Notes on SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
“I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”
Thus spoke Augustus, the first Roman emperor. But how did his Rome come to be in the first place? What did it look like? What did it mean to be Roman before, during, and after his rule? How was the Roman Empire built and maintained? And were its rulers as important as they would want us to think?
Mary Beard tries to answer these and many more questions in her book, aptly named after the Romans’ abbreviation for their state: Senatus PopulusQue Romanus (“the Senate and People of Rome”). She covers the first millennium of Roman history—from 753 BCE, when Romulus declared Rome an asylum and thereby enticed runaway slaves, convicted criminals, exiles, and refugees to become citizens of his state, to 212 CE, when Emperor Caracalla decreed that all free inhabitants of the then vast Roman Empire were Roman citizens.
The author attempts to distinguish myths from facts, but as she acknowledges, this is not always possible. Many of the surviving texts have probably been embellished or downright fabricated. Even the alleged founders of Rome—Remus and Romulus—might have never existed, and the year 753 BCE is almost certainly not the year in which Rome was founded.
Nevertheless, we can learn a lot by comparing different artifacts, written sources, construction projects, and linguistic features. Rome went from monarchy to democracy to autocracy. But none of these terms had its modern meaning back then. The kings were closer to what we would nowadays call chiefs, women and slaves could not vote during the “democratic” period, and who the emperor was had little to no influence on the daily life of most people.
SPQR offers a glimpse of what it may have been like to live in those days. Some aspects might sound shocking to modern ears. For example, there were laws on how to “properly” abandon or kill deformed babies (a practice euphemistically known as exposure).
But Rome was not all bad. Neither was it all good—it was a kaleidoscope. Rome was the first Mediterranean state to try to secure the basic food supplies of its people. The corn dole, however, did not reach everybody. Rome was home to avarice, corruption, vengefulness, exploitation, and cruelty as much as it fostered learning, personal growth, and open-mindedness. It was diverse to a point that is hard to fathom. In the second century CE, the empire had about 50 million inhabitants. Not only did they speak different tongues and have different religious and cultural backgrounds, but they also disagreed on much more mundane matters, such as how to calculate the days of the year or the hours of the day. And yet, they were governed by no more than 200 elite administrators and a few thousand of the emperor’s slaves. But how?
The process of Romanization was complex. The Roman army could not possibly be everywhere all the time, and it didn’t have to: the local elites helped. They saw becoming Roman as advantageous and did precisely that. Those who didn’t were killed or enslaved.
All in all, SPQR is for those who want to get an overview of ancient Rome. It covers both general trends and personal histories. It dazzles, and it disgusts. And it makes you want to learn more about the Romans.
