The Roman Road to the Ruin of its Republic: Michelle Berenfeld’s Lessons from Antiquity

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Back in April of last year, the Atlantic, one of my favorite online publications, ran a very provocative piece by my guest today, Michelle Berenfeld, entitled The Roman Way to Trash a Republic. And, of course, in many ways, it was an article about not just the trashing of the Roman Republic and its slide into dictatorship, but the analogies, the similarities — eerie — between Rome and the United States. And, Michelle has followed up that article with a book which came out earlier this week, Lessons from a Lost Republic. And she's joining us from Los Angeles where she lives, the one room in your house, Michelle, which has air conditioning. Of course, the Romans never had air conditioning. They had many other things. In the more than year, I guess, sixteen months since you wrote that original piece in the Atlantic that inspired this new book, is— is America looking more or less like Rome, late—

00:01:42 Michelle Berenfeld: Rome? Well, it's early Rome and late Rome at the same time. And first of all, thank you for having me. I think that it's looking more and more like the late republic every day, which is the topic of the book. So what I'm talking about is the collapse of the Roman Republic into autocracy and then when it became what we now call the Roman Empire. So modern Americans are very interested in the Roman Empire these days. There was the TikTok meme and all the bros talking about how they think about Rome every day. But they're more interested now in emperors and military might and world domination in a way that is very different from how our founders looked around at ancient Rome. The Roman Republic, as you know, was founded some 2,500 years ago on the rejection of a king and founded as a government based on the rule of law with a peaceful transition of power and guaranteed rights for its citizens. These are things and principles that were rare in antiquity and which our founders admired. And they designed our republic in some ways in response to that. But what they also knew was that the Roman Republic devolved into autocracy, and that autocracy was finally, put into full force by Augustus, the first Roman emperor as we call him. And what he was, was a monarch, and he founded a monarchy that lasted for more than a thousand years. And so the founders knew that and did not celebrate it. While today, many are looking to Julius Caesar and Augustus and also Marcus Aurelius as heroes, our country was founded on principles that saw them as usurpers and dictators and tried to avoid that.

00:03:31 Andrew Keen: Benjamin Franklin, of course, famously said, I think, after the constitutional convention, when he was asked about what happened, he said, what would be the outcome? He said, a republic if you can keep it. As you note, the founders were very sensitive about how Greece and Rome, in particular, influenced this republic. Were they acutely aware of the dangers of the slide into a dictatorship?

00:04:01 Michelle Berenfeld: They were, and they talked about it. And in their discussions of our constitution, they said things like, what if someone like Sulla or Caesar got this position? Would we be able to hold it? You know, that sort of thing when we're talking about checks and balances and the rule of law, how much protection we were giving ourselves against people who might overstretch the boundaries. And Julius Caesar and Augustus were very much examples of what not to do, what to be worried about.

00:04:33 Andrew Keen: We think of Caesar and Sulla and of course, we also think of a certain American president, who, at one point, apparently, compared Italy and the United States, complaining— suggesting they had similar histories, although that's debatable. After all, much of what he says is debatable.

00:04:54 Michelle Berenfeld: Indeed.

00:04:55 Andrew Keen: Does Trump have a Roman, a late republic quality about him? I mean, he seems as if he's almost been watching too many films about, Julius Caesar or Sulla.

00:05:11 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, he may be watching those films, but he's also probably listening to a lot of tech bros and billionaires who are really into the Romans right now and who hold up people like Julius Caesar and Augustus as heroes, as great men of history who did amazing things and were the— saved Western civilization and some such. But I think what Donald Trump is doing is— I mean, in some ways, it's a little bit on the nose, to be frank. He was putting his face on coins. He's building a triumphal arch. He had blood sport performed on the White House lawn. It's kind of comical in that way. But the more important political changes is that he is taking on more power, which is being handed to him by the Senate. And that is the thing that I see is most similar is that this is a trend that predates Donald Trump, and I actually didn't want this book to be all about Donald Trump. Like I said, he forced my hand a little bit with the triumphal arches and such. But I think it's important that we notice that it's not just him, that we don't just wait for him to go away and then say, phew. That's over and get back to, quote, unquote, normal. The Romans did that many, many times until normal had changed so radically that there was nothing left of the republic to protect.

