SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Author: Mary Beard

I dived into this book with relatively little knowledge about ancient Rome and expected to be much more enlightened after I was done reading it. My experience, however, fell rather short of expectations. While there is no doubt that Ms. Beard is a very knowledgeable historian, she was not able to educate me to any significant degree.

One of the challenging things with history, especially from a thousand years ago, is that there might be vast periods where you have very little written material. In contrast there may also be some periods in our early history where there is an abundance of written documentation, most often by a single person. This makes the view very one sided and you are right to suspect that it raises the possibility that it was produced in the self interest of the author (or the benefactor). Ms. Beard spends a good portion of the book on debunking commonly held wisdom on Roman history especially the stories around how it was originally formed. She also questions a lot of the history that is made popular by Shakespeare’s Roman plays like Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, etc.

While this book did not do much to educate me on Roman History, there are a few nuggets in the book that you are welcome to go on a treasure hunt for.

1. The origin of many popular phrases from roman history like, “et tu, Brute”, “crossing the Rubicon”, etc.
2. Why a lot of early history may be complete falsehood. Since there were no independent eyewitnesses and oftentimes you had a single source of truth or more accurately falsehood, you have no means of corroborating the story. Ms Beard outlines many arguments to demonstrate that some commonly held beliefs from ancient Roman History are likely to be false.
3. How the Romans came up with the notion of a republic complete with elections way back in 600 BC. What is amazing is that it lasted for 500+ years with very little by way of organized police. To this day, we have many countries in the world who can’t seem to break out of some kind of autocracy.
4. The many myths that exist on the formation of Rome.

Unfortunately you will have to comb through 600 pages of dense academic discussion to extract some useful information.