Please join me in welcoming Professor Caroline Winterer.

I'm just absolutely delighted to be here, and thank you all for coming.

And I also want to give special thanks to the Penn Department of Classics, the two department chairs successive who arranged for me to be here, Bridgette Murnaghan and Emily Wilson, as well as the department administrator, Sarah Gish Krause, who has been tireless in her attention to detail.

For tonight's event specifically, let me also warmly thank Thomas Donnelly, lead scholar here at the National Constitution Center, and his many wonderful colleagues for working on setting up this event.

I can reaffirm what you heard earlier about going to see the new gallery.

I just got to go see it and it is fantastic.

Off you go after the talk, not right now.

But there was

And we'll start with Caroline.

Thank you.

All right.

Well, thank you, George, so much for that wonderful introduction.

And I'm really delighted to be with you this afternoon and with our Zoom audience as well.

My job here today is to tell you about some of the links between the founders of the United States and ancient Rome.

And so I pose this as a question for you.

What do you think? Do you think after 250 years we should still be thanking them?