00:06:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's almost as if he read your original piece, in the Atlantic and then decided, okay. Well, Michelle, I'm gonna prove to you that I'm a real Roman. You've noted, Michelle, the tech bros. I'm not sure I like that term, because— okay. I'm in San Francisco, and I'm a bit of a tech bro myself, although

00:06:53 Michelle Berenfeld: Fair enough.

00:06:53 Andrew Keen: I don't much care for Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Steve Bannon, who's certainly not a tech bro, actually. But what is it about Zuckerberg and Musk and Bannon? Why do they love Rome so much? Is it some sort of lust for power, for violence, hatred of women, hatred of democracy? What is it about Rome that inspires these kinds of tech bros?

00:07:21 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, of course, I can't speak to their inner lives, but what they've said out loud is, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg has expressed enormous admiration for Augustus, has named his children Augusta [ed.: August] and Aurelia, I think, and things like that. But one of the things he said about Augustus that I thought was quite telling is, and I'm paraphrasing, that Augustus had to do a lot of tough things, but he ushered in an era of peace and prosperity that lasted two hundred years. And for me, that is jarring because those tough things included killing literally everyone who crossed him and putting out enemies lists, which call— called for the heads of anybody he said should die and taking the money of lots of people who he had killed. And then the peace and prosperity era is a little bit hard to justify as well because Augustus led to a dynasty that brought us such statesmen as Caligula and Nero, and then they were followed by a civil war and then more murderous rise and fall of various emperors. And so the peace and prosperity that he's talking about, I understand where it comes from, and I'll get back to that in a second. But I think that he is seeing that ancient world exactly as the ancient world would have wanted him to. That is Augustus was exceptionally good and so were the Romans in general at telling you what to think about what happened. And Augustus's messaging was so effective that we and people like Mark Zuckerberg and others still believe him.

00:08:59 Andrew Keen: You talk about this shift from the republic into dictatorship. Of course, the republic wasn't a democracy. Maybe there was a little bit more democracy in Athens, but Rome certainly wasn't a democracy. What was the republic like? And given that the American republic had at least democratic claims or aspirations, what was it about the republic that inspired the founders?

00:09:26 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, I think one of the things that is the clearest is the notion that there are different branches of government and different forms of those branches and that they are in contact with each other and check each other when one overreaches. So that's sort of separation of powers. For instance, they had an ex— what we would say maybe an executive branch, but which, their most famous chronicler that the founders would have known was a man named Polybius, a Greek who was captured and brought to Rome and ended up spending much of his life in the company of very, very powerful people during a period of enormous expansion for the Romans. And Polybius, like many people in that Mediterranean world at the time, was trying to figure out how the Romans had gotten so powerful so fast. And so he describes their government to us, and he describes it as part monarchy, aristocracy, which is the Senate, and we have a Senate, and then part democracy, which was the assemblies of the people. And so by putting those things together in a three part way and having the citizens and the assembly being able to check certain things that the Senate did, the Senate being able to check certain things that the consuls or the executive did, that sort of balance of powers was one way that the founders looked back to Rome to see promise in the republican system.

00:10:55 Andrew Keen: We recently did a show last week, actually, with contemporary journalist Casey Michel, the United States of Oligarchy, which we talked about Aristotle's definition of oligarchy versus aristocracy. What was the ideal political system in classical Greece, in the Republic? Was it a kind of aristocracy? It certainly wasn't oligarchy, was it? Or, or plutocracy, and it's this plutocratic element, in United States of Oligarchy, which, Michel [ed.: Casey Michel, the previous episode's guest] is so critical of.

00:11:37 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, I think for the Romans, there was, of course, an aristocracy. And like almost all societies in history, the very wealthy had more power than other people. The very wealthy and the people who came from good old families. Those were things that the Romans valued and which gave people power. But there was also quite a bit of social mobility in the ancient Roman world. And while it started out run entirely by what we call patricians, the people who are kind of like those who came over on the Mayflower in America, the old families. And then over time, people who were from other families who could be called, for instance, as Cicero was, a new man, somebody who is more of the up-by-his-bootstraps type, could rise to the highest offices in the land, and that was something that they seem to have valued. For the Romans, they had an interest in the same things that our founders tried to instill, to a degree. That is, right of recourse for its citizens, voting for its citizens, and also the rule of law. They took some pride in that, but of course it was not a perfect thing, just like ours. It was not a perfect Republic that they had, you know, the poor had far less power than the rich. It was a violent society, but it wasn't until the later republic that that violence entered into politics, that people actually used violence as a way to get someone they disliked in politics to do something different. And that was the beginning of a downward slide for the Romans that set up a situation where political violence became endemic to the system, where factionalization and, discourse of enemies of the state and things like that became more common. And that's when they really lost control of the republic and how it fell apart.

