SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard

I have read a number of histories dealing with different periods of ancient Rome, but Mary Beard’s SPQR accomplishes something difficult: she tells almost a thousand years of Roman history in a single volume without turning the book into either a procession of emperors or a catalog of wars.

Beard begins with Rome’s legendary foundation and carries the story to 212 CE, when the emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to virtually every free inhabitant of the empire. It is an inspired place to stop. Rome had begun as one small community in central Italy and had become an empire stretching across much of the known world. By Caracalla’s time, being “Roman” no longer meant being born in Rome, or even Italy. Citizenship itself had been transformed. 

Beard is particularly good at distinguishing between what we know about Rome and what Romans later claimed to know about themselves. Romulus and Remus, the kings of early Rome, the heroic stories of the Republic—all must be examined against archaeology and sources often written centuries after the supposed events. She is willing to say, repeatedly, that we simply do not know. That intellectual honesty makes the parts of Roman history for which we do have strong evidence more convincing.

The familiar characters are here—Cicero, Caesar, Augustus, Nero and the rest—but Beard continually widens the view beyond great men. She is interested in women, slaves, freedmen, provincial inhabitants and ordinary citizens. Rome was simultaneously a society of astonishing political invention and brutal inequality. Liberty and slavery existed beside one another. Republican government produced extraordinary ideas about citizenship while Roman armies conquered and exploited much of the Mediterranean world.

That complexity reminded me of a conversation during my deployment to Iraq. Several soldiers were considering getting SPQR tattoos. The idea was that we Americans were the Roman Empire of the twenty-first century. We did not get very far into the complicated question of whether the United States actually was—or is—an empire. I did point out that tattooing in Roman society was hardly the badge of proud citizenship they imagined. Tattoos and permanent marks were particularly associated with slaves, criminals and other people under institutional control; soldiers were also marked in later periods. Enthusiasm for the SPQR tattoos declined considerably.

The incident seems even more appropriate after reading Beard. One of the strengths of SPQR is her resistance to using Rome as an easy mirror for ourselves. “Rome” was never one thing. Republic became empire. Conquered peoples became citizens. Slaves became freedmen, and their descendants could become thoroughly Roman. Political institutions changed while Romans continued insisting that ancient traditions endured.

Beard ends in 212 precisely because Caracalla’s extension of citizenship represents the culmination of one of Rome’s most extraordinary achievements. An identity that had once belonged to the inhabitants of a small Italian city had expanded until millions of people across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East could call themselves Roman.

SPQR is an excellent history because Beard never allows the grandeur of Rome to obscure its contradictions. Rome could be republican and imperial, civilized and savage, inclusive and brutally hierarchical. Its history resists simple lessons.

Perhaps that is the lesson those of us sitting in Iraq discussing SPQR tattoos were missing. Comparing America with Rome is easy. Understanding what Rome actually was is considerably harder. Mary Beard’s splendid history shows us why.

Seeing the Art and Meeting the Artist at Frieda

 

Frieda for Generations is a lovely coffee shop and an intergenerational cultural space centered on conversation and connection in Old City Philadelphia.  I have been going there since it opened more than a decade ago.  From the beginning they have hosted events and art installations. I stopped at Frieda on my way home from the Brigade 76 reunion in Colorado Springs.

When I entered the high-ceilinged space hanging across the entire back wall and the part of the east wall of the restaurant were 40 wire sculptures. It is the first solo exhibit by New Zealand-born designer and multidimensional artist Michael Rex.  

As it happened Michael was having lunch at Frieda with his husband Hodi Poorsoltan and two friends.  I took a picture of the exhibit and one of the friends said with a big laugh, "Would you like to meet the artist?" I said I would.  And I did.        

Michael and Hodi have lived in Philadelphia since 2012 moving from NYC. Michael's website describes the origin of this bright wire sculptures:

Michael’s pieces are created by hand , mostly with 20 gage wire looped in continuous forms. Some are executed in annealed wire and others are in insulated copper to preserve the color of the wire. Michael has also created copper pieces in uninsulated wire that can be hung out of doors and will develop the greenish-blue patina seen on older copper pieces.  

 

The inspiration for Michael’s work is twofold. As a young child he was mesmerized by the mechanics of knitting and recalls many moments looking over the shoulder of his mother and grandmother as they crafted pieces from yarn. The mechanical memory of this was triggered at a 2017 exhibition in Chelsea, when he had the chance to view the work of the late Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa. Interestingly, she attributed her fascination with making wire sculptures to her own childhood experiences of tracing shapes as she worked a plow on her parents’ farm. Michael was inspired to begin experimenting with wire and in three years of intense work has perfected his process. 

