Book Review: SPQR, A History of Ancient Rome

By Mary Beard

More than 1500 years have passed since Alaric and his horde of rampaging Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 CE, yet the Roman Empire lives on in the public conscience. So much of our language and our culture stems from the ancient Romans, and everyone ranging from artists to Fortune 500 CEOs are influenced by their words and deeds. From the popular French cartoon Asterix to the ubiquitous “Even you, my Brutus”, that someone might say when he or she is betrayed by a close friend and about to be stabbed in the back, ancient Rome lives on in our modern era. SPQR is an ambitious work that attempts to get to the bottom of what it was that made Rome so special, how it came to pass that the republic was replaced by a dictatorship and how the Romans thought of themselves and their empire.

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, who has spent more than five decades researching ancient Rome with great fascination. Her passion and great interest in the subject is clear from the very first page and the book is a splendid love letter to her field of academic excellence. Beard is a thoroughly modern historian. What I mean by that might not be obvious, so allow me to explain. Since I am utterly devoted to my readers, I have spent some time leafing through a couple of musty old history books about Rome written during the middle of the last century. Generally, historians of yore were rather boring, with the possible exception of Edward Gibbon. They treated history very seriously indeed, and never thought to sprinkle their pages with a bit of dry humor. What´s more, they made sweeping and more or less untrue declarations that ran something like “Compared to Greek, the Roman language is straightforward and simple, reflecting the Latin people´s hard work ethic, discipline and stoic demeanor.” I improvised that last sentence myself, but it´s what an old-timey historian would have said with a straight face. Beard writes about such well known characters as Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero, but she also writes about the common men and women who lived their lives cheek by jowl in Cicero´s ramshackle housing. One of the old tomes called Cicero “the greatest orator of ancient Rome”, which he certainly was. But he was also a rapacious slumlord who built such shoddy tenement flats that they frequently collapsed and killed scores of hapless tenants. Beard will also remark on the hilarity of a half-mad Commodus clutching a severed ostrich head while berating his long suffering colleagues in the senate.

The origins of Rome are shrouded in mystery, but Beard reasonably points out that Aeneas fleeing the sack of Troy to seduce a Carthaginian queen and then proceeding to be the bottom most root of Romulus and Remus´s family tree might not be entirely true. What we do know, however, is that Rome started out as a fairly unremarkable city state in central Italy. Rome waged several wars against neighboring states, and eventually went on to be the master of the Italian peninsula. Beard points to Rome´s political system, where conquered cities and peoples were allowed to keep their local deities and go on with their lives as long as they payed taxes to Rome and supported her when she needed able bodied men to wage war. It is impossible for us to know exactly how Roman these people felt, but the Social War of BCE 90-88, when numerous Italian cities, including Pompeii, rose in revolt against Roman rule, shows us that people did not become Roman simply because they lived on the red bits on the map.

Contrary to what many may think, there probably wasn´t any manifest Roman destiny from the beginning, nor was Rome always the bloodthirsty aggressor attacking peaceful neighbors in opportunistic land grabs. Sometimes neighboring states asked for Roman assistance when confronted with dangerous rivals, sometimes Rome was threatened by bloodthirsty enemies at the gate, and sometimes, obviously, an insecure emperor needed to add a bit of martial glory to his name and went off to conquer and plunder. Before they knew it, the Romans had themselves an empire, and empires, as the late Gore Vidal warned, are dangerous things, and very hard to get rid of.   

Roman institutions during the late republic never adapted to these vastly changed circumstances. The soldiers of the legions were loyal to their commanders first and foremost, since they were the ones who fixed them up with a plot of land upon their retirement. A couple of senile old men in the senate telling their beloved commander to stand down and hand over his commission was hardly something they cared about. First Sulla, and then Caesar, defied the senate and marched their soldiers into the city. The century before the birth of Christ saw violent civil wars that nearly tore the Roman world asunder, until Caesar´s adopted son, Octavian, emerged as the ultimate winner and came to rule over a vast empire as the first among equals. Octavian assumed the mantle of Augustus, this came as a surprise since no one really knew what the word meant, and the template that he laid down for autocratic governance lasted the following two centuries.

There were a couple of bumps in the road during these heady days of the Pax Romana, such as the occasional mad emperor clutching severed ostrich heads and the infamous year of the four emperors in CE 69, but the Roman Empire effectively became a hereditary monarchy. The most dangerous part of this process, Beard argues, was when the old Caesar lay on his deathbed. As long as there was someone nearby who was not mad and either related to or adopted by the incumbent emperor, everything was good and well. However, barbarian incursions, inequality, infighting among the roman elites and ambitious commanders with a couple of loyal legions at their back and a lot of charisma eventually took their toll. There is no single explanation for the downfall of the Roman Empire, the subject would require a book in itself, and Beard even goes so far as to suggest that the Empire may not even have declined, it just morphed into something else. SPQR covers so many interesting topics that I am quite unable to dive into every one of them, but it would suffice to say that Beard has hardly been dragging her feet.   

I would heartily recommend SPQR to anyone who is interested in ancient history and probably also to those who aren´t but are feeling adventurous. The book may be several hundred pages thick, but as someone who wasn´t Roman once said “a good book always ends too soon”. Beard sheds new light on fascinating topics that scholars have long discussed, and does this with plenty of humor, passion and accessibility.