Hi! Similar questions to yours have been asked here before, and I have to say, the overall tenor of the answers by those with the relevant expertise is that Duncan is at least highly misleading. People in general like to look to the past to inform their understanding of the present, but what this often results in is a very skewed understanding of the past. People will try to make their views of the past fit in with modern conceptions of politics, etc.

I'll quote here from an email I sent recently to some podcasters who took Duncan a little too seriously:

Mike Duncan is a great story-teller, but he isn't a historian, which shows. I'll caveat that statement saying that I do really enjoy his shows, especially bringing my attention to events I hadn't previously thought much of, like the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s.

Probably the most concerning aspect for me about TSBTS is that there is such a stark divide in who reads it. The book is very popular among moderately left leaning, for lack of a better term, "history fans" and has been almost entirely ignored by anyone in the academy. The history podcasting ecosystem is one that I think is prone to quite a bit of siloing. It's full of intellectually curious people who seem to mostly trust the judgement of other podcasters as the expert on their topic. That's fine, but I think people who keep being told that they're the experts in their field have to work very hard to not let that get to their heads and to instead be willing to hear constructive criticism. This is where the issue of the openness of the Internet rears its head. Paradoxically, since the Internet allows people to criticize so easily and without in-person social feedback, a discussion can quickly devolve to personal insults. So people are more willing to write off any criticism as a personal attack that can be safely ignored. On the other hand, an academic seminar explicitly calls for the challenging of beliefs and requires the speaker to defend their thesis from all criticisms (assuming the criticism was in good faith, but that's a matter of internal departmental politics).

It's usually a red flag when you can't find some academic to have evidence supporting your position. In fact, I could find absolutely no review of the book by someone with a background in Roman history. The closest thing I've been able to find is a post about corporations in Rome from r/AskHistorians. Here, u/XenephonTheAthenian demonstrates Duncan's complete lack of understanding of the topic, which doesn't bode well for his understanding on his larger point. If his details are incorrect, why should his conclusions have any more weight? I've noticed similar tendencies to be a little short on evidence in other popular books that try to explain major historical events. If you're familiar with Colin Woodward's American Nations, you can see the same pattern. In the book, Woodward tries to explain all of US history through the lens of cultural settlement patterns dating to the colonial period. Like Duncan, he seems to have reached a conclusion and then went looking for evidence to support it, and then stopped looking when he found something matching his thesis, never engaging with any counterarguments. I'm not going to get into a full discussion of American Nations here, but if you're interested, I can direct you to a review of the book I've previously written.

Secondly, there is an element to the cipher of Ancient Rome. Since Rome is the archetypal Western state, every state in the past 1500 years has self-consciously modeled itself after Rome. The American Founding Fathers made this explicit in their writings, choosing a republican form of government under the influence of writers like Plato and Polybius. Similarly, the fall of Rome has been an extremely contentious topic. Arguments have been made for everything under the sun being responsible for the fall, including currency devaluation, immigration, and environmental degradation. Basically, anyone can point to Rome as a reason to address their particular bugbear. Of course, real life is far more complicated than the simplistic narratives we like to point to. It's worth noting this as pointing to the breakdown of norms as the cause of the death of the system strays awfully close to the flaws of similar arguments. This means that the claim requires some pretty serious evidence to get past that hurdle.

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Hey Mods, I'm not actually sure if this answer comports to the rules, so if it doesn't I'd really appreciate it if someone could let me know how it doesn't so I can fix it. Thanks!

I agree with what /u/riftsweeper1 has said, and he's (she's?) linked to an older discussion of Duncan's book (must I call it that?) that I did. Particularly important I think is his point about the distinction between internet history and academic history, not only in content but especially in methods and goals. Popular history is potentially a great thing, but popular history as it is most commonly done is fundamentally established on a misunderstanding of what history is and what historians do, to the point often of being not only anti-intellectual but aggressively so. I've written about the methods of popular history and its goals and foundations before. Both those posts are strictly speaking on podcasters and "edutainers," specifically Dan Carlin, but since Mike Duncan not only got his start as an alternative to Carlin but still uses the same methodology they hold just as well here, if not better, since Duncan has taken the step that Carlin declined of presenting himself through the publication of a book as an entry into what you might call the legitimate circle of historians (whatever the hell that would mean). I think all of this is the really important thing that has to be done and that /u/riftsweeper1 has already started, namely evaluating what the hell it is that people like Duncan do and how that fits in with popular history and academic history at large.

