A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Otherwise, the Roman Republic starkly contrasted with the development of democracy in the Athenian mould. Its unequal balance appealed greatly to aristocrats in Christian societies, once Christian societies came into existence, and we will meet several such ‘Republics’ (or, in an alternative English translation, ‘Commonwealths’) as alternatives to monarchy, in both Latin and Orthodox Christendom: Venice, Novgorod, Poland-Lithuania, the seventeenth-century England of Oliver Cromwell. The Roman Republic’s difference from developed Greek city-states probably arose because of Rome’s continual yearning to expand: a state more or less permanently at war either to maintain or to expand its frontiers could not afford the luxury of real democracy.