Authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe, including in the United States. In April 2025, NPR reported that in a survey of over 500 political scientists, the majority believed that the United States was moving from a liberal democracy toward authoritarianism. And that was before June, when regular Americans took to the streets in record numbers to oppose it. Over 5 million turned out to support the “No Kings” marches across the country on June 14 to protest Trump’s policies and a “military parade” on his birthday, budgeted at $45 million. But where can we turn to for resistance strategies? Might the historical rise of authoritarianism in the ancient world help us understand its rapid expansion today? A freely downloadable book by top ancient historians across the globe, How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond (De Gruyter, 2025), argues that it can.
In the new anthology, edited by Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty, and Christopher J. Dart, the authors collectively claim that readers can use Ancient Roman history to make sense of the rapid descent into fascism in the United States. A key reason for choosing Rome as a parallel to America is the extraordinary nature of the moment we are living in.
“Before now, no long-established democracy has fallen to internal causes except Rome,” the editors told Hyperallergic in a statement. “Several of the old, consolidated democracies around the world are in trouble, and political science has only recently started to confront that as a problem; they are used to thinking of consolidated democracies as pretty safe.”
The book treats the late Roman Republic as a dataset. Although the editors noted that Rome did not have the same scope in terms of policing, healthcare, or inflation controls, they explained that democratic decay or creeping authoritarianism is primarily about “interactions of political institutions, about the relative power of the different parts of the state.” While comparisons between Rome and America are nothing new, How Republics Die analyzes these empires’ parallel lives to underscore the consistent methods used by autocrats to shift societies away from dissent, democracy, or independent thinking, toward a triumphalist narrative of the past that culminates in their own ascent.
Although the United States became a “mixed government” predicated on republican and democratic models of governance, Rome adopted a republican model in 509 BCE. This came in the wake of the overthrow of the city’s last king. Four centuries after Rome’s Republic began, the underpinnings of the state and the explicit policies that limited the power of ambitious politicians began to erode rapidly. The book looks particularly at this period from the end of the Roman Republic to the rise of the Augustan New Order (133 BCE to 14 CE) — a time when Rome began to transition from an electoral republic to a military monarchy. Vervaet, Rafferty, and Dart told Hyperallergic that the decades marking Rome’s shift from a republic into an autocracy were heavily influenced by the arts. They also suggest how we might cross-compare Ancient Rome and America with other moments of rising authoritarianism around the world, such as in India and Belarus.
What is the value of history and art history as disciplines in this conversation? Over the last 100 years, dictators and oligarchs have often recycled the aesthetics of power from the art and archaeology of Ancient Rome. Benito Mussolini seized upon the art, archaeology, and recognizable semiotics of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, as well as the fasces and the SPQR symbol, in order to visually legitimize his own fascist rule from 1922 to 1945. Trump has similarly praised Fascist Italy and Ancient Rome for their contributions “to civilization and human progress,” and in January resuscitated an executive order encouraging the use of Ancient Greek and Roman architecture to promote “beautiful federal civic architecture.” Neoclassicism is back in, and the revival is being used to once again signal the supremacy of Western ideals.
Art historians are thus essential to understanding how autocratic rulers depend upon and seek to control cultural institutions, monuments, heritage, and art. They translate symbols of power while also showing how art can be wielded as an instrument of propaganda or an agent of historical continuity.
“Trump is extremely attuned to the importance of the arts and visual culture as instruments for public relations and vehicles for opinion making,” said Vervaet, Rafferty, and Dart. “In all these respects, Trump and his hardcore MAGA support base are evidently taking a leaf out of the book of the likes of Pompeius [Pompey the Great], [Julius] Caesar, and especially Augustus. Just as Trump likes to run the show from his residence-cum-golf-course, Mar-a-Lago, Pompeius the self-styled ‘Great’ built a magnificent theater in the sociopolitical heart of Rome in the 50s BCE.”
Like Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center board and its choice of honorees, Pompey’s construction of an opulent, permanent theater in the center of Rome was less about public appreciation for the arts and more about telegraphing his own magnificence while attempting to craft his legacy.
Pompey’s actions established one of the first documented instances of what the authors identify as “competitive authoritarianism,” a concept developed by political scientists Daniel Levitsky and Lucan Way in 2010. Within Pompey’s theater complex was the temple of Venus Victrix, a public garden, and a new Senate House (the so-called Curia of Pompeius), “where the assembly could meet under the gaze of a towering statue of the great man himself,” the editors said. And his efforts did not go unnoticed. Pompey’s use of architecture and the arts was mimicked by another member of the First Triumvirate, Julius Caesar, who provided further lessons on the optics of authoritarianism.
Before being killed outside Pompey’s Senate House in 44 BCE, Caesar would further transgress republican tradition by becoming Dictator Perpetuo (“Dictator for Life”). Caesar knew that titles were important, but so were the minted coins exchanged by millions of Romans each day. “[Caesar] became the first living Roman to have his portrait appear on Roman coins, on the model of the absolutist Hellenistic Kings of the Eastern Mediterranean,” the editors noted.
From coins to calendars to buildings, Julius Caesar revamped everyday objects, spaces, and time to reflect his own power. Money, and who appears on it, still talks. In March of 2025, Texas Republican Congressman Brandon Gill introduced legislation in the House of Representatives called the “Golden Age Act of 2025,” seeking to put Donald Trump’s face on the $100 bill. “Supported by Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, the bill faces legal hurdles as US law prohibits living individuals from featuring on currency notes,” the editors added.
Perhaps the most salient parallels between the authoritarian control of the arts in the past and the present concern Trump’s firing of the National Portrait Gallery director, the new White House probe into the Smithsonian Institution, or his interference in the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts, public broadcasting, or the Library of Congress. In similar ways, Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian Augustus, “masterminded a comprehensive program to restore and aggrandize the traditional public institutions (res publica) and mores of the Roman people and the monumental and literary dignity of their shaken city,” said the editors. “Augustus restored 82 temples and built the Diribitorium, a new voting venue for the Roman people, the largest building under a single roof in Augustan Rome and echoed by Hitler’s planned Volkshalle and Stalin’s planned Palace of the Soviets.”
“He also engaged writers of epic and poetry (Vergil and Horace) and took control of the available means of mass communication and propaganda, controlling the imagery and political messaging on Roman coinage and commissioning striking works of public utility and visual arts,” they added. Augustus cast himself as bringing about a “golden age” of reviving traditional Roman culture, all while increasing the power of the executive.
Beyond the myriad parallels and historical comparanda, How Republics Die also offers ways of recovering hope by looking at the Roman Republic’s tragedy. The book reconstructs the many choices that historical figures made alongside the ones that they could have chosen. It uses these historical possibilities to dismantle the fatalist views of the past that have long served autocrats. In one chapter, scholar Cristina Rosillo López reminds us that “nothing is inevitable,” be it the fall of the Roman Republic, the French Revolution in 1789, or the rising tide of fascism in the 1930s under Hitler and Mussolini. Apathy will always be to the advantage of the autocrat.
The same goes for Trump today. Part of understanding our collective power is recognizing that when our histories are recast as inevitabilities, authoritarians can seize upon the idea of their predestined rule, with fatal consequences. As Vervaet, Rafferty, and Dart explain, studies of authoritarianism in the Roman Republic “help us see where we are now on different political trajectories, and where those trajectories are likely to go — unless we take action.”