With that, the most important part, out of the way I think it's worth making a few remarks on Duncan's book. Well, really just one: it's crap. I don't like to dismiss books as worthless in their entirety, but I really can't find very much good to say about this book. It's not just that its title is the single dumbest phrase since 1971 when Neil Diamond wondered why a chair wasn't listening to him (or for that matter literally any lyric that Yeezy has ever delivered), it's that the book is sloppily done, overtly not about what it claims to be about, utterly unaware of any research on the subject, and simply not a work of history. The first two points can be found in the answer that /u/riftsweeper1 linked, and the second of the two links I provided above should help provide more context on the sort of project that Duncan is doing here. Every written work is influenced by the author's social and political context, over and out. But there's the use of modern exempla done with an academic rigor--for example, Morstein-Marx has pointed out that only 3% of US bills are ever vetoed, a figure which affects how we understand the legislative assembly at Rome--and there's facile equivalence. The latter is what you'll find in Duncan. I discuss the third point in the first of the two links above, as well as addressing the potential counterargument that Duncan is not an academic historian and should not be held to the same standard. Fine, but first of all why are we holding him to the same standard then? And second of all, that's really not an excuse. The best stuff in Roman history can all be found at exactly the same place that he's getting his material from, and when you're writing a book there's really no excuse. A book is a major undertaking. You don't half-ass it.

But I want to focus on that last point, just for a moment. /u/riftsweeper1's link provides a case study of a particular point that Duncan makes and mangles. You could open to just about any random page of the book and I'd lay down good money that I could find similar things to say. The obvious objection here is to cry pedantry and academic elitism, both points that I addressed in the links I gave above. That's not what's going on here at all. The examples are not the point, it's what it leads to. And what that is is that Duncan just doesn't understand what he's doing. He's just rolling up ancient sources (chosen, as far as I can see, at random) without doing source criticism or analysis, tossing in a few tidbits from very very old treatments without any idea of the historiography, and drawing facile equivalences without any attempt at systematic scrutiny or method, most of which end up going nowhere in particular. This is without even going into how the dude starts out with a thesis and selects--or, just as frequently, invents--evidence to support it. /u/riftsweeper1 has rather elegantly described how the academic method of history is fundamentally predicated on the questioning of arguments and narratives, something that is not done in the popular history of Duncans, Carlins, and Hollands. That is to say, the journalistic style of popular history, which is unquestionably the most popular.

You can see me discuss some of this in my links, but the short version is that this sort of history is based on a misunderstanding--or less charitably a distortion--of what history is and how historians do it. It is based on our conviction as a society that history is for some reason something that can be done by amateurs, because everyone in a modern nation-state has been given a grounding in history in a way that not everyone can be said to have a grounding in a foreign literature or calculus. It's a fundamentally anti-intellectual position and one that's as ingrained in our society as the Athenians' obsession with governance by amateurs (an element of which is absorbed into most western societies). The foreign literature point is important because history, especially ancient history, is a study of a foreign literature, and the business of the historian is not to "tell it like it is" the way a journalist or journalistic pop history writer might, but to undermine assumptions and question and reevaluate interpretations.

And to anyone that says that the book is worth reading because it's a readable way to get the narrative, get the hell outta here with that. It's not. Duncan's narrative is massively distorted not only from the consensus but it's also just not even a good reading of the ancient texts. It's just so sloppily done, as the link by riftsweeper1 I think ought to show in one specific example, that it's simply more useful to go to read the ancient texts themselves, which are all online and free (the major ones at least). That is, after all, about as much research as Duncan did.