Late Antiquity in early American drama: Mercy Otis Warren

This paper deals with a crucial moment of the history of classicism and classical culture in the Western world: American independence and the classical rhetoric developed by patriots. The paper focuses on Mercy Otis Warren's dramatic works, and explores their relationship with late antiquity as a new paradigm of classicism in America, as opposed to the dominant paradigm of republican Rome. The paper also tries to explain the origins and the reasons of the development of this new cultural model. * To be published *