.

In Chapter 3, I turn to a second dimension of identity, that of one’s relationship to space. The Roman and American founding identities are built around mythic journeys: Aeneas’ flight, the migration to America, the errand into the wilderness, and the settlement of the frontier, all of which imagine space as unbounded, at points inconceivable, and potentially dangerous. I read a Roman and American conception of space, and perceived threats to that space, against their founding narratives. These narratives introduce unsettled conceptions of abstract space and familiar place in two ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that is not potentially converted into a place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that space. I explore the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The reality – the differences within Samnite and Native American communities, the various attitudes toward incorporation, or the mobility of certain elites who prosper or find their way into positions of power – is less important in this discussion than how the groups are imagined. What I want to point to is how different the Samnite and the Native American are from the corrosive Stranger, yet how both play a part in the construction of identity. The corrosive Strangers – the Greeks, Italians, and Gauls – remain a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they are cast as a Stranger to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant are cast similarly in the United States. The Samnites and Native Americans, as the wild Stranger, are frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just conquest but the unifying and securing of a familiar space. But bodies are not so easily frozen, and boundaries not so easily obeyed. Resisting these definitions of the wild Stranger is the persistence of bodily memory, which I explore by way of Charles Eastman and Horace.

In the previous chapters, I explore several elite efforts to valorize a particular version of a Roman or American identity. But controlling the definition of the Stranger is not so easy. The founding narratives contain within them a vast array of assumptions, images, myths, and symbols that are not just ambiguous at points, but may actually be in tension with each other. For every Cicero, there is a Cato the Elder or Marius who celebrated Roman rusticity. For every Webster, there is a Daniel Boone who could live and fight in the wilderness. Moreover, individuals are not just situated within a culture, embodying the enactment, internalization, and naturalization of imposed meanings, but are living bodies who respond to, modify, and resist the valorization of these meanings. The valorization could reference the dominant values of the culture; for example, the claims of privilege by patricians or nobiles of Rome who inherited their authority. The valorization could be modifications of the dominant values, as we see with the self-conscious styling of Cicero as a new man making a claim for his own earned authority. Or the valorization could arise from a resistance to, or recasting of, the taboos and laws against which value is defined. We got a hint of this with Charles Eastman, whose own bodily memory leads him to reassess the judgment of his Native American beliefs and practices as taboo. The Stranger – the individual who is present within, but defined as a threat to, the culture – comes to valorize some of the Strangeness.

In Chapter 4, I look at the combat spectacles of professional gladiators (auctorati) and American bare-knuckle fighting in the early nineteenth century as an instance of how the taboo body comes to be valorized, upsetting the boundaries of identity. Both bodies were banned: the gladiator excluded from civic participation and protections; boxing matches banned through much of the nineteenth century. Both bodies were marked by wounds, but even more by a brashness and ruggedness that was contrary to standards of elite decorum. And both bodies were condemned by the elite as uncivilized, uneducated, and unrefined. These excluded bodies resisted their exclusion, not by rebelling against the network of power but by blurring the boundaries of dominated and free as they valorized the rugged origins embedded in the founding ideal.

In the final chapter, I look at the crises of the Roman and American republics. There is a fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of the slow demise of the Roman Republic: Why does the system collapse when, as many scholars have noted, there is nothing that suggests that there was ever an intention by anyone to overthrow the Republic? There have been two primary approaches to addressing this paradox. The predominant view identifies particular objective conditions that are seen as causing or determining political outcomes. In the case of Rome, scholars have largely focused on the structural inability of its institutions to address the issues caused by imperial expansion. From this perspective, the resolution to the paradox of how the Republic falls without anyone intending for it to happen is that conditions overwhelm any decisions that could be made. A second approach, one developed largely in response to the first, sees politics as a contingent affair dominated by influential individuals. From this perspective, the Republic collapses because of miscalculations by a few powerful individuals who either subvert the norms or outright break the laws that once checked political ambition.

Although these approaches differ fundamentally in their assertions about whether political institutions are overwhelmed by larger structural issues or by bad actors, they similarly view politics as an arena of interest. I argue for a broader understanding of politics as an arena of identity. Politics is the realm in which the community puts into practice what it imagines as its future. In the final decades of the Roman Republic, political institutions were less-and-less able to project the community into the future. This change was not attributable to the emergence of a set of issues that the institutions were structurally incapable of addressing. Nor was it a function of individuals making contingent decisions. What changed is that political participants came to see each other as Strangers who did not share a common sense of either the past or the future. This had implications for politics. Driven by mutual incomprehension and distrust, individuals altered norms of action to disable institutions, making possible the search for alternative actors and forms of action that bypassed these institutions. In the corrosion of public institutions, in the cowardice and opportunism of political actors, and in the elevation of violence, we see played out in Rome and now in American politics the collision of Strangers who do not imagine the same future.

This work continues the recent revitalization of ancient Rome, which we have seen in everything from scholarly reassessments of Roman contributions to rhetoric and political thought to a popular fascination with Rome to cultural studies that explore contemporary appropriations of the Roman past. The book is about Roman and American identity. It is about how a shared founding myth of a dislocating journey of Strangers leaves unresolved the question of what defines a We, a question that does not go away even as both cultures emerge as hegemonic. The reach of these cultures – their ability to expand and incorporate – exposes, however paradoxically, a sense of the vulnerability and permeability of their identities. I end with a brief note on how these aspects of vulnerability and permeability (notions articulated prominently in feminist scholarship) can foster a different ethic of recognition and belonging.