Books: SPQR - A History Of Ancient Rome By Mary Beard

 

(Drivebycuriosity) -  I am fascinated by Rome. I am impressed that an ancient village transformed into a megalopolis that accumulated & fed about one million residents at her peak and ruled almost the whole known world for centuries. Therefore I enjoy reading books about Rome`s history. I just finished "SPQR A History of ancient Rome" by Mary Beard (amazon). SPOR means"The Senate and People of Rome" (Senatus PopulusQue Romanus). The author describes the rise of Rome and the peak of the Roman empire.

SPOR is one of the best nonfiction books I ever read. The books shows that the author has invested her whole career as academic historian and dedicated about five decades into the research of Rome, not only by reading countless academic studies & original documents, including a mountain of  letters and other coeval reports, she also participated in excavating original Roman material. The book (about 600 pages) condensates an immense material in a very readable form. I enjoyed her clear style and her analytical remarks. Beard evaluates the ancient reports with a lot of skepticism, because the authors often reported just from hearsay, often centuries after the events, and spiced their texts with their own opinion and their approval or disapproval of the described persons & events.

Rome´s history is still work in progress. There are still new recoveries - "in the ground, underwater, even lost in libraries". Archaelogical scientists are still "carefully examining samples drilled from the ice cap of Greenland to find the traces, even there, of the pollution produced by Roman industry". And: "Roman history is always being rewritten, and always has been, in some ways we know more about ancient Rome than the Romans themselves did". Beard sees her book as her contribution to that bigger project.

The book is "about how Rome grew and sustained its position for so long, not about how it declined and fell, if indeed it ever did in the sense that Gibbon imagined". So Beard´s book ends "with a culminating moment in 212 CE,when the emperor Caracalla took the step of making every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered and completing a process of expanding the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship that had started almost a thousand years earlier."

Ancient Rome`s experienced three phases: In the begin the city was ruled by kings, then she changed into a republic governed by senators. After Cesar`s assassination Rome was ruled by emperors, called Cesars. Almost nothing is known about the first phase - including the foundation. There are no written documents,  just rumors and legends ("Romulus & Remulus got fed by a wolf").  Most of our common knowledge is based on Virgil`s poem Aeneid which was written between 29 and 19 BC, centuries after the foundation. The kings were apparently ruthless tribe leaders and warlords and later despised by the Romans, even though they knew little about them.

The republic was better documented, often by letters - like Cicero`s vast communication with friends. But our knowledge is still based on texts, which where often written much later than the described events, and often biased by the authors. Apparently the republic was a bloody mess and a chain of civil wars between ambitious generals like Sulla, Pompei & Caesar.

The third phase, the regime of the emperors, may have started by Julius Caesar, who became a dictator himself. Cesar adopted his nephew Octavian and made him his heir. After Caesar`s assassination Octavian named himself Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus and claimed to be the son of a God, because his adoptive father got nominated as a god after the assassination. He defeated his competitors - including Brutus, Pompeius and later Marc Antony and became the sole ruler of Rome under his new name Augustus - the first emperor of Rome. The knowledge about him and his many successors, including the infamous emperors Caligula, Nero and Commodus (the villain in Ridley Scott`s movie "Gladior") is still fragmentary. Did Caligula really appoint his horse as consul or is this just slander made up by his enemies? Did Nero really "fiddly as Rome burned"? Beard does an excellent job in interpreting and evaluating all the ancient gossip.

I learned a lot and the book helped me to better understand Rome´s ascent. The city rose by warfare, a predatory career, but Rome also integrated the defeated and made many of them to citizens with full rights. Often the Romans formed alliances with the conquered cities & kingdoms, which accelerated Rome`s growth and strengthened her military & economic power (discussed in the excellent chapter 4: "Rome`s Great Leap Forward"). They developed a system of alliances, which "became an effective mechanism for converting Rome`s defeated enemies into part of its growing military military machine. Once the Roman`s military success started, they managed to make it self-sustaining".

Beard finished the book with a description - and speculations - about the life of the common people and Rome`s economy & social life (chapter 11: "The Haves and have-nots") and life in Rome´s provinces (chapter 12: "Rome Outside Rome").

While reading this book I felt like traveling back in time and to experience this great city by myself.  SPQR is highly recommended.