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Michael and I talked about handling wire. I told him I was just returning from and reunion of my tank unit from the 1970s.  I told him back then when we set up an outpost or headquarters we often connect the forward troops with wire-connected phones.  Wire is more reliable than radio. We had to be careful with stringing wire hundreds of meters to support it and keep it from breaking.  Michael's sculptures are hundreds of meters of woven 16- and 20-gauge wire. 

For those who want a lunch spot for conversation, Frieda has no internet. It is an excellent place for conversation--possibly about the art on display!

(For those who want to use screens, Frieda has seating outdoors and in the northwest corner of the dining area.)

A Forest of Color will be on display at Frieda until August 30.  

50th Anniversary Reunion 1st Battalion 70th Armor

 

Fifty years ago Brigade 76, 4th Brigade Mechanized, 4th Infantry Division, flew to West Germany. Four thousand soldiers left Fort Carson, Colorado, to establish an mechanized brigade on the former air base in Wiesbaden, West Germany. Two mechanized infantry battalions (one of the infantry battalions was from Fort Riley, Kansas), an armored battalion, an artillery battalion and a support battalion along with brigade headquarters moved en masse across the ocean. 

I was the commander of tank Bravo 13 in 1st Battalion, 70th Armor, the tank battalion. Within 48 hours of arriving, the brigade headed for the East-West border at Fulda.  Most of us were in Wiesbaden for two to three years training to fight the war that never happened between NATO and the Soviet Union.  

Beginning last Sunday about 20 veterans of 70th Armor returned to Fort Carson for a reunion on the 50th anniversary of our Cold War service.  

Sam Rushing, who took the lead in organizing nearly a dozen 70th Armor reunions between 2009 and this year put together an excellent event. 

We spent Monday on Fort Carson with:

A Fort Carson Museum tour

Hands-on experience in a Stryker (Armored Fight Vehicle) simulator, 

Lunch in a dining facility  

Presentations on the Stryker and weapons by a Stryker battalion.

After the day on Fort Carson we had dinner in The Airplane restaurant.  It is a 1950s vintage KC-97 refueling plane with booth seating replacing the interior of the airplane. The cockpit and the refueling boom area at the rear of the plane are intact.

On Tuesday we took the cog railway to the top of Pikes Peak.

The final event of was the reunion banquet. The speaker was Lt. Col. Jonathan Patten, commander of the Stryker battalion who hosted us on Fort Carson. Four soldiers from his unit were the honor guard for the event and joined us for dinner.  

After the dinner Sam Rushing read a letter from Col. Richard Goldsmith. He commanded 1-70th Armor for two years between 1977 and 1979. 

The next morning we left Colorado Springs on planes and in cars to destinations from Seattle, Washington, to Sturgis, South Dakota, to Kansas, Minnesota, Arkansas Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

My son Nigel and I were delighted with the event as was everyone I spoke to.

Thanks to Sam, Kirk Wood, Bill Betson and the other organizers for a great event.  

Responsibility and Judgment by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt’s Responsibility and Judgment is a posthumous collection of essays, lectures, and addresses assembled around questions that occupied her throughout her life: How do we judge right and wrong? What responsibility does an individual bear for actions committed within a political system? And what happens when the moral standards of an entire society collapse?

These questions inevitably return Arendt to Nazi Germany. In “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” she rejects the comforting argument that individuals living under dictatorship can surrender responsibility to the system. Hitler did not personally commit every Nazi crime. Thousands of ordinary people made the machinery work. Arendt is particularly interested in those who refused to participate—not necessarily because they possessed a superior moral system, but because they could not live with themselves if they became accomplices. This essay seems disturbingly current. “I was only following orders” is an extreme version of a much more common human temptation: the willingness to surrender personal judgment to a leader, party, institution, or prevailing opinion.

“The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?” was especially striking because Arendt was writing in 1964 about Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial play accusing Pope Pius XII of failing to speak adequately against the Holocaust. When Arendt wrote, much of the evidence remained inaccessible. The Vatican finally opened the archives of Pius XII’s pontificate to researchers in 2020. Subsequent discoveries have made the questions raised by Hochhuth and Arendt even harder to dismiss, revealing how much the Vatican knew about Nazi mass murder while Pius maintained his public caution. The complete historical judgment remains contested, but Arendt’s insistence that silence itself can become a moral act—or failure to act—now seems remarkably prescient. I intend to read The Deputy next.