00:13:27 Andrew Keen: Was it a class thing? I know that you're an academic, and so you're probably bored of debates about whether or not there was class struggle in, in Rome or Greece. But in my conversation with, Michel, he looked back with a degree of nostalgia to Teddy Roosevelt and suggested that America needs that type of reformer now to address the current oligarchic system of corruption and wealth. But, of course, Teddy Roosevelt as well as FDR were from part of the elite. So was— were the elite in the dominant class, so to speak, Michelle, in Rome? Were they united or were they divided? Were the critics of the republic, were they the wealthy, the corrupt, the rotten?

00:14:19 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, first, I would say that there is probably no one that I would point to as saying they were a critic of the republic. Much like now, everybody who is fighting over how best to run it and claiming they were doing well by the republic. And it's an important point that you make about the elites and the similarity with America is that nowadays, of course, as your earlier guest indicated, we have a profound wealth inequality in this country. Then there's a very small number of people who have an extraordinary amount of money and that they've become involved in politics. That was true in antiquity and in Rome. But what happened in Rome is that people would claim— elites of both would claim to be both on the side of the people known as the populares or on the side of the elites known as the optimates, which just means the best men. And eventually, those two quasi parties started to look a lot alike to the Roman people, much as ours have started to look a lot alike to a lot of Americans. That is they were both made up of very rich men who were competing to hold on to a few slots of powerful positions and to hold on to their interests rather than to really work for what the Roman people needed, which was easier access to food and land and stability and all that sort of stuff.

00:15:43 Andrew Keen: Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the term bread and circuses was invented in Rome as perhaps an early example of what we might think of as populism. Are there equivalents there then in terms of the way in which certain factions in contemporary America use bread and circuses to, cheer up the ordinary people, the popular, the populus, as the Romans called them?

00:16:11 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, it's interesting that you bring up bread and circuses because, of course, yes, this was a term that was used by the writer Juvenal to talk about how people had traded their freedoms and liberties and republic for something else and were satisfied with bread and circuses, which were the things that the Roman emperors provided to them. The circuses being the most commonly understood as the games that is amphitheater games, gladiators, beast fights, that kind of thing. And those were put on every other day sometimes in Rome. They were incredibly frequent. And so that sort of entertainment of the Roman people keeping them happy that way was the circuses side. The bread side was actually something which our modern politics might call socialism, which was absolutely part of the Roman Empire in that every Roman citizen had a certain allotment of grain given to him to help feed his family. And so the bread in bread and circuses is actually almost a minimum basic income situation. And that is something that I find telling in that in our current situation, we're not getting either the new— the popular, or you can be the populist or whoever, but we're not being promised bread or circuses. People can't afford to go to the World Cup, and people are not being given a minimum basic income or anything like that. And those, whether they should be, can be debated, but that's what bread and circuses was referring to. And I think we're trading some of our liberties and republican, ideals for very little in that regard.

00:17:52 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I'm not sure whether being not being able to afford to go to the World Cup is the best evidence one way or the other. You're a professor of classics at—

00:18:01 Michelle Berenfeld: Mhmm.

00:18:03 Andrew Keen: Pitzer, a very distinguished liberal arts college down in Los Angeles [ed.: Pitzer College is in Claremont, in Los Angeles County]. Beautiful campus too.

00:18:10 Michelle Berenfeld: Mhmm.

00:18:12 Andrew Keen: You're warning us in many ways, Michelle, both in the Atlantic piece and in the new book about Rome, about becoming Rome, these lessons from a lost republic. How did the Romans think about that? How did they— you're a professor of not just Rome, but of Greece as well. Did they look back to Athens and say we can't be like Athens given the violence, the instability? Did they look at Sparta? What was their historiographical context in terms of learning from the past?

