The Ivy League’s woke revisionists are wrong. Classical history matters. A group called Decolonization at Brown is agitating for the removal of statues honoring Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, claiming they “celebrate ongoing colonialism in the United States and idealize white, Western civilization — both of which continue to cause harm at Brown today.”

The classical world is not the wellspring of white colonialism. And Western civilization cannot be repealed. Indeed, the modern world owes an incalculable debt to Rome. As Mary Beard notes in “SPQR — A History of Ancient Rome”: “The main reason London is the capital of the United Kingdom is that the Romans made it the capital of their province Britannia.”