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boomerlusink's review
5.0
Given that I DNF'd 3 out of the past 4 nonfiction books I read (with those four attempts spread over 4 years), and even the one I finished I didn't enjoy really at all- this was an easy 5 stars for me.
Readable, insightful, informative, engaging- Beard is my new favorite nonfiction author (though again, that may not be saying much.) Much of the book is structured in a way where bits of history are introduced in the way that Roman historians thought of them, and then Beard goes back through those bits and clarifies what is probably myth, propaganda, misinformation, or just wrong. So in a sense, you get two chances to get a clearer picture of what is going on, which really helped me retain the info.
What I found made a great book excellent was Beard's comments at the end of the book, where she encourages modern folks to refrain from taking lessons straight from the Romans or the Roman world, but rather take lessons by engaging with the Romans and what we know of them. Really smart stuff, and when coupled with the last pages being about the peoples of the Roman provinces from Judea to Roman Britain, and about how these people were able to successfully hold two cultures and backgrounds in their hearts and heads at the same time. To me, and this could be Beard's intention or no, but I recognized perhaps an idealized future for the western world in which incredibly diverse countries like the United States are full of citizens who are concretely and unambiguously American AND something else.
Anyways, a really great book. Hopefully I can keep nonfiction in my roster going into the future.
Readable, insightful, informative, engaging- Beard is my new favorite nonfiction author (though again, that may not be saying much.) Much of the book is structured in a way where bits of history are introduced in the way that Roman historians thought of them, and then Beard goes back through those bits and clarifies what is probably myth, propaganda, misinformation, or just wrong. So in a sense, you get two chances to get a clearer picture of what is going on, which really helped me retain the info.
What I found made a great book excellent was Beard's comments at the end of the book, where she encourages modern folks to refrain from taking lessons straight from the Romans or the Roman world, but rather take lessons by engaging with the Romans and what we know of them. Really smart stuff, and when coupled with the last pages being about the peoples of the Roman provinces from Judea to Roman Britain, and about how these people were able to successfully hold two cultures and backgrounds in their hearts and heads at the same time. To me, and this could be Beard's intention or no, but I recognized perhaps an idealized future for the western world in which incredibly diverse countries like the United States are full of citizens who are concretely and unambiguously American AND something else.
Anyways, a really great book. Hopefully I can keep nonfiction in my roster going into the future.
aseel_reads's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.0
Unfortunately, this audio experience was not good. I kept zoning out, for the life of me, I could not understand how the book was set up, like what was the approach to history, I know it was mentioned, but it just slips my mind. Which is a shame, I know more about ancient Greece and I would like to know a bit about ancient Rome, but I can't say I know more after a 17 hour book
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Violence, Murder, and War
Moderate: Rape and Sexism
Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Animal death, Slavery, Xenophobia, Religious bigotry, Death of parent, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail
catskill_criptid's review
2.0
While full of information often glossed over in histories of Rome, this book was a bust for me. The author jumps back and forth between events that took place hundreds of years apart with not transition, making it very difficult to follow. It also contains the digusting bias of Roman superiority that often plagues those who cover these topics. the worst is when she claimed ancient Roman women had more rights than any other ancient society. I guess to this Roman historian ancient Egypt and the people of Ancient Europe didnt exist until Rome invaded them.
tombuoni's review
A historical survey of what Beard calls the “First Roman Millenium”, SPQR traces the history of the senate and people of Rome from approximately 700 BC to 300 AD. It’s a very long story, but it’s well told - starting from the myths around the founding of Rome (Romulus and Remus, Aneas), the early tribal kings, the rise and fall of the Roman republic, the dynastic Roman Empire through Julius Caesar and Augustus and the subsequent reigns of the Caesars, up until the civil wars, the 212 CE decree when the emperor Caracalla made every free inhabitant of the empire a Roman citizen, the rise of Christianity, and eventual transition of power to Constantinople. Reading this helped me gain a distinction between these different eras of Ancient Rome, showing how it evolved over time. It also helped me gain an appreciation for the challenges of being an historian- since there’s only so much intact writings to go on, and so much of history is “written by the victor”, there’s a lot of research and critical thinking that’s required to read between the lines and consider other perspectives. My third Mary Beard book, after Twelve Caesars and Women in Power, this one is a much more straightforward history, but definitely worth the read.
“It is always worth trying to read any version of Roman history, ‘against the grain’, to prise apart the small chinks in the story using the snatches of other, independent, evidence that we have and to ask if other observers might have seen things differently… In Roman history, as elsewhere, we must always be alert to the other side of the story – which is part of the point of this SPQR.”
