2026 Frederick and Catherine Lauritsen Lecture in Ancient History

UMN History and the Center for Premodern Studies Present the 2026 Annual Lauritsen Lecture

"The Rooster at the Rubicon: Sorting Out Causes of the Fall of the Roman Republic."

Did the Roman Republic "fall" in the 40s BCE because of its own fatal weaknesses? Or was Erich Gruen right to conclude that "Civil war caused the fall of the Republic -- not vice versa?" Investigation of the causes of the "fall" of the Roman Republic has been hampered and blurred by a tendency not to address causality very critically. Prof. Morstein-Marx will attempt to shed some light on the problems of causation implicated in this momentous event, stressing in particular a counterfactual test that, in the Roman case and possibly elsewhere, allows one to distinguish between causes of greater and lesser importance, and perhaps to rule out some theories altogether.

Presented by Dr. Robert Morstein-Marx, Professor of Classics at UC - Santa Barbara

After his B.A. from the University of Colorado (Classics, History and Philosophy) and an Honors B.A. from the University of Oxford (Literae Humaniores), he earned his PhD in 1987 at UC Berkeley from the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. He is the author of two books, the first, Hegemony to Empire: The Development of the Roman Imperium in the East from 148 to 62 BC, focusing on questions of Roman imperialism, the second, Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic, analysing the effects of public speech and public meetings upon the distribution of political power in Rome. He has also co-edited (with Nathan Rosenstein) the “Blackwell Companion to the Roman Republic.” His latest book (2021) is a study of Julius Caesar and the Roman People, which he describes as “not another biography of Caesar” but an attempt to illuminate the popular character of the Late Roman Republic and shed new light on its crisis.

Prof. Morstein-Marx’s main research interests lie in Roman history from the middle Republic to the early Empire, and current work focuses on political culture in the Late Roman Republic, especially political values and concepts and their realization in institutions during a time of crisis. Other major interests include Cicero, Roman rhetoric, Roman imperialism, and classical historiography, both Greek and Latin.