Michael Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 185–257

Excerpt:

Regimes are founded, destroyed, or perpetuated during extreme times, time which command almost universal attention. Revolutions are like bonfires; no one can avoid staring at them and, still, no one likes to find himself in their fiery center. The attention which men pay to revolutions differ according to the men who render them. In time of revolution, men who burn and thirst for distinction begin to stir. It is then that such men either destroy the regime which nourished them or renew that regime be dedication to the principles of the first founders. Hence, it is in revoltions that human greatness, insofar as it is visible in politics, shines. It shines in men who are greatly virtuous or greatly vicious, in a Churchill or a Hitler.

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