G.K. Chesterton once said “the act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice.” Finding our own time still more ill-disposed towards vindicating almost any virtue, I was puzzled at first to find so little exhilaration in Valentina Arena’s Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Republic. This is the more unfortunate because Arena is dealing with what, to me, is the issue for the Romans: the corruption and confusion of their civic virtues between 70 and 52 B.C. Arena’s contextualist methodology, witnessed by a heavy reliance on Quentin Skinner throughout and…
Patrick Callahan Subscribe
Patrick Callahan is dean of the Humanitas program at the St. Lawrence Institute for Faith and Culture.
