SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Mary Beard writes in a breezy, often anecdotal, style which makes her book both informative and entertaining. SPQR covers the history of ancient Rome from its founding by Romulus to the reign of Emperor Caracalla, who, in the year 202 A.D. granted Roman citizenship to the entire free male population of the empire. This is a very ambitious work and is well worth reading. Beard not only delves into the history of ancient Rome, but also has a lot to say about its sociology. She concerns herself not only with the famous personages but also with the lower classes and their lives, with long glimpses of what went on in the bars and eateries where the ordinary people hung out. In one such establishment in Pompeii, there was a frieze picturing seven notable Greek philosophers, but rather than discussing deep philosophical topics, they are depicted as giving scatological advice. She also writes extensively on the conditions of women, slaves and freed slaves.Beard at times seems to have a cynical attitude toward the Romans; at least, toward the movers and shakers. For example, she says about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey: “The irony was that Pompey, their figurehead, was no less an autocrat than Caesar. Whichever side won, as Cicero again observed, the result was to be much the same: slavery for Rome. What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one man rule was really a war to choose between rival emperors.” Personally, I have a bit of difficulty swallowing this, because Pompey, as egotistical as he was, had ample opportunities to march on Rome and take over as dictator in the manner of Sulla and Caesar, but he never did. And if Cato the Younger, arguably the most obstinately principled notable in history, believed that Pompey had the same ambitions as Caesar to become an autocrat, we would have declared “plague on both your houses” and stayed home rather than followed Pompey into exile.Beard relies on the writings of Cicero for much of her analysis, and she gives him extensive coverage in SPQR. This is understandable since more of Cicero’s writings have survived than any other writer of his time.Beard has no liking for Augustus, and at one point refers to him as a “reptile.” She does make it very clear that he was a man of remarkable gifts, able to walk that tightrope of Roman power and gaining support of the Roman elite where his Great Uncle Julius Caesar failed to do so. It probably helped that the proscriptions of the second triumvirate killed off most of the opposition. Under Augustus’ rule the Senate ceased to be a governing body and turned into a sort of civil service. Any opposition that wasn’t killed off was bought off. She describes Augustus as “a poacher turned game keeper.”Beard also makes the point that during the next two hundred years after the end of the Republic it didn’t really matter who the emperor was or whether he was “good” or “bad.” I need to take some issue with that notion as well. If an emperor was particularly rapacious, as in the case of Nero, it could cause considerable unrest in the provinces. It was Nero’s instructions to confiscate the lands and possessions of Prasutagus, the husband of Boudicca, upon his death, that led to Boudicca’s rebellion which destroyed three Roman cities and killed an estimated 70 to 80 thousand Romans and Britons. One wonders if the same thing would have happened under a less rapacious Emperor. One suspects that Nero’s rapaciousness was also one of the causes of the full scale revolt that took place in Judea toward the end of his reign. None of the 14 emperors during this period were really “good” by modern standards, but some were more rapacious than others, and the quality of the emperor did have an effect on the running of the empire.SPQR is a meaty work with a lot of events, analysis and ideas to digest. It gives the reader a vivid insight into the various lives of the Romans, from emperor to slave.

Mary Beard is perhaps the best known and most popular historian of Ancient Rome. After reading SPQR, I can understand why. Although, not without flaws, SPQR presents a concise and very readable history of Ancient Rome from its beginnings (legendary and otherwise) to the year 212. SQPR advances more or less in historical order. For each broad period, it discusses culture, society, and history before it jumps to another period. While some have called the book “revisionist,” to my mind it does an excellent job of presenting different hypotheses—some traditional and some new. While this is not a page turner in the classic sense of the term, it is well-written and easy to read.Beard covers the major battles and political events, however much of the book focuses on what we know and do not know about Rome’s people, its subjects, its society, and its culture. She does an impressive job bringing together archeological evidence, documents, and common sense to reconstruct Ancient Rome. Her aim, as she explains, is to show a full portrait of ancient Rome, based on what we know and on our current thinking. In other words, the history of “the Senate and People of Rome” the English rendering of the SPQR.Before 390 BCE or so, we only have Rome’s founding myths and legends. Beard looks at these stories and at many different elements of archeological evidence. This allows her to put together a number of different possibly histories of the early history. Did Romulus found Rome after being raised by a she-wolf and killing his twin brother? No. But many of the origin stories and legends may have some basis in fact.As the book moves forward, it focuses more and more on what we know from the documentary evidence and tries to answer questions about the period. For example, how revolutionary or populist were Julius Caesar or rabble rousers like Clodius? How dedicated was Brutus and friends to the cause of liberty? How did Romans transfer large sums of money? Or how many people really knew how to read and write (20%?).Beard offers a great deal of insight about the Roman republic, both as it rises to power and is it falls into civil war and political chaos. I found her discussion of the rise of warlords (Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, etc.) quite engaging. As Rome became richer and more powerful, it was transformed from an oligarchic republic to a failed state. More money, greater inequality, and less stability.To my mind, the books starts to lose its steam after the reign of Augustus Caesar (31 BC to 14 AD). Augustus (who was still called Octavian), through cunning and military force, is able to stabilize the republic and create a monarchy that restores the peace. Beard explains in detail how Augustus sets up his republican monarchy, along with its compromises and accommodations.However Beard provides little discussion of what happens next. While she does outline the reigns of the twelve legitimate emperors from Tiberius to Caracalla (there were two short civil wars during this period), it is done in short form. Possibly Nero and Domitian were not as bloody as history tells us; perhaps Caligula was not as mad as much as maddening (to the Roman elite). There is a good discussion of the expansion of Christianity in its first two centuries. Beard also discusses the expansion of “Romanization” as the empire expands.The narrative ends in 212, the year that Caracalla grants citizenship to the entire free population. This was on the cusp of the so-called “Crisis of the Third Century.” As Beard herself points out, it is not clear why citizenship was extended or what this meant in practice. I think that this date was chosen because the empire that emerged after sixty years of revolts and civil wars was a very different sort of place with very different rules. It is not an entirely satisfactory answer but at some point the book does have to end.Looking back two thousand years, it is quite common to ask what we can learn from Rome or if we (our civilization) is falling like the Roman Empire fell. Mary Beard argues that there is little that we can directly learn from Rome. From this book, I learned that a lot of modern institutions that we take for granted—ranging from targeted social safety nets to a proto-nation state to the republican government that is really an authoritarian dictatorship—have their origins in Ancient Rome. Certainly, we are not destined to repeat anything but there is much that we can learn.