00:18:50 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, the Romans had a really interesting relationship with the Greeks in that they conquered them and made fun of them and admired them enormously. And so the Greeks, were a source of great learning for the Romans. They read Homer and most Romans in the Roman Empire would have learned some Greek if they were an educated person. And so there was an enormous admiration for the cultural history of Greece, but they— the Romans looked back on them as basically having failed and being weaker than them because the Romans also took them over completely. And so I don't think that the Romans look to Greek democracy as something that they were necessarily trying to emulate, and it didn't last very long in Athens for one thing, and it had been long gone by the time the Romans took over Greece.

00:19:42 Andrew Keen: Did you see the Odyssey, by the way? Yeah?

00:19:45 Michelle Berenfeld: I was afraid you'd ask me that because in my professional negligence, I am not seeing it until Monday. I have not seen it until—

00:19:51 Andrew Keen: Damn it. Like, it's criminal.

00:19:53 Michelle Berenfeld: I— I feel very guilty about this, but I will— I—

00:19:56 Andrew Keen: wouldn't go as far as say criminal, but certainly rather naughty of you. There was a very influential book written a couple of years ago by a journalist, a Canadian journalist who, spent a lot of time in China who argued that China was a country run by engineers and America was a country run by lawyers. Did Rome have engineers or lawyers? And my— again, the common perception of Rome is what distinguishes them in history with their engineering achievements, the roads, the waterworks. Would it be fair to say that in a sense, Lessons from a Lost Republic should be read as much in Beijing as it is in New York or Washington DC?

00:20:48 Michelle Berenfeld: What an interesting way of thinking about it. I think that Lessons from a Lost Republic is for— I mean, I hope it's read everywhere, of course, but I think it's really geared towards Americans because Americans tend to be thinking about their republic as something that will just last forever. We are in this very strange moment of dichotomy between denial and despair. On the one hand, everybody talks on both sides of the aisle about how the republic is in danger, how this country is going to hell in a handbasket. But yet at the same time, they believe that just adding a couple of seats to the House or Congress on whichever side will fix that. And by talking about Donald Trump as if he is the only problem, he is the thing and if we go against him, then we'll be okay. We're giving people cover, those who should be doing things to preserve the rule of law, to make sure our elections are fair, to make sure that everyone has a fair chance to do the things that they wanna do in this country. We're giving them cover by claiming that it's really just the president's fault that these things are going wrong. And so I want Americans to read this book because I want them to recognize that a republic's collapse is not inevitable. Ours isn't. The Romans wasn't. But it's also not impossible. There is no system in the history of the world that has lasted forever. And I think that a lot of our discourse is based on this notion that it'll just keep bumping along no matter what we do. And so in terms of the Chinese, they don't have the history of a republic that they are trying to protect and that it has the same parallels. They might have lessons to learn about how to set up a more authoritarian government that pretends it's still a republic. That could be interesting for them. I don't really know.

00:22:45 Andrew Keen: But what about this question on the engineering achievements of the republic? I mean, why was, in your view, the Roman Republic, so successful? Maybe let me rephrase the question. Not the Roman Republic, but why was Rome so successful? Was it for its military accomplishments, its engineering accomplishments, its cultural achievements?

00:23:14 Michelle Berenfeld: I think it's interesting to think about what we define as success. The Romans did—

00:23:19 Andrew Keen: But why did it— sorry to jump in here. But why— Yeah. Yeah. Why are we talking about Rome? We're not talking about the Goths. We're not talking about lots of other, quote, unquote, civilizations that had a— didn't have the same impact on the world.

00:23:33 Michelle Berenfeld: You're right. The Romans lasted for a very long time. And like us, it is hard to imagine that it would ever go away, which, of course, it did, but it took quite a while. But what they did do in the republic was set up a series of systems, an idea of the state that could perpetuate itself. And the emperors, at least especially in the early period, paid attention to that system and retained it in a way in that the republic was dead in that voting didn't really have the same impact. The emperors chose the consuls. The Senate had fealty to the emperor, but they kept those systems in place. And, yes, they had enormous military might, and they paid attention to things like making sure their citizens had at least their basic needs met. That didn't always happen. But those were some of the ways that they kept things going. As far as engineering, they were exceptionally good at that. One way to do that is that you have a lot of free labor, of course, and you have a lot of time to do things. The engineering achievements of the Romans, I've been thinking about quite a lot with the reflecting pool problem in DC because I— you know, if I were an ancient Roman, I could tell him, you know, I've got a guy. I can fix that right up. They had, reflecting pools and enormous waterworks and concrete that could resist— get stronger underwater. And so I wish that in that one way, Donald Trump would try to be a little bit more like a Roman emperor.

