Lessons from a Lost Republic: What Ancient Rome Can Teach Us About This American Moment

by Michelle Berenfeld

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

224 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication August 11, 2026

Reviews

[Jen Burrows · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lessons from a Lost Republic is a highly readable history of the end of the Roman Republic. Berenfeld's clear and colloquial prose makes the past feel close without ever oversimplifying it. In reminding you how each event and each character sits in their historical context, you really get the sense of how political change can be both sudden and a slow erosion, and how easy it is not to notice how far things have shifted until it's too late.

The parallels with American politics today are definitely there, but never forced. There is always a sense that history didn't have to be this way. This is the story of Rome with moments of reflection; by recognising the turning points in the past it becomes easier to spot them in your present.

Engaging, accessible and absorbing, Lessons from a Lost Republic is a thought-provoking read.

*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5 stars* Late Roman Republic meets Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, and let's face it, the late republic is endlessly more fascinating that the "Rome Bros" obsession with Augustus and Aurelius.