The Political Afterlife of a Roman Name. Publicola and Its Democratic Myth

Abstract This article examines the transformation of the Roman figure of Publius Valerius Publicola from a historical protagonist of the Roman Republic to a mythicized character embodying republican virtue, civic liberty, and resistance to tyranny. Starting from a recent etymological revision—according to which Publicola does not mean ‘friend of the people’ but rather ‘one who takes care of the army’—it is shown how this semantic misunderstanding, already attested in antiquity, fostered the emergence of a political topos capable of reappearing in historically diverse and temporally distant contexts. Through the analysis of three emblematic cases—the Federalist Papers (1787–1788), the revolutionary writings of Giuseppe Lattanzi (1796), and an American anti-imperialist pamphlet of 1898—the article reconstructs a genealogy of ideological appropriations in which the name Publicola operates not merely as an erudite reference but as a rhetorical and identity-constructing device. Particular attention is given to the Lattanzi case, where the pseudonym becomes a performative element of Napoleonic republican militancy. Far from regarding this process as a simple philological misunderstanding, the investigation interprets it as a dynamic of political mythopoeia. Through a multidisciplinary approach, it demonstrates how a name, even when divorced from its original meaning, can acquire force and actively intervene in political discourse. The case of Publicola thus reveals the generative potential of classical tradition in the construction of modern political languages and the transmission of collective values.