Lessons from a Lost Republic - by Michelle Berenfeld (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A lively pocket history of the Roman Republic's collapse--and its unsettling echoes in our own political moment.

Americans are obsessed with Rome. Billionaires and manosphere pundits wax on about its military might, its gladiators, its emperors, its greatness.

But we're telling ourselves the wrong story.

In this sharp, eye-opening account, classics professor Michelle Berenfeld redirects our gaze. The Roman Empire isn't the lesson--the Roman Republic is. Nearly five centuries of representative government, undone by forces that should sound familiar: wealth and power concentrated in the hands of elites, rampant political violence, endless expansionist wars, and a Senate that normalized emergency measures until it had nothing left to protect. One by one, aspiring strongmen seized what the Senate had surrendered, stretching the limits of their legal power, using the military against their own people, undermining elections, and killing their enemies--until one of them, Augustus, gained total control and became an emperor.

Berenfeld's argument is both clarifying and urgent: Rome's slide into autocracy was not inevitable--and neither is ours. Smart, spirited, and packed with revelatory detail, Lessons from a Lost Republic is a wake-up call two thousand years in the making, a reminder that the republic is ours to protect.

Review Quotes

"A classicist turns in a searching study of how republics become dictatorships. The demise of the Roman Republic has served as inspiration to would-be dictators . . . including, by Berenfeld's account, the current occupant of the White House. Take the case of Augustus Caesar, the first emperor, of whom the author writes, 'If the Romans had a Nobel Peace Prize, Augustus would have given it to himself.' Augustus considered himself the center of the world, slapping his name all over public buildings and coins, remaking Rome to suit his tastes, purging the government of all but loyalists, and hijacking cultural institutions. . . . Augustus couldn't have done all this alone, though; as Berenfeld notes, the Roman Senate ceded its legislative authority to the executive 'without a fight.' . . . Augustus took the republic they gave him and made it a tyranny that ruled with ruthless violence for the next thousand years. . . . That ceding of power was the key ingredient to dictatorship, as was the Roman equivalent of governance by executive order, abandonment of due process, militarization of society, inequality, and other like matters. . . . A deeply cautionary tale of how not to keep a republic."--Kirkus Reviews

"Rome is having a moment, often for the worst reasons--an obliging mirror, ready to flatter whoever happens to be holding it. Michelle Berenfeld will have none of it. Lessons from a Lost Republic is urgent and necessary: inviting without sacrificing intelligence, brisk without sacrificing depth; it pushes beyond the easy parallels into the deeper structures of a republic in decay. Berenfeld brings a historian's eye to this thrilling, sobering tale, and a citizen's voice to its lessons for our own moment."--Ayad Akhtar, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Homeland Elegies

About the Author

Michelle Berenfeld is the John A. McCarthy Professor of Classics at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges. An archaeologist and fellow of the American Academy in Rome, she has done research in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Greece, and Italy. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic and numerous scholarly publications. She lives in Los Angeles.