ABSTRACT
Civic republicanism is a modern tradition with roots that extend deeply into the classical past. The exponents of the early modern tradition hark back to ancient theoretical and practical antecedents in Greece and Rome. Machiavelli, Harrington, Madison and Rousseau wrote in very different worlds, but all thought of themselves as building on ancient foundations: the institutions of Athens, Sparta and Rome, the examples of their political heroes, and the ideas of ancient writers, particularly Aristotle and Cicero.
