Roman reading: "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome" by Mary Beard

This was one of those slightly intimidating tomes that has been lurking on my bookshelf for a while. It is a doorstop of a book at over 600 thick - so much so that I noticed myself frequently checking I hadn't accidentally turned two - pages (530-ish without the notes, bibliography and so on), and was bought after I read a very favourable review, I think in the FT or the Economist. Whatever, for a while it daunted me, at least until the holidays came along. 

In the event, my fears were misplaced. For all the dauntingness of the subject, roughly 1000 years of ancient Roman history, Beard writes for the most part in an easy, engaging style, belying the sheer learnedness that lies behind this book. I noticed praise for her somewhere, pointing out that she has pulled off the not-obvious trick of being a media-star intellectual (I was actually unaware of this...) while retaining the credibility of a serious active academic - she is professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. 

Part of the way Beard achieves the readability of SPQR is the sceptical lucidity she brings to her depiction of ancient Rome and Roman politics. She is happy to debunk some of the accumulated myth around the subject, pointing out, for example, in respect of Caligula, that his name means "bootikins" (a childhood nickname deriving from the cute spectacle of a small child in large military boots), that his

horse never became consul, and that: “The idea of some modern scholars that his dinner parties came close to orgies, with his sisters ‘underneath’ him and his wife ‘on top,’ rests simply on a mistranslation of the words of Suetonius, who is referring to the place settings — ‘above’ and ‘below’ — at a Roman dining table.” Similarly, she points out that Cleopatra's supposed means of suicide - by poisonous snake bite - is highly improbable: "Suicide by snakebite is a hard feat to pull off, and anyway, the most reliably deadly snakes would be too hefty to conceal in even a regal fruit basket." 

Beard also shows a mostly illuminating willingness to use contemporary points of reference to explain the politics and attitudes of ancient Rome. When describing a panic, and subsequent campaign, against pirates, she fixes the political psychology neatly: “Pirates in the ancient world were both an endemic menace and a usefully unspecific figure of fear, not far different from the modern ‘terrorist’”. Similar references, occasionally accompanied with overt authorial asides, illustrate many features of Roman politics. On one occasion, discussing the dangers of undertaking conquest without a viable game plan for the governance of the conquered territory, she inserts a wry aside alluding to the much more recent invasion of Iraq. (Sorry, can't track down the quote...)


In general, however, Beard constantly warns against over-simplifying our understanding of Rome. One reason we might be tempted to do so comes from the fact that so much is familiar. Rome indeed set the pattern for much of our political and cultural thinking, but at the same time, there is much which is immeasurably distant from our world:

"In some ways to explore the ancient Rome from the 21st century is rather like walking on a tightrope, a very careful balancing act. If you look down on one side, everything looks reassuringly familiar: there are conversations going on that we almost join, about the nature of freedom or problems of sex; there are buildings and monuments we understand, with all their troublesome adolescents; and there are jokes we 'get'. On the other side, it seems like completely alien territory."

She continues:

That means not just the slavery, the filth (there was hardly any such thing as refuse collection in ancient Rome), the human slaughter in the arena and the death from illnesses whose cure we now take for granted; but also the newborn babies thrown away on rubbish heaps, the child brides and the flamboyant eunuch priests.”

Another reason for caution in our reactions to ancient Rome lies in the sources. Notwithstanding the unprecedented quantity of contemporary source material available from the mature republican era onwards, we should bear in mind firstly that it is socially quite limited in scope, reflecting the preoccupations of high status men (women and plebeians are almost absent as primary sources), and, secondly, that it is very often the victors' version of events, whereby the villainy of, say, Cateline or Nero may have been significantly exaggerated by those with an interest in besmirching their legacies. We should, Beard constantly insists, be conscious of what we cannot really know as of what we do actually know.

The starting point of Beard's history is in fact the greatest of all the sources, Cicero. Although the book looks back to the founding myth of Rome, involving Romulus and Remus, traditionally set at 753 BC, and ranges forward to 212 AD (sorry, I can't quite accustom myself to Beard's use of BCE and CE to replace the traditional forms), the date at which Caracalla grants Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire, she starts in the middle. The first chapters look at Cicero's thwarting of Cateline's revolt against the Republic, and the subsequent series of events which nonetheless brought about the transition to one-man imperial rule, judging that the dynamics of this late republican period are the most revealing as to the nature of ancient Rome in general. Indeed she is almost surprisingly dismissive (in historical terms) of the succession of emperors who followed the creation of the imperial system by Augustus (previously Octavian). Her assertion is that, while the Republic evolved constantly, though not always for the better, Imperial Rome basically followed the pattern set by Augustus for the next two hundred years. Sure, there were events and personalities, but in terms of the system and its legacy, the steam largely went out of Rome in this period.

TV star and credible scholar, Mary Beard

Looking back, to explore how an unremarkable central Italian village could have become the great world power of later years, Beard grapples with both a lack of contemporary source material and a substantial quantity of later mythologising by later writers, notably the Roman historian Livy. Nevertheless, she constructs a fascinating narrative for how Rome progressed from backwater to regional muscleman, to world domination.

This is, in many respects, the story of political events and the deeds of great men, as that is what the source material allows. However, Beard makes a great effort also to shed light on areas of Roman life less illuminated by the sources, piecing together a fascinating insight into domestic life, the lives of women, children, slaves and provincials, very few of whom has any kind of direct voice in the record. I for one, was extremely grateful for these chapters, and was even left wanting a little more.

In any case, this is a magisterial, scholarly, yet engaging and highly readable book, opening a broad vista on 1000 years of Roman history. For those, for example, who have, like me, enthused over Robert Harris' trilogy of Cicero books, it is a great investment to go to the history and place those books in the wider context, while at the same time confirming just how well Harris gets his facts right. Whatever, an unreserved recommendation.