“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.
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Popular highlights in this book
Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder.Highlighted by 1,930 Kindle readers- The message is clear: however far back you go, the inhabitants of Rome were always already from somewhere else.Highlighted by 1,682 Kindle readers
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From the Publisher
About the author
A Splendid Summary of a Mysterious Millennium
This study is an accessible, erudite overview of the first millennium of Ancient Rome from a reliable author. SPQR is an acronym for 'The Senate and the People of Rome' and the chronology spans from the foundation myths of Rome, from around 753BC, to Emperor Caracella's grant of citizenship to all inhabitants of the Roman Empire in 212CE. The incorporation of nearly a millennium of history into only 536 pages (excluding notes) is an arduous task that Beard manages well with, surprisingly, few substantial omissions. However the fast-paced, scholastic prose can make it difficult to patch together a coherent narrative at times.Nonetheless, with equal measures of sympathy and scepticism, Beard interrogates the ancient sources to provide a well researched, visual and thorough account. Although a tad Cicero-centric at times, which is partly a concession to the sources available, the reader can appreciate the evolution of Rome from mound to metropolis with the aid of beautifully written passages alongside photographs of paintings, architecture and useful diagrams that are plentiful and spark the imagination further. Beard is an exemplary historian and a master of the craft.But all historians, although some claim objectivity, have something to prove in their work. Beard's main agenda, as with her TV shows and the general trend of historiography, is to amplify the voice of the normal person in history. The 'daily grind' of life takes the forefront in this work to showcase triumph and tragedy in a variety of settings from the shoddy 'insulas' (apartment blocks) to the more famous settings of the Forum and the Colosseum. Beard is at her best when she plays the medium through the examination of epitaphs in an attempt to discern the main concerns of everyday Romans and their particular circumstances. This provokes wonderful and enlightening speculations on the authors part. From the baker to the bearded-warrior, the lost little girl to the magnificent mother - all harbour forgotten stories and find a niche in Beard's study.However as a result of Beard's focus on average Roman citizens, if their was to be such a thing, the political narrative can appear rushed at times. This is unhelpful for those without a grasp of the main political narrative but serves to illustrate one of Beard's main themes. After the establishment of the Augustan template of imperial rule, even if ambiguous, Beard argues that any emperor could have been in power henceforth and much would have remained the same until the start of the third-century CE. Furthermore, Beard speculates that the idiosyncrasies we take as literal truth, for example Caligula's insanity or Nero's pyromania, could have just been defamations of character to legitimise the power of the superseding emperor. This goes some way to explaining how fourteen emperors can be condensed into <50 pages of the book but still leaves the reader wanting much more detail than is provided in this area.Beard has provided a splendid summary of a mysterious millennium that, although hard to follow at times, is an efficacious springboard for further reading.
Top reviews from United Kingdom
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 August 2017
This study is an accessible, erudite overview of the first millennium of Ancient Rome from a reliable author. SPQR is an acronym for 'The Senate and the People of Rome' and the chronology spans from the foundation myths of Rome, from around 753BC, to Emperor Caracella's grant of citizenship to all inhabitants of the Roman Empire in 212CE. The incorporation of nearly a millennium of history into only 536 pages (excluding notes) is an arduous task that Beard manages well with, surprisingly, few substantial omissions. However the fast-paced, scholastic prose can make it difficult to patch together a coherent narrative at times.
Nonetheless, with equal measures of sympathy and scepticism, Beard interrogates the ancient sources to provide a well researched, visual and thorough account. Although a tad Cicero-centric at times, which is partly a concession to the sources available, the reader can appreciate the evolution of Rome from mound to metropolis with the aid of beautifully written passages alongside photographs of paintings, architecture and useful diagrams that are plentiful and spark the imagination further. Beard is an exemplary historian and a master of the craft.
But all historians, although some claim objectivity, have something to prove in their work. Beard's main agenda, as with her TV shows and the general trend of historiography, is to amplify the voice of the normal person in history. The 'daily grind' of life takes the forefront in this work to showcase triumph and tragedy in a variety of settings from the shoddy 'insulas' (apartment blocks) to the more famous settings of the Forum and the Colosseum. Beard is at her best when she plays the medium through the examination of epitaphs in an attempt to discern the main concerns of everyday Romans and their particular circumstances. This provokes wonderful and enlightening speculations on the authors part. From the baker to the bearded-warrior, the lost little girl to the magnificent mother - all harbour forgotten stories and find a niche in Beard's study.
However as a result of Beard's focus on average Roman citizens, if their was to be such a thing, the political narrative can appear rushed at times. This is unhelpful for those without a grasp of the main political narrative but serves to illustrate one of Beard's main themes. After the establishment of the Augustan template of imperial rule, even if ambiguous, Beard argues that any emperor could have been in power henceforth and much would have remained the same until the start of the third-century CE. Furthermore, Beard speculates that the idiosyncrasies we take as literal truth, for example Caligula's insanity or Nero's pyromania, could have just been defamations of character to legitimise the power of the superseding emperor. This goes some way to explaining how fourteen emperors can be condensed into <50 pages of the book but still leaves the reader wanting much more detail than is provided in this area.
Beard has provided a splendid summary of a mysterious millennium that, although hard to follow at times, is an efficacious springboard for further reading.
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Top reviews from other countries
- Robin E. LevinReviewed in the United States on 25 January 2016
History and Sociology of Ancient Rome.
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- IanReviewed in Australia on 3 March 2024
Great Read - A look behind the scenes of what you think you know about Rome
