The Roman Democracy of Fergus Millar

In his The Roman Republic in Political Thought (his Jerusalem Lectures in History, delivered in memory of Menahem Stern), Millar refers to the reforms implemented in 1980s by Thatcher’s government as the historical context in which he first conceived his work on the Roman Republic. However, the political climate of that era, this paper shows, did not merely serve as the context in which Millar thought about the Republican political system. Rather, it functioned, I argue, as a foil within his historical analysis and constituted one of the domains he aimed to intervene in through his historical research. His reading of Roman Republican politics and of its interpretations in later political thought was intrinsically informed by his opposition to (in particular) the university policies of the 1980s and 1990s and to the neo-liberal discourse that informed them.