Wrong! "Republican freedom" meant three dozen families ruling everyone else, 40 percent of the population in slavery (it was about 3:1 in Rome itself), and the decades conquests of neighboring groups led to the evolution of a permanent executive branch, non-Romans in the Senate (no more taxation without representation), and despite the best efforts of leaders as far back as Augustus, a serious decline in the inbred former aristocracy, with opportunity and upward mobility for citizens of the empire.
Read volume one of Livy.