00:25:03 Andrew Keen: He certainly should read your book. I don't suppose he will. You mentioned the tech bros' infatuation with Rome, Zuckerberg's, or aspirations to become maybe Augustine [ed.: Augustus] in a weird kind of way. But I wonder whether also— and I've always been very curious about this, Michelle. Why are so many— it's not just the tech bros, but particularly young men. Why are they so obsessed with stoicism? What is it about stoicism that has made it so popular? The— maybe the sort of the Arendtian reading, so to speak, of that is that what Rome did away with was politics, and so everyone turned inwards, which explains why, maybe as you argue, Rome and America have much in common.

00:25:58 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, the Marcus Aurelius stoicism, phenomenon has been quite interesting to me, and it is true that just about every man that I meet in America, and I mentioned that I work on ancient Rome, brings up Marcus Aurelius to me. And there's kind of two things about the Marcus Aurelius thing. One of them is the serious philosophical aspect of his Meditations. That is this book that he wrote or a journal that he kept more accurately that he wrote in Greek, so, in the language of philosophy and learning. And so as I was saying, this idea that the Greeks were a source of learning and culture was something that someone like Marcus Aurelius would have realized. This was not the language that he was speaking with his soldiers on the battlefield as he was writing some of this. But the Meditations are a personal reflection of an emperor who was trying to think about stoicism as he was learning about it and to think about how he could apply it to his own endeavors as a good Roman person and as an emperor. Reading the Meditations — there's a lot of good stuff in there. I certainly welcome anybody to read it, and he talks a lot about taking thoughtful action and considering the value of your life and how others interact with it. One thing that I found particularly interesting is that he does not have the long life optimizing gene in there and that he talks very specifically about how you either have a short life or a long life, and you don't know any better no matter which one you have. But one thing about the Meditations that I wonder if a lot of these people realize is that this was, as I said, the reflections of a probably elderly emperor writing after a long— at the end of a long career, and it was for his private reflection. And it didn't have a lot of readership back in the day. It didn't go very far. It wasn't really rediscovered until much later. It was one of these things that wasn't read widely. And I wonder if it's a little bit like when George Bush started making paintings after he was president and that sort of artistic outlet reflective time. It's a little bit like that.

00:28:21 Andrew Keen: What other lessons are there from Rome, from this lost republic? One of the things that we do many shows on Keen On America, Michelle, is the role of religion in this country, Christianity. Many historians have argued that the American Republic is a Christian republic. Rome, of course, in its own peculiar, ironic way, bore Christianity. Are there lessons from this lost republic when it comes to the birth and development of monotheism in Rome and, the fact that your friend Donald Trump seems to have very enthusiastic support from evangelical Christians?

00:29:04 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, of course, he's not my friend. I've never met Donald Trump. But—

00:29:07 Andrew Keen: No. I'm teasing you, but, clearly, you're warning us. You're— you're not, as I am, and neither of us are great friends of him.

00:29:16 Michelle Berenfeld: No. I mean, the most important lessons, I think, from the lost republic are that powers given up like those of the Senate and the Congress are not easily gotten back. And that when you give an individual man, whoever he is, whatever side of the aisle or political party he's on, powers beyond his office, they often stick around with that office long after that man has left. And then I'll get to Christianity in one second, but I think it's important that Americans recognize that turning to individuals to save the republic, no matter what their party, is doomed to fail. It failed again and again in the Roman era. There were people who claimed to be on the side of the people and others who claimed to be on the side of the elite, but none of them could restore the republic without giving back those important powers to the Senate and the people of Rome to decide their own fate. Christianity, as you pointed out, was— or as I often say, born and raised in the Roman Empire. That is Jesus was born under Augustus and grew up under the first— the second emperor, Tiberius. This is also a lesson from a lost republic because if you had told anyone in the time of Augustus that just last week, a Jewish baby was born in an often rebellious province, and one day he will become the one and only God of the Roman Empire and eventually of billions of people. They would have laughed in your face. It was the most unlikely thing you could have possibly said, but yet here we are. And I think that's an important lesson too, is that we tend to be very confident in our predictions of disaster, but less so in predicting that we could do something different, that we could do something better. And I think our agency in history is important for us to remember because we look back on something like the fall of the Roman Republic or even the rise of Christianity and view these things as inevitable as happening just the way they did. But they were highly unlikely in many cases and could have gone very differently depending on the choices that people made along the way. And so I think that's my biggest point probably for a lesson.

