SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

"We all love Mary Beard—she’s a bit of a goddess for the Classics department here. She’s done such a great job, I don’t want to say ‘in popularising classics’ because that implies it wasn’t already popular, but she’s certainly kept things relevant. She’s very good both on TV and in fiction and nonfiction at making classics pertinent to the modern day. I’ve seen her on the BBC current affairs programme Question Time a number of times, and she always brings in classical parallels. I think SPQR is a wonderful book. Ancient Roman history is so very dense and intricate that it can be difficult to teach and learn about. Mary Beard makes it accessible—and she goes through it all, from the early days right up until the present day. ‘SPQR’ is just four letters, but interwoven in those four letters are thousands of years and pages of history. Cicero used to talk about the ’ concordia ordinum .’ He said there was a harmony between all the orders in Rome. It’s like a pyramid hierarchy structure. At the top you have the ′ senatus ′ or the Senate—the aristocrats, the rich men who make decisions. Underneath that you have the ’ equites ’ who we don’t talk about as much , but they have their own spheres of power. They’ve got a bit of money and are a lower level. And underneath that you’ve got the ’ populus ’ or the people. SPQR is the harmony between the senatus and the populus and how they work together. That’s where Rome comes from: it’s not just about the Senate. The Senate can’t work without the people and vice versa. So ‘SPQR’ is basically a four-letter summation of the Roman constitution. It’s what it should be, though often isn’t. One of the reasons why—and she writes about this very well—Rome falls apart is because that relationship of harmony and hierarchy does fall apart under Caesar and Pompey in the 1st century BC. She doesn’t give the kings much time of day. Livy is the historian we get most of our information on the kings from, but we can tell that they are at best legendary and at worst mythical. They are more like stories that have been dredged up by the Romans to explain who they are. What she’s good at is looking at these kings and saying, ‘What does this tell us about what was going on at the time?’ We know that, for example, Tarquinius Priscus (the fifth out of seven kings of Rome), was the first king from the Etruscans. Then, two kings later, Tarquinius Superbus (the last king of Rome) gets thrown out by the Romans, who then set up the Republic. “You have to look past the story given to you by history” What was probably happening at this time was that Rome was a small city that was attacked, conquered and brought into an alliance with the more powerful Etruscans to the north. It became part of a bigger Etruscan confederacy that eventually threw off the shackles and defeated the Etruscans. But you have to look past the story given to you by history. She’s good at that; she has this really nice way of trying to find some history from fiction. Yes. For example, with tablets, we assumed the writing or the inscription had been worn away—but we can now use techniques like spectroscopy to tell us what they said. In the ancient Greek world in particular, we’re finding out so much about what daily life was like for ordinary people: not the ones who were writing on parchment for it to be handed down the generations, but the ones who were just writing a bit of graffito on the side of the baths."