More than two millennia after the Republic’s collapse, the “extraordinary character” of the men—and women—who starred in its drama still astonishes. But so too—less well known perhaps than a Caesar, or a Cicero, or a Cleopatra, but more remarkable than any of them—does the Roman Republic itself. If there is much about it we can never know, then still there is much that can be brought back to life, its citizens half emerging from antique marble, their faces illumined by a background of gold and fire, the glare of an alien yet sometimes eerily familiar world.
