THE JOURNAL OF 592  Book Reviews e Storm before the Storm: e Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic. By Mike Duncan. New York: Public Affairs, 2017. ISBN 978-1-61039-721-6. Time- line. Maps. Notes. e ancient sources. Select modern sources. Index. Pp. xxi, 327. $27.00. Award-winning podcaster Mike Duncan has produced a print version of his take on the fall of the Roman Republic from his Internet series, e History of Rome. His writing style is lively and his enthusiasm is obvious, but any resem- blance to real scholarship in Roman history is accidental. e thesis is banal: that the Roman republican system was unable to cope with the vast empire it ruled and the ruling class, straying from their traditional republican austerity and lacking a foreign enemy to unite against, turned on itself in civil war. Ancient historians used to wonder at the republic’s spectacular collapse, but these days more time has been spent explaining how the system lasted as long as it did, given its many con- tradictions and the tensions intrinsic to all oligarchic systems. In an area fraught with disagreement and a changing culture of opinions, the author produces a work where facts are all cut-and-dried; hyperbole like “Caesar destroyed the Republic by the sheer force of his ambition” abounds. Not only does this book not fill “a hole in our knowledge of Roman history,” but the work is problematic methodologically. Where the author lists “ancient sources” in the back, there is simply a list of abbreviations and titles with no indica- tion of edition or translator. While relying entirely on translations that he quotes verbatim, he gives no credit to those whose scholarship produced them. is would be considered plagiarism in any decent undergraduate class. His modern works are select indeed and, like the author, monolingual. e author writes: “No period in history has been more thoroughly studied than the fall of the Roman Republic” (p. xix), and yet the fruits of those studies are never sampled. A single reference to Harriet Flower’s Roman Republics would have given him a more nuanced view of what the republic really was and how it changed. Sim- ilarly, reference to Henrik Mouritsen’s Politics in the Roman Republic would have supplied the scholarship of the last half-century by experts like Tonio Hölscher, Robert Morstein-Marx, Christian Meyer, Francisco Pina Polo, Andrew Wallace- Hadrill, Matthias Gelzer, Martin Jehne, Christian Meyer, and so many more. e “also forgot to read” list would be longer than his bibliography. e conclusion included with the promotional material is that this book will “serve as a stark warning for modern readers about what happens to a civilization driven by increasing economic inequality, political polarization, and ruthless ambi- tion.” e problem with this theory is that it appears nowhere in the book. e text is a straightforward retelling of republican history with no modern parallels. e very premise of the book is wrong-headed. e fall of the republic actually had relatively limited impact and scope. It did not mark the “collapse” of Roman society or civilization, and the Roman state did not “distintegrate,” but continued to thrive for centuries. Neither did the fall affect Rome’s overseas empire, which survived intact and was even expanded despite the upheaval. Provinces did not