Conflicting ideals of freedom and bondage—inherited from Rome—are baked into America’s origins.
When building their new government, the Founding Fathers once again looked to Rome, instituting term limits and establishing a senate. However, they also used Rome’s example to justify the institution of slavery and to ensure that rich landowners controlled politics. Rome’s history is entangled in the United States’ foundations, just as the American Revolution inspired later battles for secularism and freedom from authoritarian and colonial rule in France, in Haiti, and across Latin America.
The legacies of Rome and the United States’ founding should be viewed critically. The people and institutions of both are seen for their genius and their contradictions, for freeing some while keeping others in bondage. A 2023 production of Cato held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, grappled with these tensions (see below), asking the audience “to stay for 30 minutes and discuss the play. Night after night, multigenerational audiences explored the tensions…between liberty and slavery, tensions that unfold between the promise of an American principle of equality and the realities of empire and race that steer the nation’s formation.”
From Ancient Rome to Today’s America
“Joseph Addison’s Cato is a play that is in the US-American bloodstream” (Anderson et al, 2025).
In 2023, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, staged a new production of Cato, a Tragedy. Shortened for modern audiences and edited to eliminate racialized language used to describe Indigenous North Africans, the production cast women and actors of color for many of the principal roles. Throughout the play, the audience was asked to consider, “What did liberty mean for Cato and for George Washington? What does it mean now, for modern Americans?”—reminding all involved of the potent throughlines from ancient Rome to 1776 to today’s America.
Photo: Ithamar Francois as Juba and Shinnerrie Jackson as Syphax in Cato by Joseph Addison. Clarence Brown Lab Theatre, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2023. Credit: Taryn Farro at AwSnap Photography.
