What have the Romans ever done for us?” the actor John Cleese once asked, in a famous Monty Python sketch, before being forced to admit a long list of improvements including roads, public order and education. To that impressive inventory he might have added elections and an early form of what we call representative democracy.
If there is a nation that can be said to have followed the Roman model most closely, sliding away from monarchy while retaining aristocratic privilege, obsessing about tradition and entertaining a constitution more like a gentleman’s agreement than a properly organised document, it may well be Britain.
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