SPQR

Easily the most accessible and thorough book on Ancient Rome I have read. The writing is witty and the research is top notch. I highly recommend this edition for any history lover's shelf.

Great book, mine of info.

Just buy it if you are interested in rome

A book which covers the both side of the Roman history. Marvellous writing and detailed descriptions

An analysis of the Roman Empire from the auc to ca. 212CE written in a lucid easy to grasp way. Mrs Beard has to be commended for her gem of a book.

The author is a scholar in her writing. But she is no historian.. For example she says A did to B and then B did this to C.. she writes pages on it and then says there is no proof of A doing anything... In In She is too rational..and can't tell a story like a historian... Thanks for a detailed timeline of roman empire ...that was commendable ..

Book packaging was bad

Very good

Si te interesa la historia de la antigua Roma y quieres un libro riguroso históricamente pero que te cuente las cosas de una forma amena y divertida, este es tu libro! Yo empecé a leerlo con una prueba gratis para e-book y me convenció tanto que me acabe comprando la versión escrita. Muy bueno!

A ubiquitous commentator on affairs both ancient and domestic in her native Great Britain, Mary Beard is something of an institution. Her latest written work, SPQR, is an interpretive history of ancient Rome aimed at a lay audience. Beard eschews a strictly chronological narrative in favor of a more thematic approach, peppering her history with insights and personal perspectives. It seems to me that any prospective reader should already have a firm grasp on the basics of Roman history, although the litany of awards SPQR has garnered, including New York Times Bestseller status, suggests that many disagree. Beard begins her history at the dawn of Roman civilization and ends with Emperor Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to everyone living in the empire in 212 AD. She starts by writing that Rome’s seven kings were likely more myth than reality. It is highly unlikely, she says, that just seven men served over the course of 250 years. It is noteworthy, she says, that many of the enduring features of Roman life were introduced by the kings. “Abominated as they were, kings were credited with creating Rome,” Beard writes. For instance, Numa created much of Rome’s religion and Servius Tullius developed the census and the associated centuriate assembly system that gave weight to the wealthier classes. Moreover, some of the kings were clearly Etruscan in background, which underscored from the earliest days that Roman leaders could come from outside of the city, a key theme of Roman self-identify. Much like the United States, Rome was a city of asylum where anyone could rise to the top. Next Beard turns to the Republic, which she is quick to note did not spring full grown in the wake of the rape of Lucretia in 509 BC. Rather, she argues, it took centuries for the Republic of Cicero’s day to develop. Major turning points occurred in the early fourth century BC. First came the Roman destruction of Veii, Rome’s Trojan War, in 396, and then the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC. The pattern of conquest and fear of conquest was thus established, she writes. “Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.” The sophistication in building the massive defensive walls around the city and the logistics of incorporating large contingents of allied forces required “infrastructure unthinkable in the fifth century.” Next, in 367 BC, the plebs were allowed to stand for the consulship. Henceforth, Beard writes, being a patrician “carried a whiff of snobbery attached to it and not much more.” Beard agrees with the historian Polybius who saw the Roman political system as responsible for the success of the city during the Republic. The mixed constitution provided the state with strength and stability. She writes that the tradition of ancestor worship and the competition for political office and military spoils is what drove the expansion of empire, not any formal plan of imperial conquest. It was a coercive empire, she says, not one of annexation. The Latin word imperium meant “the power to issue orders that are obeyed,” and that is what the Roman’s did. However, the influx of conquered people and wealth would challenge what it meant to be traditionally Roman. Next, she points to the year 146 BC as a turning point, the year both Carthage and Corinth were razed. Roman violence was suddenly turned inward, beginning with the controversial tribunates of the Gracchi brothers. The road to Augustus, she claims, runs directly from the brothers to Marius versus Sulla and then Pompey versus Caesar. Each did their part to undermine key elements of the Republican system that led inexorably to dictatorship. The feud of the Gracchi brothers introduced violence to the domestic political process. The reforms of Marius allowed men without property to serve, thus turning the army into “a new style of personal militia” directly controllable by only the commanding general. Sulla added the military march on Rome and Roman soldiers spilling Roman blood, not to mention proscriptions and reviving the dictatorship. Pompey, for his part, climbed to the top of the political system outside of the natural order of the Republic, gaining commands without officially holding office. Caesar was just a culmination of his predecessors’ careers. Beard affirms the remarkable legacy of Augustus in the transition from Republic to Empire, “a puzzling and contradictory revolutionary.” Perhaps his greatest reform – and certainly his most expensive – was the introduction of pensions for soldiers. No longer were the Roman legions dependent on their commander for taking care of them. Now after 20 years of service soldiers received 12 years salary or the equivalent in land. The reform cost an estimated 450 sesterces or half of the annual imperial income. But it effectively removed the army from politics, at least for the time being. Augustus also made the Senate hereditary for three generations and allowed the Senate’s bills to have the weight of law. Now that Augustus was solely responsible for receiving positions in the imperial infrastructure, elections slowly died off and the old patron/client system, once the bedrock of Roman society and politics, was rendered nugatory. Although Augustus held the consulship 13 times, the position had largely become symbolic. The Roman Republic was dead but kept alive as fiction by filling old positions and offices. Or as Beard explains it, “Augustus was cleverly adapting the traditional idioms to serve a new politics justifying and making comprehensible a new axis of power by systematically reconfiguring the old language.” Concerning the first two centuries of emperors, Beard writes that for all of their idiosyncrasies and outlandish behavior they were far more similar than they were different. “There is no sign at all,” she writes, “that the character of the ruler affected the basic template of government at home or abroad in any significant way.” Moreover, “there was hardly any such thing as a general policy for running the empire or an overarching strategy of military deployment.” The emperor did represent a new tier in the structure of command, but “his role was largely a reactive one; he was not a strategist or forward planner.” The truth was that the emperorship provided “a remarkably stable structure of rule,” at least for the first two centuries of the empire. Between ascension of Augustus in 31 BC and the assassination of Commodus in 192 AD there were just 14 emperors (not counting the three short-term emperors of 69 AD). In a period half as long, between 193 and 293, there were no fewer than 70. For all of its stability, however, succession was an enduring challenge, as naming a new emperor always came down to “some combination of luck, improvisation, plotting, violence and secret deals.” In closing, SPQR is a marvelous synthesis of one renowned scholar’s take on one thousand years of Roman history. I’ve read much Roman history, particularly the Republican period, but I learned a lot from SPQR. I suspect Beard has delivered something very few authors can, a learned piece of scholarship that advances our understanding of Roman times that is as much admired by her academic peers at is enjoyed by the general educated public.

