Pays attention to the highly juridical and legalized language used by the protagonists of the struggles of the late Republic~Seriously considers the constitutional nature of the arguments made by all sides of the struggles and civil wars accompanying the Republic's collapse~Offers a new perspective on the intellectual history of the late Roman Republic itself, and opens a gap between Roman and Greek political thought~Shows that classical republicanism is not a coherent concept and that the civil wars and crises of the late Roman Republic spawned a tradition of political thought, from Cicero to Bodin, Montesquieu and the American Founders, that saw constitutionalism, not virtue, as the remedy to the Republic's fate