The longest and most unusual piece in the collection, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” finds Arendt addressing morality more directly than she usually did. She was suspicious of moral rules treated simply as inherited commandments. The experience of Nazi Germany had demonstrated how rapidly supposedly respectable moral standards could be exchanged for monstrous ones. She therefore turns toward Socrates and the relationship we have with ourselves. The essential question becomes not merely what society permits but whether I can continue living with myself after doing something I know to be wrong. Judgment requires thinking, and thinking cannot simply be delegated.

But the essay that affected me most was the last, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address.” Arendt delivered it in Boston in May 1975 as the United States approached its two-hundredth birthday. It became the last work she published during her lifetime. She died that December, at sixty-nine, and therefore never saw the Bicentennial she was contemplating. 

There was little triumphalism in her assessment of America at two hundred. The country of 1975 seemed to be coming apart. Saigon had fallen only weeks earlier, completing what Arendt regarded as a humiliating American defeat in Vietnam. Richard Nixon had resigned because of Watergate. Inflation was damaging ordinary life. Cities were deteriorating. Terrorism and political violence seemed increasingly part of the modern world. Most seriously for Arendt, political deception had become institutionalized. The lies surrounding Vietnam and Watergate were not isolated falsehoods but symptoms of a political culture increasingly willing to substitute manufactured images for reality. 

Reading “Home to Roost” fifty years later is unsettling because so much sounds familiar. Once again Americans live amid political division, distrust of institutions, inflationary pressures, international disorder, war, terrorism, and an extraordinary capacity for political leaders and their followers to construct competing versions of reality.

Yet history also supplies a caution against despair.

Arendt did not live to see the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976. Nor could she have known that within fifteen years the Berlin Wall would fall, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe would collapse, and by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union itself would disappear with remarkably little violence compared with what might have accompanied the dissolution of a nuclear superpower. The United States that looked so exhausted and disoriented in 1975 survived its crisis and participated in one of the great peaceful political transformations of modern history.

That does not invalidate Arendt’s warning. It makes it more valuable.

Responsibility and Judgment repeatedly argues against historical inevitability. Political systems do not make our moral decisions for us. Institutions do not relieve individuals of responsibility. A terrible present does not guarantee a terrible future, any more than a prosperous present guarantees continued success. Human beings judge, choose, act, and sometimes refuse to act.

That is why this collection feels so contemporary. Arendt does not give us a moral handbook. She gives us something more demanding: the obligation to think for ourselves and then accept responsibility for what we do.

“Home to Roost” is therefore an appropriate final essay. Arendt spent much of her life examining what happens when people abandon judgment and surrender themselves to systems, ideologies, and convenient lies. In 1975 she turned that same uncompromising gaze upon the country that had given her refuge and citizenship. She found America in serious trouble but did not declare its experiment over.

We know something she could not know.

The Republic survived 1975.

That knowledge should give us hope—but not complacency. Arendt’s entire argument insists upon the difference. Survival is not guaranteed by history. It depends upon people who remain willing to distinguish truth from lies, judge right from wrong, and take personal responsibility when doing so becomes difficult.

A Tale of Two Lovers: A Renaissance Humanist Before He Became Pope

 

A Tale of Two Lovers by Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini is an unusual tale both for its content and because the author would later become Pope Pius II. Written in 1444 while Piccolomini was a diplomat and Renaissance humanist, the novella became one of the most popular love stories of the fifteenth century. After his election as pope in 1458, however, he distanced himself from the work.

The story belongs to the long tradition of medieval and Renaissance courtly romance that stretches from Chrétien de Troyes to the literature eventually satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. Yet Piccolomini's lovers are more human than the idealized knights and ladies of earlier romances. They are driven not simply by chivalric devotion but by genuine physical desire.

What surprised me most was the novella's frank celebration of physical love. The lovers meet only twice, yet on both occasions they delight in one another passionately and immediately long for another meeting. Piccolomini presents their intimacy not as temptation but as an essential expression of their love. For a work written in the middle of the fifteenth century, the openness with which he portrays mutual physical affection feels remarkably modern. The story is, for much of its length, unabashedly in love with physical love itself.

