Penn Public Lectures On Classical Antiquity And the Contemporary World - Fall 2026

Lecture 1: "Model Republic: Why the American Founders Loved Ancient Carthage" (September 10, 2026)

The magnificent north African city of Carthage dominated the ancient Mediterranean world from its founding in around 800 BCE until it was annihilated by the Romans in 146 BCE. This lecture will reveal what the American founders admired about these mortal enemies of the Romans. Was it their republican government, their senate, or their fearsome army of horses and war elephants, led by famous generals such as Hannibal? Or was it also something more haunting: that the Roman obliteration of Carthage warned Americans about the limits of empire-building?

Lecture 2: "Colonies without Empire: The Archaic Greek Colonies in the American Revolution" (September 15, 2026)

Long before the classical heyday of Athens and Sparta in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, the Greek world exploded into a galaxy of new colonies. New settlements and cities spread from the far western Mediterranean all the way to the Black Sea in the east for three centuries beginning around 800 BCE. Known later as Magna Graecia—“Greater Greece”—the widening of Greek settlement and culture formed without an empire. Instead, it was individual city-states that launched bands of colonists. This lecture shows how restive American colonists deployed the example of the Archaic Greek colonies as they fought Great Britain’s top-down imperial management style. A few hardy colonists even visited the ancient Doric temples near Naples—a city whose modern name evokes the “new city” (Neapolis) of the lost Greek colonies.

Lecture 3: "The First Empire: The Appeal of Ancient Persia in Revolutionary America" (September 17, 2026)

Ancient Persia (c. 550-332 BCE) was the first and largest empire in the history of the world, until surpassed by Rome. Stretching from modern Turkey in the west to the door of India in the east, ancient Persia occupied a region that today forms 20 nation-states, including Iran and Iraq. While today some see an existential struggle between the values of East and West, this lecture shows that ancient Persia formed a pillar of the political world of the founders. They admired its founder, Cyrus the Great of Persia; its cosmopolitan cities, such as Persepolis and Susa; and they looked to its model of federalism as they debated the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Far from an alien civilization, the ancient Persians lie at the heart of the American Revolution.

Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor by courtesy of Classics, at Stanford University. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas and the history of science.

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