“One of the big puzzles about this foundation legend is its claim that two founders were involved, Romulus and Remus… maybe it reflects the fact that later there were always two consuls in Rome.”
“The name ‘Romulus’ is itself a give-away. Although Romans usually assumed that he had lent his name to his newly established city, we are now fairly confident that the opposite was the case: ‘Romulus’ was an imaginative construction out of ‘Roma’. ‘Romulus’ was merely the archetypal ‘Mr Rome’… The Romans had not, as they assumed, simply inherited the priorities and concerns of their founder. Quite the reverse: over centuries of retelling and then rewriting the story, they themselves had constructed and reconstructed the founding figure of Romulus as a powerful symbol of their preferences, debates, ideologies and anxieties.”
“Notwithstanding all kinds of later innovations and refinements, the modern Western calendar remains a direct descendant of this early Roman version, as the names we give to our months show: every single one of them is Roman. Among all the things we fancy we have inherited from ancient Rome, from drains to place names, or the offices of the Catholic Church, the calendar is probably the most important and the most often overlooked.”
“Fabius took command after Cannae, avoided pitched battle with Hannibal and played a waiting game, combining guerrilla tactics with a scorched-earth policy, to wear down the enemy (hence ‘delayer’)… Ennius credited Fabius with ensuring Rome’s survival: ‘One man alone restored the state to us by delaying [cunctando],’ he wrote. George Washington, the ‘American Fabius’, as he has sometimes been called, opted for similar tactics at the start of the American War of Independence, harassing rather than directly engaging the enemy.”
“In 494 BCE, plagued by problems of debt, the plebeians staged the first of several mass walkouts from the city, a combination of a mutiny and a strike, to try to force reform on the patricians. It worked. For it launched a long series of concessions which gradually eroded all the significant differences between patricians and plebeians and effectively rewrote the political power structure of the city. Two hundred years later there was little to patrician privilege beyond the right to hold a few ancient priesthoods and to wear a particular form of fancy footwear… It is hardly surprising that working class movements in many countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a memorable precedent, and some winning rhetoric, in the ancient story of how the concerted action of the Roman people wrung concessions from the hereditary patrician aristocracy and secured full political rights for the plebeians.”
“Polybius saw in Rome a perfect example in practice of an old Greek philosophical ideal: the ‘mixed constitution’, which combined the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The consuls – who had full military command, could summon assemblies of the people and could give orders to all other officials (except the plebeian tribunes) – represented the monarchical element. The senate, which by this date had charge of Rome’s finances, responsibility for delegations to and from other cities and de facto oversight of law and security throughout Roman and allied territory, represented the aristocratic element. The people represented the democratic element. This was not democracy or ‘the people’ in the modern sense: there was no such thing as universal suffrage in the ancient world – women and slaves never had formal political rights anywhere. Polybius meant the group of male citizens as a whole. As in classical Athens, they – and they alone – elected the state officials, passed or rejected laws, made the final decision on going to war and acted as a judicial court for major offences. The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed.”
“In one of the Roman world’s most quoted jibes, the satirist Juvenal, writing at the end of the first century CE, turned his scorn on the ‘mob of Remus’, which – he claimed – wanted just two things: ‘bread and circuses’ (panem et circenses). As the currency of that phrase even now shows, it was a brilliant dismissal of the limited horizons of the urban rabble, presented here as if they were the descendants of the murdered twin: they cared for nothing but the chariot racing and food handouts with which the emperors had bribed, and effectively depoliticised, them.”
“[For Cicero], a group of Bacchantes, the uninhibited, ecstatic, drunken followers of the god Bacchus… could not possibly be used to decorate a library as he wanted: you needed Muses for a library, he explained, not Bacchantes.”
“Every later emperor we shall meet was or at least impersonated Augustus. They used the name Augustus among their imperial titles, and they inherited his personal signet ring, which is supposed to have passed down the line from one to the next.”
“They made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome.”
“Gaius may have been assassinated because he was a monster, but it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated.”
“The philosophical Thoughts of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, cliché as much of it is ('Do not act as if you were going to live 10,000 years. Death hangs over you'), still finds many admirers, buyers and advocates today, from self-help gurus to former US presidents.”
“For the most part the great divide in the Roman world was between the haves and the have-nots: between the tiny minority of people with substantial surplus wealth and a lifestyle somewhere on the scale between very comfortable and extravagantly luxurious, and the vast majority of even the non-slave population, who at best had a modest amount of spare cash (for more food, for an extra room, for cheap jewellery, for simple tombstones), and at worst were destitute, jobless and homeless. About the privileged - the haves - of the Roman world we know a great deal. They were the authors of almost all the literature to survive from antiquity.”
