Contrary to Ken Burns’ recent documentary on the American Revolution, it was a band of Italians, the ancient Romans — not the Iroquois — who served as the model for our fledgling republic. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams also studied the Greek style of governance. However, America’s Founders believed that Athenian democracy insufficiently embraced the legal underpinnings of a truly egalitarian polity. As Roger Vigneron and Jean-Francois Gerkens note in “The Emancipation of Women in Ancient Rome”: “Of course, the Romans lived in a world with many inequalities: there were slaves, peregrines and barbaric peoples. But inside the …