Not the story of Rome you want but story of Rome you need. An extremely insightful work by Mary Beard into the history of Ancient Rome, its emperors, citizens, slaves and whatnot. First chapters may scream challenging book, but as the book progresses, you’ll see why the Author provides such rich content and notice that you have actually learned something. Thank you MB

great

“History is just one damned thing after another”, goes a famous quote. And that’s what many introductory history books sound like: “First this happened, then that happened”. They might go as far as investigating causation (“this happened because that happened”) and even context (“this happened because of these circumstances”). But they don’t take the next step. I’m currently reading in parallel Michael Burleigh’s book and Richard Evans’ trilogy on the Third Reich. They’re of this type. Now, that’s no criticism. For history that recent, the facts are going to be well-established enough not to warrant discussion in the main text, at least in a book intended for general rather than specialist readership. Sources can be relegated to footnotes for those keen and knowledgeable enough to follow them up. The facts material to, say, Hitler’s assumption of the German Chancellorship in January 1933 are not in dispute, and a lay reader like me is content to assume that the historian has done their homework with the sources, and to get on with following the narrative. Ancient history is different. There are gaps. That’s also true of modern history, of course, but those in its ancient counterpart are so fundamental that a simple narrative history is actually misleading, because to say the equivalent of “Hitler assumed the Chancellorship on January 30th 1933” might very well not be true at all. How do we know he did? Because sources tell us. But what are those sources for ancient history? When we’re told that in 509 BCE Lucius Junius Brutus forced Tarquinus Superbus, the last of the Roman kings, into exile in order to establish the liberty of the Roman people, that Tarquin made an alliance with the Etruscan king Lars Porsenna and besieged Rome in order to get his throne back, that the Etruscan army was prevented from crossing a key bridge across the Tiber by Horatius Cocles defending it single-handed, or almost single-handed, that the Etruscans abandoned the siege out of admiration for Roman spunk, and that Tarquinus’ Latin allies were finally defeated at the Battle of Lake Regillus in 499 BCE, it comes as something of a shock to then read in Beard’s “SPQR” that “it is only in the first century BCE that we can start to explore Rome, close up and in vivid detail, through contemporary eyes.” The earliest author to describe these foundational events is the historian Livy, writing in the time of Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, half a millennium later. That raises the obvious question of how reliable this information about a series of events at least as significant for ancient Rome as Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship was for Weimar Germany actually is. This is the kind of question that’s at the heart of Beard’s book. On one level, it’s a history of ancient Rome from its foundation to 212 CE. As such, as pointed out by several previous reviewers (both positive and negative), it requires at least a basic knowledge of the subject. Noting these comments, I read all the Wikipedia articles on ancient Rome and its various aspects before embarking on this book. I was glad I did, although I’m not convinced I needed to. If, like one reviewer, I had complained about Beard's skimpy treatment of, say, the Punic Wars, I would have missed what her book actually is. As much as a history of Rome, it's a history of the history of Rome. It asks the raft of questions that are an essential part of what we “know” (yes, that’s “know” in quotation marks) about it. How do we know what we think we know about a particular event or set of circumstances? What are the primary sources? How long after the event were they written? Why did the authors write what they did? For whom? Should we merely take their words at face value, or read them “against the grain”? What additional information can this reading between the lines reveal? How representative of his world and his time is a single main source for a whole period, like Cicero for the late Republic and the Civil Wars? How well does one source triangulate with othera(s)? What happens if they contradict one another? And how does all this tie in with archaeology? This “history of history” is just as exciting a story as the one about “what actually happened”, and not just because the former is foundational to the latter. Even in contemporary history it enters the picture when, for example, David Irving’s misrepresentations of evidence are brought to light in his discussions of the Holocaust and the bombing of Dresden. We trust historians to do their work honestly, and nothing is as