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New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Kirkus Reviews Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction) Shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Gift Guide Selection A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A sweeping, "magisterial" history of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists shows why Rome remains "relevant to people many centuries later" (Atlantic). In SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" (Wall Street Journal). Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" (Economist) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" (Christian Science Monitor) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" (Dallas Morning News) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, SPQR will to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come. Read more
Publisher : Liveright; 1st edition (November 9, 2015)
Publication date : November 9, 2015
Language : English
File size : 99641 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
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Top Amazon Reviews
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.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2019 by T. Graczewski
Mary Beard writes in an engaging and easy-to-read style. Reading this book felt like I was "reading" a historical documentary series. My main problem with this book is its organization and presentation. I was looking for a comprehensive history of Rome that would be more interesting to read than a Wikipedia article. Who did what; when did they do it; what were the major accomplishments of each emperor; and what major military battles, religious movements, or political scandals shaped the Roman Empire? Instead, Beard goes for a "snapshot in history" approach: she'll name-drop a few important historical figures, skip explaining why they were important or what they did, and then try to delve into what life was like for ordinary people during that decade or so. This approach is very good at conveying the Roman mindset and lifestyle, but it is not good for actually explaining the history of Rome, which is what I wanted. So many historical events are merely hinted at or glossed over; she spends paragraphs and paragraphs describing the psychological underpinnings of Romulus killing Remus, but never actually relays the story of the founding myth. She name-drops Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Scipio, etc etc, but does very little to explain why they were important. Most frustratingly, she jumps around in the chronology quite frequently; the book starts in 63 BC, then backtracks, then leaps forward. This is NOT a good introductory book for the history of Ancient Rome.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2023 by JGar
I found the book to be interesting. But it leaves out a significant part of AD 100 history, and that is the entry of Christians into Rome civilization. I think there might be three paragraphs referring to this, when I think it deserves far more treatment. In my Parochial school in the 1950's, the nuns taught us that Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire book was blacklisted by the Catholic Church for leaving out this significant material. Especially since eventually the Christians took over the place. And it ends at about AD 250. The author says that somebody else can do the next couple of hundred years, she is DONE. I should note that at the same time, I was reading Isaac Asimov's History of the New Testament, and he had a lot more material about Christians in Rome than this book did.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2023 by Dennis DeMattia
Like a series of lectures rather than a book about Roman history, this book makes the author, as well as the subject, come to life.
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2023 by Paul Kemper
The book covers the history of Rome from its earliest known beginnings to the end of the second century CE. It is not simply a detailed recitation or chronology of events, however. It focuses more on concepts and broadly raises and discusses questions as to how certain events occurred and why they occurred. The one weakness I found in the book is that the author spends a lot of time describing what we think we know about early Rome and then tells us that what we think we know is incorrect, with the end result that the reader is left with the paradoxical conclusion that despite a wealth of sources we really don't know much of anything about early Rome.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2023 by Kindle Customer