“Latin vocabulary itself captured the idea [of the scorn of labor by the aristocracy]: the desired state of humanity was otium (not so much leisure, as it is usually translated, but the state of being in control of one's own time); 'business' of any kind was its undesirable opposite, negotium ('not otium').”
“Cicero and most of the elite professed to despise wage labour. But for the majority of the urban inhabitants of the Roman world, as now, their job was the key to their identity. It was usually tough. Most people who needed a regular income to survive (and that was most people) worked, if they could, until they died; the army was an exception in having any kind of retirement package, and even that usually involved working a small farm.”
“Elites everywhere tend to worry about places where the lower orders congregate, and - though there was certainly a rough side and some rude talk - the reality of the normal bar was tamer than its reputation. For bars were not just drinking dens but an essential part of everyday life for those who had, at best, limited cooking facilities in their lodgings. As with the arrangement of apartment blocks, the Roman pattern is precisely the reverse of our own: the Roman rich, with their kitchens and multiple dining rooms, ate at home; the poor, if they wanted much more than the ancient equivalent of a sandwich, had to eat out.”
“The citizenship decree was only one element in a wide series of transformations, disruptions, crises and invasions that changed the Roman world beyond recognition in the third century CE. The second Roman millennium - which did not finally end until Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire in the East by the sixth century CE, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE - was grounded on entirely new principles, on a new world order and, for most of the time, on a different religion… Rome in its second millennium was effectively a new state masquerading under an old name. Whether this millennium was one long, slow period of decline; a series of patchy cultural and political changes which eventually transformed the ancient world into the medieval; or an extraordinarily dynamic era of art, architecture and cultural reflection depends on your point of view.”
“I am more and more convinced that we have an enormous amount to learn - as much about ourselves as about the past - by engaging with the history of the Romans, their poetry and prose, their controversies and arguments. Western culture has a very varied in-heritance. Happily, we are not the heirs of the classical past alone.
Nevertheless, since the Renaissance at least, many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury and beauty have been formed, and tested, in dialogue with the Romans and their writing.”
“It is always worth trying to read any version of Roman history, ‘against the grain’, to prise apart the small chinks in the story using the snatches of other, independent, evidence that we have and to ask if other observers might have seen things differently… In Roman history, as elsewhere, we must always be alert to the other side of the story – which is part of the point of this SPQR.”
“One of the big puzzles about this foundation legend is its claim that two founders were involved, Romulus and Remus… maybe it reflects the fact that later there were always two consuls in Rome.”
“The name ‘Romulus’ is itself a give-away. Although Romans usually assumed that he had lent his name to his newly established city, we are now fairly confident that the opposite was the case: ‘Romulus’ was an imaginative construction out of ‘Roma’. ‘Romulus’ was merely the archetypal ‘Mr Rome’… The Romans had not, as they assumed, simply inherited the priorities and concerns of their founder. Quite the reverse: over centuries of retelling and then rewriting the story, they themselves had constructed and reconstructed the founding figure of Romulus as a powerful symbol of their preferences, debates, ideologies and anxieties.”
“Notwithstanding all kinds of later innovations and refinements, the modern Western calendar remains a direct descendant of this early Roman version, as the names we give to our months show: every single one of them is Roman. Among all the things we fancy we have inherited from ancient Rome, from drains to place names, or the offices of the Catholic Church, the calendar is probably the most important and the most often overlooked.”
“Fabius took command after Cannae, avoided pitched battle with Hannibal and played a waiting game, combining guerrilla tactics with a scorched-earth policy, to wear down the enemy (hence ‘delayer’)… Ennius credited Fabius with ensuring Rome’s survival: ‘One man alone restored the state to us by delaying [cunctando],’ he wrote. George Washington, the ‘American Fabius’, as he has sometimes been called, opted for similar tactics at the start of the American War of Independence, harassing rather than directly engaging the enemy.”
“In 494 BCE, plagued by problems of debt, the plebeians staged the first of several mass walkouts from the city, a combination of a mutiny and a strike, to try to force reform on the patricians. It worked. For it launched a long series of concessions which gradually eroded all the significant differences between patricians and plebeians and effectively rewrote the political power structure of the city. Two hundred years later there was little to patrician privilege beyond the right to hold a few ancient priesthoods and to wear a particular form of fancy footwear… It is hardly surprising that working class movements in many countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a memorable precedent, and some winning rhetoric, in the ancient story of how the concerted action of the Roman people wrung concessions from the hereditary patrician aristocracy and secured full political rights for the plebeians.”
