Not True

There is an article up on the American Conservative that contains this sentence: "The standard story that the Roman Republic ended with Caesar Augustus becoming emperor is therefore simply wrong..."

The article is a book review, and the sentence is part of a thread of an argument in the book that Byzantine theocracy was considerably like a republic; to be more specific, the third phase of the Roman Republic. 

I like Stoicism, a lot, but the Stoics did not free the slaves; Christians did. 

Likewise, some people may like Orthodox culture and the Byzantine Empire, but that does not entitle one to make false assertions about history.

In the authors' defense, I suppose we're being asked to think more abstractly and to assign less weight to concrete historical events. This view has some merit. That being said, there's more explanatory power and greater likelihood in the idea that civic culture simply carried over from age to age than to say that, based on the presence of similar values, one form of government was actually a different form of government; a dictatorship was really a republic.