@blatham,
I'm glad to hear you enjoy it. Machiavelli wrote in the late 15th & early 16th centuries, at the dawn of the Modern era, and (except for China) before the rise of the nation states that make up the modern world. I suspect his fascination with the perfection of Rome (or at least its utility as a model for the study of republics) reflected that moment and place in history. As an Italian, or more properly as Tuscan, he lived in a place that owing, in part, to its advanced (compared to the rest of Europe) development, regional factionalism, and local political competition with the Roman Church, was itself unable to come up with any stable political entities beyond local principalities, and I believe that too contributed to his fascination with Rome. He was also reputed to have no knowledge of Greek. which may have added to it all.
At his time and place Catholicism was considered to be the culmination of Greek and Roman civilization, though its inability to hold empire together may also have fascinated him.
I believe Machiavelli's great achievement is on the dynamic nature of human political affairs. We are all far too accustomed in our era to dealing with static models of liberal capitalism, Socialism, Social Democracies, Totalitarian States, Democracies, forgetting, as we usually do, that they come in various shades and combinations, and that none of them have yet shown an ability to last unchanged for very long. Instead he foucuses on the dynamic "tumult" in the human affiairs of republics and the characteristics needed for endurance over time. He focuses on the swings and excesses between the enduring but competing groups making up any republic, and the features that enable this "tumult" to be resolved without collapsing the whole. It's a markedly different point of view compared to the rather linear comparisons of the static models of democracies, authoritarian or totalitarian states with capitalist or socialist economies to which we are all far too accustomed. Indeed it is a very refreshing examination of the underlying complexity of real life in which (as modern mathematics has revealed) the future states of non linear dynamic systems are largely, not just unknown, but unknowable ... and, as we know,anything involving humans is highly non-linear.
