Michelle Berenfeld, the John A. McCarthy Professor of Classics at Pitzer College, discusses and signs her book “Lessons from a Lost Republic: What Ancient Rome Can Teach Us about This American Moment” at 7 p.m. Thursday at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd.
The book, published Aug. 11 by Spiegel & Grau, makes the case that the collapse of the Roman Republic, rather than the empire that replaced it, is the ancient history most worth reading now.
The Republic lasted nearly five centuries. It was undone by wealth and power concentrated in the hands of elites, rampant political violence, endless expansionist wars and a Senate that normalized emergency measures, according to Spiegel & Grau.
Berenfeld first set out the comparison in “The Roman Way to Trash a Republic,” an essay published in The Atlantic on April 16, 2025. In it she wrote that in about 80 years, “the Roman Republic was transformed into a dictatorship.”
An archaeologist who has done field research in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Greece and Italy, Berenfeld has taught at Pitzer, one of the Claremont Colleges, since 2010. She held the Cullman/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome for 2017-2018, and her courses include Archaeology of the Age of Augustus.
The hardcover is $26.00, and Vroman’s has it in stock. The store, founded in 1894, says it hosts more than 400 free community events a year.
Need to know: Michelle Berenfeld discusses and signs “Lessons from a Lost Republic: What Ancient Rome Can Teach Us about This American Moment” on Thursday, Sept. 10, at 7 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. The store is open until 9 p.m. Thursday. For more, call 626-449-5320 or visit vromansbookstore.com.
