This chapter examines Rémi Brague’s “Roman model” of European civilization, extending Leo Strauss’s Athens–Jerusalem paradigm by adding Rome as the essential mediator. Europe’s identity is “eccentric”: its cultural sources, Greek reason and Jewish revelation, lie outside itself. Romanity is defined by “secondarity”, a humble reception and transmission of prior traditions, fostering a dynamic tension between classical perfection and present dangers of declining into barbarity that drives recurring Renaissances and cultural progress. Brague applies this to Christianity, which relates to the Old Covenant as Rome did to Greece, while its opposition to imperial power distinguishes divine and temporal spheres. Cicero embodies the Roman attitude through decorum, aesthetic-moral propriety rooted in prudence and self-knowledge, promoting civility. The Roman villa balances otium (contemplative retreat) and negotium (public activity), mediating nature and culture, work and leisure. The forum represents sacred-political communal life. Golden Age poets, like Virgil (foundational myth), Horace (independent reflection), and Ovid (nostalgia for a lost home) idealize Roman urbane attachment and peace. Finally, Cicero’s humanitas ties education in liberal arts, rhetoric, law, and philosophy to virtue and prudence, enabling the responsible civility of the Roman citizen. European culture, per Brague, is thus conservatively dynamic: reverence for external antiquity fuels creativity and humane civility.