ABSTRACT
Shakespeare represents Rome as a place that is continuously changing in time, and also in time giving way to subsequent kingdoms and empires. In Julius Caesar, the broader reflections on temporality that run through the Sonnets are brought to bear on the state and historical time. Du Bellay very effectively shows the poetic wish that Rome would function as an anchor of meaning, and one of the points of Les Antiquitez de Rome and the Songe is to demonstrate the untenability of this notion. Shakespeare extends this line of questioning to the use of Rome as political legitimation. As for Du Bellay, Spenser, and Montaigne, the very durability that enables Rome to serve as model is undermined by the fact of its having faded in the past. Rome's failure is none other than an effect of time, the time that destroyed it and continues to increase its separation from modernity.