00:31:35 Andrew Keen: You're suggesting that we should be skeptical of men who claim to [unclear], which seems to be men who come and claim to be saving the republic. But aren't there chapters in American history where men did indeed save the Republic? Lincoln comes to mind and even FDR, and that you could turn your argument on its head.

00:31:58 Michelle Berenfeld: That's an interesting point. And I think that certain presidents are considered great in the past because they did remarkable things, but none of them could have truly done that alone. Then I think that one of the things that is important for us to remember is that the president is not meant to be or at least was not meant to be an all powerful person. He was meant to stand at the head of an executive branch that was equal to the other two. And I think that what we have been seeing in our country is that Congress, as the Roman Senate and the people of Rome did, keep ceding their power to an executive, keep giving him extra permission to do things that would not normally be allowed for a president in the name of a crisis or solving an emergency. And that to me is very dangerous because when we were lucky with Lincoln and arguably FDR in that they may have done extraordinary things and may have done and did do things that were a little bit outside the bounds of their presidency, but they agreed to let go afterwards. And that's something that is not guaranteed of every person that comes along. And so I think it's better to put our faith in institutions and improve those institutions than keep looking for a savior.

00:33:27 Andrew Keen: Well, I'm not sure they agreed to let go. They both died. You know? So they didn't have much choice. True. I mean, what's your model then, Michelle? When— when you think of, maybe correct me if I'm being— if this is an unfair question. But do you have sort of a model of the glory years of the American Republic? How did it work? What individual or what institution? Are you looking for a— you're looking for a strong Congress, senators, of course, ironically, senators given the Roman connection? When you look back at the American Republic, what warms your heart?

00:34:07 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, I think it's important to remember that things change and things— forget— people forget how things change. I am not one who's looking back to some mysterious golden age that never existed. I don't think there's any one moment that I could point to and say, yes. That's perfect. We should go back to that. Not least because it's impossible and I think it's a problematic argument. And I think it's one that is being made quite a lot, this golden age that we could all return to. And this is something that people did in Rome too. Augustus himself claimed that the— I mean, the Republic was constantly falling apart, just like us. People are always complaining that kids today are not as good as they were back in the day. But Augustus tried to tell a story of himself as restoring a republic that had been corrupted, that had become weaker. And instead, he dismantled it and took it over for himself. There is no moment in the past that I'm trying to return us to. I am just hoping that Americans will recognize that if they keep acting like they're trying to get back to something, get back to normal after each crisis, that they're not noticing that the normal keeps shifting and that they could be in fact thinking about what they want and what they want to get, in the future rather than just trying to go back to normal, which has thus far not worked very well.

00:35:36 Andrew Keen: There's a great debate. Again, Michelle, you know this as well as I do. And in fact, it was on the pages of the Atlantic about whether, America and whether Donald Trump is a fascist. My old friend Jon Rauch wrote a piece saying, yeah, earlier this year saying, yes. Trump is a fascist. Very debatable. I'm not sure he actually believes he's been on the show. We've had some conversations on it. The word fascism, of course, was invented by Mussolini with direct reference to Rome. Was Rome, in a sense, fascist, and is that a warning about this descent into, quote, unquote, fascism in Trump or post Trumpian America?

