SPQR – A History of Ancient Rome Paperback – Illustrated, 11 July 2017

“History is just one damned thing after another”, goes a famous quote. And that’s what many introductory history books sound like: “First this happened, then that happened”. They might go as far as investigating causation (“this happened because that happened”) and even context (“this happened because of these circumstances”). But they don’t take the next step.I’m currently reading in parallel Michael Burleigh’s book and Richard Evans’ trilogy on the Third Reich. They’re of this type. Now, that’s no criticism. For history that recent, the facts are going to be well-established enough not to warrant discussion in the main text, at least in a book intended for general rather than specialist readership. Sources can be relegated to footnotes for those keen and knowledgeable enough to follow them up. The facts material to, say, Hitler’s assumption of the German Chancellorship in January 1933 are not in dispute, and a lay reader like me is content to assume that the historian has done their homework with the sources, and to get on with following the narrative.Ancient history is different. There are gaps. That’s also true of modern history, of course, but those in its ancient counterpart are so fundamental that a simple narrative history is actually misleading, because to say the equivalent of “Hitler assumed the Chancellorship on January 30th 1933” might very well not be true at all. How do we know he did? Because sources tell us. But what are those sources for ancient history?When we’re told that in 509 BCE Lucius Junius Brutus forced Tarquinus Superbus, the last of the Roman kings, into exile in order to establish the liberty of the Roman people, that Tarquin made an alliance with the Etruscan king Lars Porsenna and besieged Rome in order to get his throne back, that the Etruscan army was prevented from crossing a key bridge across the Tiber by Horatius Cocles defending it single-handed, or almost single-handed, that the Etruscans abandoned the siege out of admiration for Roman spunk, and that Tarquinus’ Latin allies were finally defeated at the Battle of Lake Regillus in 499 BCE, it comes as something of a shock to then read in Beard’s “SPQR” that “it is only in the first century BCE that we can start to explore Rome, close up and in vivid detail, through contemporary eyes.” The earliest author to describe these foundational events is the historian Livy, writing in the time of Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, half a millennium later. That raises the obvious question of how reliable this information about a series of events at least as significant for ancient Rome as Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship was for Weimar Germany actually is.This is the kind of question that’s at the heart of Beard’s book. On one level, it’s a history of ancient Rome from its foundation to 212 CE. As such, as pointed out by several previous reviewers (both positive and negative), it requires at least a basic knowledge of the subject. Noting these comments, I read all the Wikipedia articles on ancient Rome and its various aspects before embarking on this book. I was glad I did, although I’m not convinced I needed to. If, like one reviewer, I had complained about Beard's skimpy treatment of, say, the Punic Wars, I would have missed what her book actually is.As much as a history of Rome, it's a history of the history of Rome. It asks the raft of questions that are an essential part of what we “know” (yes, that’s “know” in quotation marks) about it. How do we know what we think we know about a particular event or set of circumstances? What are the primary sources? How long after the event were they written? Why did the authors write what they did? For whom? Should we merely take their words at face value, or read them “against the grain”? What additional information can this reading between the lines reveal? How representative of his world and his time is a single main source for a whole period, like Cicero for the late Republic and the Civil Wars? How well does one source triangulate with othera(s)? What happens if they contradict one another? And how does all this tie in with archaeology?This “history of history” is just as exciting a story as the one about “what actually happened”, and not just because the former is foundational to the latter. Even in contemporary history it enters the picture when, for example, David Irving’s misrepresentations of evidence are brought to light in his discussions of the Holocaust and the bombing of Dresden. We trust historians to do their work honestly, and nothing is as honest as actually showing the basis of your conclusions. It’s like a medieval timber-framed house in which the supporting structural members are a prominent feature of the design rather than being hidden behind an elegant facade. Beard does this par excellence in “SPQR”, elegantly combining the story with the story of the story in one engrossing narrative.One model of history is the “Great Man” (yes, almost invariably “man”, unless we’re talking about great singers) view, in which the narrative consists of the doings of individual figures who are said to exercise a decisive influence on their societies. For ancient Rome, this would be the Mariuses and Sullas, the Pompeys and Caesars. From Augustus on, the history of Rome on this reading is of course the history of the emperors.This is partly due to the simple fact that it tends to be the rich and powerful who leave the traces in the record. They build the buildings that survive, they command the armies that win (or lose) and that determine the fates of thousands and millions, it is their doings that are the subjects of sculpture and painting and monument and writing. The proles, meanwhile, pass unnoticed and unremarked unless they riot or rebel. Beard points out that the Roman Empire consisted primarily of some 50 million people, most of them peasant farmers who remain undifferentiated and anonymous because pretty much all evidence of them has vanished. Palaces can survive; peasant huts tend not to. But we do have some hope of reconstructing, to some degree, the lives, at least in the aggregate, of city dwellers, especially those million inhabitants of Rome who weren’t the few thousand elites. This is largely thanks to archaeology.That’s why, if I had to choose my favourite chapter in the whole book, it would probably be Chapter 11, in which Beard determines just how much the evidence can tell us about the plebs. The answer is: more than you might think. Most Romans lived in “insulae”, multi-story apartment blocks, which is how a million could be crammed into such a relatively small footprint. Where and how they lived, what and where they ate and what they spent their little money on can all be