The back of Franklin's mind

Cullen Murphy (Globe photo by Mark Wilson)

My Saturday story about editor and author Cullen Murphy was more about him than about his new book, "Are We Rome?", since I was not writing a review. However, the subject of comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire is such an interesting one that it took up much of the interview, most of which didn't make it into the story. Here is part of Murphy's answer to my question of why we are more likely to compare the United States to the Roman Empire than to the British Empire, which would seem to be a more apt comparison -- both English-speaking peoples, both in modern times:

"There are probably good reasons. Nowadays, you do see comparison of ourselves with the British, for example, people like [Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, author of "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire."]. As a young nation, we were emerging from a situation where we were contrasting ourselves with the British. We did not want to be like them. And we were explicitly adopting a republican model that the British didn't have, so there are many reasons we why wouldn't be comparing ourselves to the British and why we would be comparing ourselves to the early part of Rome. The Roman example was a cautionary one. Everybody knew that Rome had been, for a period of centuries, a republic -- it had cast off a monarchy. It deliberately created itself as a republic and then something happened and it took a bad turn, from the republican point of view. So [the Founding Fathers] were very conscious of what do you do to keep yourself a republic? In the back of Franklin's mind, that is what he was saying with his famous remark when coming out of Independence Hall [at the end of the 1787 Constitutional Convention]. He was asked, 'What kind of a government have you given us?' and he said, 'A republic, if you can keep it.' He was thinking of Roman history."