00:36:18 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, Mussolini, of course, took from the Romans this word, fasces, which are the bundle of sticks with an ax sticking out of it that Roman, basically, bodyguards carried alongside important Roman officials. And the fasces were a very important symbol for the United States before Mussolini took them over. They are still very prominently displayed, in fact, on either side of the dais in, Congress today. But the e pluribus unum, bundle of sticks is stronger than one, all comes from the fasces. So those were things that were principles from ancient Rome that the founders and others took on. Mussolini took that and turned it into his movement. And I think one thing that's interesting about that is that the image of ancient Rome is very important to our modern understanding of ourselves in many cases, and that was exemplified with Mussolini. Because back in nineteen— in the 1930s, the basically common view of ancient historians was that Augustus had in fact saved Rome and that he was the amazing founder of a golden age, exactly the story that Augustus told. Mussolini positioned himself as Augustus, as a new one, and was in some ways looked upon more kindly than perhaps he should have been early on because of Augustus's reputation. So when Mark Zuckerberg talks about someone like Augustus being something that he admires, in some ways, he's giving leeway for something like Augustus to get— get ahead. I don't know if Donald Trump pays any attention to the Romans, frankly, but I think it's important for all Americans to think about what they want their leaders to do. Do they want to give powers to one leader that they would not give to another? I think that is more important than figuring out, exactly what— you know, I'm not in a position to say whether Donald Trump is a fascist, honestly. But I think that if we give him powers that we would not like in the hands of someone whose policies we didn't agree with, then that is an unwise move. And I encourage Americans to think differently about what they want their president to be.

00:38:38 Andrew Keen: What do you think the Romans would think of Trump if you were a time traveler, Michelle, and you could— you could remix this new book, Lessons from a Lost Republic, and then write it for a Roman audience saying suggesting that the Romans can learn a lot from the America of the 2020s. What do you think they'd make of the current state of America?

00:39:04 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, it actually, what they would make of it depends on how it ends. The Roman emperors' reputations are almost entirely dependent on who came after them. So someone like Nero, who has the most closest physical, similarity to Trump, honestly, is sort of distinctive—

00:39:20 Andrew Keen: Did he really fiddle by the way or not?

00:39:23 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, there were—

00:39:24 Andrew Keen: Burn, burn.

00:39:25 Michelle Berenfeld: That story is exactly the kind of thing that came out because of how much he was hated after the fact. And so Nero had a relatively normal career as an emperor [unclear — likely "up to a point"], but then, of course, he, developed a terrible reputation for a number of reasons. There's the fiddle as Rome burned is, of course, the story that he stood on a balcony, playing the lyre and singing the song of the fall of Troy during one of the greatest conflagration fires of 64 AD in Rome. Later, people blamed Nero for the fire. Some people blamed Christians for the fire, but his mismanagement of that moment and his later reputation is what led him to have these famous stories and have him become such a famous bad emperor. And so for Donald Trump, it really depends on what happens next. If he's successful and he gets a successor who likes him and wants to continue, he'd burnish his image like Augustus did, like Trajan did, like some others did, then his arch and his coins and even perhaps the reflecting pool and the gilded statues could be the story of a great and successful president for the future. If someone follows him that does not burnish his reputation so well, maybe history will tell his story differently.

00:40:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I'm guessing JD Vance is much more likely to be interested in the Romans than Trump himself or Marco Rubio. So maybe there's some augury, Michelle, in what you're saying. Finally, I remember it was about probably about thirty or forty years ago [ed.: Are We Rome? was published in 2007], there was an excellent book, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by excellent journalist, Cullen Murphy. Yours is not the first or, for that matter, the last book, comparing America to Rome. Is this really useful? I mean, it obviously is because you've written this book. But at what point does this become a little repetitive that Americans keep on being reminded about Rome? Maybe it's because Americans don't— I mean, you're the professor of classics, so, maybe Americans don't know enough about Rome, so they need to be reminded. But do we keep on having to go through this?

00:41:47 Michelle Berenfeld: Well, for me, it was the fact that that book, which I also remember, was about the fall of the Roman Empire and the dissolution of that empire. And to me, I am constantly asked about the end of the Roman Empire as if that was the thing to worry about. I am not so concerned about the fall of a massive monarchy. What I am thinking about is quite different, which is the Roman Republic and the seeming inevitability of its culmination in Augustus. That history that seems to look forward to Augustus, which is not something anybody in ancient Rome would have recognized as real. And I think by looking at the Roman Republic and the moments when it could have gone a different way, the choices that people made along the way may help Americans see that their republic is also not inevitably going to collapse, but it's not inevitably going to survive in a form that they like and that we all need to take a part in actually trying to protect it.

00:42:51 Andrew Keen: There we have it. Political agency. It comes up time and time again. Michelle Berenfeld brings it up in her new book. It's very short, very readable. Lessons from a Lost Republic. I think it will resonate. Michelle, thank you so much, and I hope you really enjoy the Odyssey.

00:43:08 Michelle Berenfeld: I hope so too. Thank you so much.