“Polybius saw in Rome a perfect example in practice of an old Greek philosophical ideal: the ‘mixed constitution’, which combined the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The consuls – who had full military command, could summon assemblies of the people and could give orders to all other officials (except the plebeian tribunes) – represented the monarchical element. The senate, which by this date had charge of Rome’s finances, responsibility for delegations to and from other cities and de facto oversight of law and security throughout Roman and allied territory, represented the aristocratic element. The people represented the democratic element. This was not democracy or ‘the people’ in the modern sense: there was no such thing as universal suffrage in the ancient world – women and slaves never had formal political rights anywhere. Polybius meant the group of male citizens as a whole. As in classical Athens, they – and they alone – elected the state officials, passed or rejected laws, made the final decision on going to war and acted as a judicial court for major offences. The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed.”
“In one of the Roman world’s most quoted jibes, the satirist Juvenal, writing at the end of the first century CE, turned his scorn on the ‘mob of Remus’, which – he claimed – wanted just two things: ‘bread and circuses’ (panem et circenses). As the currency of that phrase even now shows, it was a brilliant dismissal of the limited horizons of the urban rabble, presented here as if they were the descendants of the murdered twin: they cared for nothing but the chariot racing and food handouts with which the emperors had bribed, and effectively depoliticised, them.”
“[For Cicero], a group of Bacchantes, the uninhibited, ecstatic, drunken followers of the god Bacchus… could not possibly be used to decorate a library as he wanted: you needed Muses for a library, he explained, not Bacchantes.”
“Every later emperor we shall meet was or at least impersonated Augustus. They used the name Augustus among their imperial titles, and they inherited his personal signet ring, which is supposed to have passed down the line from one to the next.”
“They made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome.”
“Gaius may have been assassinated because he was a monster, but it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated.”
“The philosophical Thoughts of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, cliché as much of it is ('Do not act as if you were going to live 10,000 years. Death hangs over you'), still finds many admirers, buyers and advocates today, from self-help gurus to former US presidents.”
“For the most part the great divide in the Roman world was between the haves and the have-nots: between the tiny minority of people with substantial surplus wealth and a lifestyle somewhere on the scale between very comfortable and extravagantly luxurious, and the vast majority of even the non-slave population, who at best had a modest amount of spare cash (for more food, for an extra room, for cheap jewellery, for simple tombstones), and at worst were destitute, jobless and homeless. About the privileged - the haves - of the Roman world we know a great deal. They were the authors of almost all the literature to survive from antiquity.”
“Latin vocabulary itself captured the idea [of the scorn of labor by the aristocracy]: the desired state of humanity was otium (not so much leisure, as it is usually translated, but the state of being in control of one's own time); 'business' of any kind was its undesirable opposite, negotium ('not otium').”
“Cicero and most of the elite professed to despise wage labour. But for the majority of the urban inhabitants of the Roman world, as now, their job was the key to their identity. It was usually tough. Most people who needed a regular income to survive (and that was most people) worked, if they could, until they died; the army was an exception in having any kind of retirement package, and even that usually involved working a small farm.”
“Elites everywhere tend to worry about places where the lower orders congregate, and - though there was certainly a rough side and some rude talk - the reality of the normal bar was tamer than its reputation. For bars were not just drinking dens but an essential part of everyday life for those who had, at best, limited cooking facilities in their lodgings. As with the arrangement of apartment blocks, the Roman pattern is precisely the reverse of our own: the Roman rich, with their kitchens and multiple dining rooms, ate at home; the poor, if they wanted much more than the ancient equivalent of a sandwich, had to eat out.”
“The citizenship decree was only one element in a wide series of transformations, disruptions, crises and invasions that changed the Roman world beyond recognition in the third century CE. The second Roman millennium - which did not finally end until Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire in the East by the sixth century CE, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE - was grounded on entirely new principles, on a new world order and, for most of the time, on a different religion… Rome in its second millennium was effectively a new state masquerading under an old name. Whether this millennium was one long, slow period of decline; a series of patchy cultural and political changes which eventually transformed the ancient world into the medieval; or an extraordinarily dynamic era of art, architecture and cultural reflection depends on your point of view.”
“I am more and more convinced that we have an enormous amount to learn - as much about ourselves as about the past - by engaging with the history of the Romans, their poetry and prose, their controversies and arguments. Western culture has a very varied in-heritance. Happily, we are not the heirs of the classical past alone.
Nevertheless, since the Renaissance at least, many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury and beauty have been formed, and tested, in dialogue with the Romans and their writing.”