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 Ten Books of Titus Livy. An early chapter in that work leaves a reader in little doubt about the parallels Machiavelli would have perceived between America and Rome. The Florentine was writing only some 20 or 25 years after the discovery of the New World and more than two and a half centuries before the United States would be founded. But consider how he characterizes Rome in contrast to two other model republics, ancient Sparta and (relatively) modern Venice.

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Republics, including Machiavelli’s own Florence, had a reputation for instability and Rome was no exception. Its history, not least as told by Titus Livy, is a saga of endless conflicts between plebeians and patricians, as well as endless wars with foreign powers. Philosophers from Aristotle onward tried to devise some means, some constitutional arrangement, that could prevent each type of republic – democracy or aristocracy – from degenerating into something worse:........

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