"Plena exemplorum est historia" : rewriting exemplary history in Charles Brockden Brown's "Death of Cicero"

The historical tale "Death of Cicero: A Fragment (1800) echoes Charles Brockden Brown's skepticism about exemplary historiography being the predominant mode of the interpretation of history in the early Republic. Interpretations of the past primarily relied on the implication that the formation of civilizations evolves in patterns of development, such as the rise and fall of republics, and that the endless repetition of such patterns allows for a comparison from which essential widely accepted reading of the history of the republics of classical antiquity as models which should be emulated