Do the Gracchi Need to Die for the Republic to Survive?
Max Lykins vs. Isabella Reinhardt
Join us on October 20, 2026
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM at the University of Austin
101 W. 6th Street, Austin, TX 78701
Doors open at 5:00 PM
Do the Gracchi need to die for the Republic to survive? In the late second century BC, the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus pushed sweeping reforms that shook Rome's political order, and both were killed for it. Professor Max Lykins from UT and Professor Isabella Reinhardt from UATX will debate whether or not the Romans made the right choice. Join us for a spirited debate on reform, populism, political violence, and what it takes for a regime to hold together.
MAX LYKINS
Max Lykins is a political theorist whose interests include ancient political thought, especially the Romans, republicanism and the republican tradition, and rhetoric and political theory. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Polis, and Political Research Quarterly. Previously, he was visiting assistant professor at Bowdoin College and postdoctoral fellow in the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia.
ISABELLA REIHNHARDT
Isabella Reinhardt works on Greek thought of the 5th-century BC. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. Before taking up her position at UATX, she was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on Greek tragedy, particularly the dramas of Aeschylus, and presocratic philosophy. Isabella’s current book project, Absent Present: Language and Concept in Early Greek Thought, examines the link the between abstract knowledge and language in 5th-century Greece. A forthcoming article from Classical World argues that we may find traces of Parmenidean thought in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and that these traces provide insight into the play’s presentation of human knowledge, human suffering, and divine causation.