American art history gets an eight-part tour from critic Robert Hughes, and this episode, "The Republic of Virtue," traces how the young United States borrowed the look of Greece and Rome to build its own image. Hughes stands in Washington DC discussing the capital's original plans, drawn up with columns and domes meant to evoke republican virtue rather than monarchy. He visits Monticello, walking through Thomas Jefferson's own experiment in classical design, and connects that same borrowed vocabulary to something as unlikely as Las Vegas, where the Forum Shops at Caesars turn ancient Rome into a shopping mall. The episode is one segment of a series shot across 100 locations nationwide, and Hughes narrates in his own voice, tracing a straight line from Jefferson's columns to Nevada's fiberglass ones. The point is not nostalgia for antiquity but the durability of the borrowing: how a nation invents its self-image by raiding the past, then keeps recycling that image long after the original meaning has drained out of it.