Time and Antiquity in American Empire

This is a book about two empires—ancient Rome and the United States—and what happens to historical time when we think about them together. Ranging from the present day to the late eighteenth century, it tracks how the political and cultural imagination turned Roman antiquity into an object of mutual recognition—an analogy—for the imperial US state, sometimes for the sake of its justification and perpetuation, and sometimes as a tool of critique and resistance. To tackle this, it is divided into three parts: an introduction that lays out the conceptual and methodological stakes, a second part of two chapters on American empire’s political foundations—the republic and the slave—and a third on the popular genres that have stepped into America and Rome’s sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel narratives, and science fiction. But through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, this book is also a way into a more fundamental inquiry: about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within and across historical time. Time and Antiquity in American Empire ultimately builds a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one located in the oscillating, dialectical dynamics of the analogy, and in a grasp of temporality better understood through metaphors of interconnection—constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, it suggests that recognizing the forms of time that emerge when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have read—and how we might yet, in a continuing spirit of critique, read

Ancient history · Art · Empire · Late Antiquity · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · American literature

• Columbia / New York

  Open Access•Thomas Constantinesco•Transatlantica•2022

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