In SPQR, Mary Beard sets herself a colossal task, starting with the foundation of Rome (dated by tradition to the 8th century BC) and concluding with the emperor Caracalla’s grant of Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire in AD212. In the course of this millennium, Rome grew from a village to dominate the largest and longest-lived empire western Eurasia has ever known. Sustaining the energy that such a topic demands for more than 600 pages, while providing a coherent answer to the question of why Rome expanded so spectacularly, is hugely ambitious. Beard succeeds triumphantly.
The phases of Roman history emerge with total clarity. It took 300 years for the village to become a substantial town of maybe 30,000 souls. At that point, in the 5th century BC, Rome was still much smaller than the great Greek cities that dominated southern Italy and Sicily. Barely 200 years later, it had beaten all its immediate neighbours to rule the Italian peninsula, and within 150 more its dominion had spread right across the Mediterranean and north into western Europe, too. By the mid-1st century BC, its borders were more or less where they would stand until the era of imperial collapse.
It is a well-known story, but Beard tells it with originality. Brilliantly, she starts with Cicero and the world of achieved empire in the mid-1st century BC. All the surviving Roman accounts of the deeper past date from this period, and use its supposed ancient history to explain important things about contemporary Rome. As the early chapters make clear, the origin of key institutions such as the Senate and the consulship, and much of Rome’s cultural superstructure, were radically misdated by Cicero and his fellow citizens, pushed way too far back in time. These 1st-century BC narratives also peopled this past with consuls and legions, when it was really warlords and warbands. Later chapters do an equally good job on the better documented periods of empire-building. Here, Beard’s retelling becomes less radical, but there’s much to admire in the historical and literary craft.
SPQR is consistently enlivened by Beard’s eye for detail and her excellent sense of humour. On a more elevated note, Cicero’s writings are exploited not only to revisit the death throes of the Republic, but also to show how the nature of provincial administration changed in the 150 years after his death. This evolving political narrative is carefully balanced by a series of chapters exploring different aspects of life in the city and the provinces.
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These are full of insight and delight. Roman women enjoyed good property rights, Beard points out, but were pretty much powerless when choosing husbands. The poor lived in penthouses, she slyly remarks, not for pleasure but because these were the most dangerous living quarters where there was little chance of escaping a fire. The poor also ate out more than the rich, who dined at home because they could afford kitchens. These thematic chapters offer far more than light relief. The final one, for instance, tackles the key theme of Romanisation: the evolution of empire-wide cultural patterns in the early centuries AD, without which Caracalla’s grant of citizenship is inexplicable.
As an academic, Beard is, I think, a child of the cultural turn in historiography, and this is apparent in her book. SPQR is more interested in working through later representations of the deep past for what they tell us about 1st-century Rome, than in bending every sinew in search of the archaic. She is also less interested in military and political narrative than some might prefer. It is exciting to find Carthage and Corinth being sacked in the same year (146BC), but I missed the same kind of backstory to the second calamity that she provided for the first. There is also no follow-up to her excellent discussion of the Twelve Tables, the 5th-century foundation stones of Roman law. Evolving Roman jurisprudence represents one of the most significant elements in the empire’s heritage.
The real strength of the book, however, is how immediate Beard makes Roman history feel. Two overarching themes emerge: inclusion versus exclusion, and the impact of new wealth on existing political structures. Roman stories about its origins often claimed that the city’s first settlers were vagabonds, outlaws and former slaves. This might be a 1st-century take, but a willingness to enfranchise a broader population (though never everyone) was central to Roman success. Greek cities hoarded citizenship to provide privileged lifestyles for a relative few. Beard attributes the capacity of early Rome to overcome its richer Greek neighbours to a greater willingness to share the benefits of belonging. The same reflex also saved it later (in the 1st century BC, when massed citizenship grants defused a revolt against Roman hegemony within Italy) and eventually underpinned Caracalla’s universal citizenship decree.
Correspondingly, it was the unequally distributed profits of empire that funded a series of would-be autocrats, who overwhelmed the Republic in a tide of civil war. In her epilogue, Beard comments that she now finds no answers to modern problems in Roman history. But in a Europe struggling to maintain order in the face of groups from its former empires seeking a decent standard of living, and also of international oligarchs and corporations increasingly able to bypass existing authority structures, these themes look extremely familiar. It is also food for thought that Rome’s greatest days came when it was most inclusive.
Peter Heather is the author of The Fall of the Roman Empire.
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