Abstract

Georg W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger argued that Romanitas worked as a conceptual negation that abruptly severed the authentic thread that firmly connected German thought to the Greek origin of philosophy. By considering Hegel’s and Heidegger’s systematic and unifying philosophies of history as a hegemonic paradigm that emptied the experience of Latin culture, I will present Hannah Arendt’s requalifying interpretation of the idea of auctoritas as a critical position that rehabilitates Romanness into a political narrative characterized by a plurality of beginnings and by the ever-growing foundation of a common history.