In the end, however, the novella returns to convention. The lovers cannot escape the moral and social order surrounding them. The heroine dies in despair, while the knight ultimately marries a worthy bride, restoring the expected balance of virtue and duty. The conclusion is obligatory. The author recognized that his celebration of passion required a moral resolution acceptable to his audience.

A Tale of Two Lovers is not a great work of Renaissance literature, but it is a fascinating one. It stands between medieval romance and Renaissance humanism, revealing a writer more interested in the psychology of love than in the conventions of chivalry. Read today, it is made even more intriguing by the knowledge that its worldly, perceptive author would later become the head of the Roman Catholic Church. That remarkable transformation gives the novella an historical irony almost as memorable as the story itself.

Cambridge American Military Cemetery: Remembering the Airmen Who Never Came Home

Last month I visited the Cambridge American Cemetery in the quiet English village of Coton, just west of Cambridge. Maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the cemetery is the resting place of 3,811 American servicemen and women who died during World War II. The Wall of the Missing bears the names of another 5,127 whose remains were never recovered or identified.

Walking among the rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David, I was struck by how many of those buried there were young airmen. The cemetery lies only a few miles from the airfields that housed the Eighth Air Force, whose heavy bombers flew daily missions over Germany and German-occupied Europe. Although the cemetery includes soldiers, sailors, and a small number of nurses, its character is unmistakably tied to the strategic air campaign.

The Eighth Air Force paid a terrible price for daylight precision bombing. A B-17 or B-24 carried a crew of ten men. On many missions, bombers returned to England riddled with flak and machine-gun fire, their crews nursing dead and wounded comrades. Others never returned at all, disappearing into the North Sea or crashing deep inside enemy territory. Walking through the cemetery, it was impossible not to imagine the stories behind the thousands of identical white markers—pilots, navigators, bombardiers, radio operators, engineers, and gunners who climbed into their aircraft knowing that each mission might be their last.

The cemetery also contains the graves of Medal of Honor recipients and the remains of airmen whose sacrifice helped establish Allied air superiority before the Normandy invasion. Their efforts crippled German aircraft production, transportation networks, oil supplies, and industry, contributing significantly to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany.

The Cambridge American Cemetery is a place of extraordinary peace. Birds sing, the lawns are immaculate, and the surrounding English countryside seems untouched by war. Yet beneath that tranquility lies the memory of one of history's most costly air campaigns. It is a fitting memorial to the thousands of Americans who crossed an ocean to defend freedom and never made the journey home.

The Battle of Salamis: The Victory That Saved Greece

 

Barry Strauss’s The Battle of Salamis is a well-written, readable account of one of the decisive battles of the ancient world. Drawing on Herodotus and other ancient sources while incorporating archaeological evidence and modern scholarship, Strauss reconstructs the naval battle of 480 B.C. with enough detail to make the confused and dangerous fighting vivid.

I was impressed by Strauss’s portrayal of the divisions within the leadership of both sides. We tend to look backward at famous victories and assume that the winning strategy must have been obvious. At Salamis, almost nothing was obvious. The Greek coalition was fragile, its commanders disagreed about where and even whether to fight, and individual city-states had different interests. The enormous Persian force under Xerxes suffered from its own divisions, conflicting advice, and difficulties of command.

At the center of Strauss’s account is Themistocles. Strauss gives him much of the credit for the Greek victory, and persuasively so. Themistocles understood that Athens could not defeat Persia on land and had spent years building the Athenian fleet. At Salamis he recognized that the narrow waters could neutralize the Persians’ numerical advantage. Perhaps most importantly, he possessed the political cunning necessary to hold the divided Greeks together and maneuver both allies and enemies into fighting the battle where he wanted it fought.

The result was a devastating Persian defeat. Salamis did not immediately end the Persian invasion, but it destroyed Xerxes’ hopes of conquering Greece by overwhelming force and helped preserve the independence of Athens and the other resisting Greek states.

Strauss is particularly good at reminding us that history is made amid uncertainty. The participants at Salamis did not know they were fighting one of history’s most consequential battles. They were frightened men making difficult decisions while their leaders argued about what to do next.

The Battle of Salamis succeeds as both military history and narrative history. It explains ships, tactics, geography, politics, and personalities without losing sight of the human drama. Above all, it restores Themistocles to the center of the story: a brilliant, difficult, sometimes manipulative leader whose preparation and judgment helped make an improbable Greek victory possible.