[Florence’s] founder is the Roman people, conqueror and master of the
globe... what a beginning this is, for the Florentine race to be born from
the Roman people! What nation in the whole world was ever more famous,
more powerful, or more pre-eminent in every kind of virtue?’’ (Bruni 1996 ,
596 ). But Bruni has in mind a more speciWc thought. Florence was not simply
founded by Rome, but by the Roman republic. That is, Florence had the
distinction of being founded by the Romans at the height of Roman liberty.
When Rome founded Florence, Bruni reasons, ‘‘the Caesars, the Antonines,
the Tiberii, the Neros, plagues and destroyers of the republic, had not yet
abolished liberty.... From which I think it results that, in this city more than
any other, we see that a particular quality is present and has been present:
namely, that the men of Florence delight in liberty above all things, and are
the greatest enemies of tyrants’’ (Bruni 1996 , 600 ).
It is important to recognize what a substantial departure this passage
represents. It had been an orthodoxy of Roman historiography throughout
the Medieval period that Rome achieved her true greatness under the Caesars,
and that the famous republican antagonists of the emperors had simply been
traitorous rebels—an account that also drew strength from Church history,
which idealized the imperialpax romanaas the great enabler of Christian
proselytization (Baron 1955 , 39 ). The most celebrated formulation of this
classic view appears in Dante’sInferno, where Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and
Cassius, appear in the claws of Lucifer alongside Judas Iscariot in the very
lowest level of hell (Dante 1960 , 677 ). Here, Bruni reverses the standard
reasoning. Rome, he informs us, reached its zenith as a self-governing
republic, and the end of Roman liberty brought decline and corruption.
The manner in which he makes this case should sound quite familiar. ‘‘For
after the republic had been brought under the yoke of one man,’’ Bruni
writes, ‘‘ ‘those remarkable minds,’ as Cornelius [Tacitus] says, ‘disappeared’:
so it is of great interest whether a colony was founded in the later period, for
by then all of the virtue and nobility of the city of Rome had been extirpated’’
(Bruni 1996 , 606 ). This is a straightforward recapitulation of the standard
Roman claim: liberty makes virtue possible, and without virtue there can be
no glory.
Bruni continues by making a set of connected claims about how liberty
promotesgrandezzain the Florentine state. Because Florence is governed by
numerous magistrates each serving short terms, and because each part of the
city is represented in government, ‘‘there is liberty, without which this people
would not consider life worth living’’ (Bruni 1996 , 634 ). This balanced system
republican visions 199