Location: The Heritage Foundation's Lehrman Auditorium

The Founders of the United States understood the profound lessons of Roman history for those who sought to fashion a new republic in a new world. Those lessons are even more compelling today. The Roman Empire of the Second Century AD and the United States of the Twenty-first Century are the only two absolute superpowers that have existed in history. From foreign policy in the Middle East to cultural diversity at home, the Roman Empire offers an enduring model of how to establish world peace and prosperity by combining freedom and empire.

An award-winning teacher and speaker, J. Rufus Fears is the David Ross Boyd Professor of Classics and G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of several books and innumerable articles on ancient history (such as The Theology of Victory at Rome and The Cult of Virtues and Roman Imperial Ideology), the history of liberty (including a three-volume edition of Selected Writing of Lord Acton, the great British historian of liberty) and the lessons of history for our own day.