SPQR

Ancient Rome is the substrate of Western Civilization. From Roman law which lives on as civil law—the legal system of most countries, to the Roman Republic which inspired the modern republic, to the Roman Empire whose legacy many states tried to carry on, the influence of Ancient Rome is undeniable. SPQR covers the history of ancient Rome from its founding to 212 CE when Caracalla grants every free man in the Roman Empire citizenship. The book is structured into chapters which cover a distinct period of Roman history, though this structure breaks down at the end. Within each chapter, the book is structured by topic. For example, the second chapter goes from Cicero to the story of Romulus and Remus to the meaning of Remus’ murder to the Rape of the Sabine Women to Aeneas and so on… The non-linear structure makes it easier to track the big ideas Beard is trying to communicate but harder to track what happened when. Much of the book assumes that the reader has some familiarity with the conventional history and stories about Rome. This makes SPQR less accessible for readers who don’t know much about Roman history.

The book is organized around two questions:

1. Who is Roman? Throughout the book, Beard traces the expansion of Rome but also Roman citizenship from a small settlement to a large metropolis to Italy and beyond. It’s no surprise then that Beard ends the book in 212 CE, when Caracalla grants every free man in the Roman Empire citizenship, which settles the matter. Everyone is Roman. Of course, if every Roman subject is a Roman citizen, it ceases to be a meaningful category. Beard describes how Roman society split along a new division between the upper and lower classes.
2. What does it mean to be Roman? The second chapter, about the founding of Rome, is a good example. It is more interested in what the myth of Romulus and Remus says about the Roman people than whatever truth lies behind the myth. Does the fratricide of Remus by Romulus doom Rome to civil war? What does it mean that the first Roman marriages involve rape, or at least kidnapping?

One thing I was surprised by is the amount of historiography. Beard spends much of the early chapters relaying how unreliable our sources for early Roman history is. She does this for the obvious case of the founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus—what she-wolf have you seen suckle 2 infants—but also for the less obvious cases of the kings of Rome and Rome’s early expansion. Beard points out that even for significant events like the Battle of Cannae, we only have contradictory accounts from historians written decades to centuries later. We are not even sure where the battle took place and the current geography is not the same as it might have been 2 millennia ago. Only as Roman history nears the first century BCE, she claims are there enough concurrent records to confidently construct the timeline of events. I found it fresh for a history book to tell you the limits of a narrative rather as opposed to presenting a narrative and seducing you into believing it.