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.