Should America be Venice or Sparta?
Americans never tire of asking themselves whether their country is turning into Rome. A Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States proclaims a novus ordo seclorum – a “new order of ages.” But in the poem from which that phrase is adapted, Virgil’s fourth eclogue, the words mean a quite exact replay of past events: there will be, for example, another voyage of the Argo and another Trojan War. Our new order might likewise repeat the history of Rome. One philosopher who gave a great deal of thought to new orders and Roman history as a template was Niccolò Machiavelli, particularly in his Discourses on the First
