Empires of Trust

Current reading: an advance copy of Empires of Trust: How Rome Built--and America Is Building--a New World, which argues that the U.S. has notable similarities with the Roman Republic (not the late Roman Empire), such as how the Romans were expected to, and generally did, uphold high moral standards in dealing with defeated enemies, and were upset at their own mismanagement of Locri, a town they had conquered after it sided with the Carthaginians.