honest as actually showing the basis of your conclusions. It’s like a medieval timber-framed house in which the supporting structural members are a prominent feature of the design rather than being hidden behind an elegant facade. Beard does this par excellence in “SPQR”, elegantly combining the story with the story of the story in one engrossing narrative. One model of history is the “Great Man” (yes, almost invariably “man”, unless we’re talking about great singers) view, in which the narrative consists of the doings of individual figures who are said to exercise a decisive influence on their societies. For ancient Rome, this would be the Mariuses and Sullas, the Pompeys and Caesars. From Augustus on, the history of Rome on this reading is of course the history of the emperors. This is partly due to the simple fact that it tends to be the rich and powerful who leave the traces in the record. They build the buildings that survive, they command the armies that win (or lose) and that determine the fates of thousands and millions, it is their doings that are the subjects of sculpture and painting and monument and writing. The proles, meanwhile, pass unnoticed and unremarked unless they riot or rebel. Beard points out that the Roman Empire consisted primarily of some 50 million people, most of them peasant farmers who remain undifferentiated and anonymous because pretty much all evidence of them has vanished. Palaces can survive; peasant huts tend not to. But we do have some hope of reconstructing, to some degree, the lives, at least in the aggregate, of city dwellers, especially those million inhabitants of Rome who weren’t the few thousand elites. This is largely thanks to archaeology. That’s why, if I had to choose my favourite chapter in the whole book, it would probably be Chapter 11, in which Beard determines just how much the evidence can tell us about the plebs. The answer is: more than you might think. Most Romans lived in “insulae”, multi-story apartment blocks, which is how a million could be crammed into such a relatively small footprint. Where and how they lived, what and where they ate and what they spent their little money on can all be determined, at least sufficiently for a mildly imaginative historical novelist to reconstruct an urban Roman scene and to get inside the heads of its ordinary citizens. Three conclusions would surprise us: Rome wasn’t zoned (the poor lived cheek by jowl with the rich throughout the city), the best apartments in insulae were on the lower, not the upper floors, and poor people ate out while rich ones dined at home. Parallel to her examination of ordinary lives, Beard tries to determine what the impact on Rome was throughout the Empire. How much did Roman rule affect the inhabitants of Gaul or Egypt or Asia (i.e. modern western Turkey)? What did “being Roman” actually mean to a rural inhabitant of what is now Western Europe? How far down did "Romanisation" extend into the conquered societies? And what did it mean to Romans themselves? This is a theme to which Beard periodically returns. We all have an image of our society, certain assumptions we tacitly make about our culture. It’s part of our mental makeup, the part that relates to our corporate rather than individual identities. What were Romans’ attitudes to Rome? These are intimately entwined (and perhaps enshrined?) in their city’s history, which was actually largely mythical – certainly the more so the further back it went. What they “knew” about Romulus and Remus and Aeneas reflected their own ambivalence, which was expressed in various ways throughout the near-millennium that it took for Rome to rise from an average Latin hilltop settlement whose wars were fought against enemies ten miles distant to superpower status. Much of this evidence is, of course, skimpy in the extreme, far too much so to draw concrete conclusions. Beard again makes clear when this is so, and what such consensus or disagreement as there may be among historians and archaeologists on a given topic are. The only thing I wish she had specified is in her closing: in her discussion of the Arch of Constantine, I feel she could have made the difference between the figures on it that were recycled from earlier monuments and those freshly carved for it clear, in order to illustrate artistically her thesis about the new nature of the Empire after 212 CE. The Kindle version works as well as you could expect. There's X-ray, for what it's worth, and the index is active as well as the table of contents. A minor exception is the (very useful) timeline at the end, which comes across as some kind of PDF. The fairly small font can’t be enlarged, and its various sections are of slightly different sizes, so you have to squint a bit. But it’s worth it – as is the entire book. If you want to know what happened in ancient Rome, read an introductory work. If you want to understand ancient Rome and how we’ve come to know about it, this is the book for you.