determined, at least sufficiently for a mildly imaginative historical novelist to reconstruct an urban Roman scene and to get inside the heads of its ordinary citizens. Three conclusions would surprise us: Rome wasn’t zoned (the poor lived cheek by jowl with the rich throughout the city), the best apartments in insulae were on the lower, not the upper floors, and poor people ate out while rich ones dined at home.Parallel to her examination of ordinary lives, Beard tries to determine what the impact on Rome was throughout the Empire. How much did Roman rule affect the inhabitants of Gaul or Egypt or Asia (i.e. modern western Turkey)? What did “being Roman” actually mean to a rural inhabitant of what is now Western Europe? How far down did "Romanisation" extend into the conquered societies?And what did it mean to Romans themselves? This is a theme to which Beard periodically returns. We all have an image of our society, certain assumptions we tacitly make about our culture. It’s part of our mental makeup, the part that relates to our corporate rather than individual identities. What were Romans’ attitudes to Rome? These are intimately entwined (and perhaps enshrined?) in their city’s history, which was actually largely mythical – certainly the more so the further back it went. What they “knew” about Romulus and Remus and Aeneas reflected their own ambivalence, which was expressed in various ways throughout the near-millennium that it took for Rome to rise from an average Latin hilltop settlement whose wars were fought against enemies ten miles distant to superpower status.Much of this evidence is, of course, skimpy in the extreme, far too much so to draw concrete conclusions. Beard again makes clear when this is so, and what such consensus or disagreement as there may be among historians and archaeologists on a given topic are. The only thing I wish she had specified is in her closing: in her discussion of the Arch of Constantine, I feel she could have made the difference between the figures on it that were recycled from earlier monuments and those freshly carved for it clear, in order to illustrate artistically her thesis about the new nature of the Empire after 212 CE.The Kindle version works as well as you could expect. There's X-ray, for what it's worth, and the index is active as well as the table of contents. A minor exception is the (very useful) timeline at the end, which comes across as some kind of PDF. The fairly small font can’t be enlarged, and its various sections are of slightly different sizes, so you have to squint a bit. But it’s worth it – as is the entire book. If you want to know what happened in ancient Rome, read an introductory work. If you want to understand ancient Rome and how we’ve come to know about it, this is the book for you.

This new book is called SPQR = "Senatus Populus Que Romanus" - the Senate and People of Rome. Its is a relatively short book which is certainly a virtue compared with some of the tomes available on Roman history. If anyone is looking for a relatively short and relatively readable overview of the rise of Rome up until around 200 AD this is a good place to start. Written by a well known Cambridge academic it's aimed at and hits the target of the general reader interested in the Classical world.Beard starts in impenetrable mythology with Romulus and Remus but once some kind of evidence, mainly archaeological emerges, moves into less speculative territory. I found the first half of the book particularly good, perhaps because I knew much less about the Republic than the Empire. It also lends itself to Mary Beards short and focused style whereas perhaps the much richer in terms of material second half of the story is more of a challenge to pack in. The end point, which is in 212 when the emperor granted Roman citizenship to all free adult males, feels somewhat arbitrary, but then the book would not have been short had the decline of Rome also been fully covered.Beard brings out some really interesting insights into the process whereby the relatively small city of Rome absorbed the surrounding city. One of the best stories concerns a man from the northern Italian region of Picenium who as a babe in arms had been paraded among the prisoners in a triumph. Fifty years later, now a Roman general he celebrated his own triumph for victory over the Parthians. This first triumph was part of a war between Rome and its erstwhile allies in what is now Italy. the other cities revolted and turned enemies: ironically they established a rival state called Italia with a capital at Italica. Through the eventual victory in around 90 BC Rome became the nearest thing to a nation state that the world had yet seen. There were then around one million Roman citizens, proudly able to declare "Civis Romanus sum" which was meant to mean that the citizen was treated with all respect and fairness throughout the Roman world. Ironically it's most well known use was in the prosecution by Cicero of the tyrannical Verrres for his treatment of an innocent Roman who had tried to use this famous phrase when under sentence of death on trumped up charges - as Beard points out it had been an unsuccessful plea!This episode illustrated one of the core problems which Beard identifies. The Roman Empire worked as long as it could keep expanding thus fuelling the drive for power wealth and booty. But the process of managing the every bigger territory stretched the republic eventually to breaking point. Who was to govern the provinces, collect the taxes, command the army? Inability to solve this led first to power being seized from the Senate by Julius Caesar and then next to Augustus and the period so ably covered by Tom Holland in his excellent recent book "Dynasty" which I have also reviewed. The two books complement each other well, Hollands is much more personal and narrower and colourful. its also more readable Beard in places is a little pedestrian. But Beard has her qualities too, notably in making the valid point that it's dangerous to focus too much on the personalities of the emperors. Yes they were often dangerously unstable, cruel, on occasion apparently insane, but their impact on everyday life in the empire was limited. She also tackles the misunderstanding that the Romans were uniquely aggressive or militaristic compared with all the other powers in the Mediterranean region. Clearly they were not and nor, with the possible exception of Caesars conquest of Gaul, did they undertake genocide. In fact the Empire grew precisely by the opposite: a process of cultural assimilation whereby all kinds of disparate people's could say "Civis Romanus Sum".Other reviews have commented that you need some background in Roman history to appreciate the book. I dont agree, its a perfectly good place for an interested reader to begin.