{"id":6303,"date":"2015-10-19T11:35:52","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T11:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6303"},"modified":"2015-10-26T11:08:54","modified_gmt":"2015-10-26T11:08:54","slug":"spqr-a-history-of-ancient-rome-by-mary-beard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6303","title":{"rendered":"SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Profile Books 20 October 2015 <\/strong><\/p>\n

608pp, hardback, \u00a325.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What do we think of first, when we think of the Romans? Aqueducts, amphitheatres?\u00a0 Legions, laws? Gladiators? Latin quotations?<\/p>\n

Scholar Mary Beard suggests that we think of the Romans mostly as thugs, especially in comparison with the Greeks. The message of her weighty new history is that this is a gross simplification: \u2018Since 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

Take citizenship.\u00a0 In decreeing in 212 CE that all the free inhabitants of the Roman Empire, from Scotland to Syria, were Roman citizens, the emperor Caracalla completed a process that in Roman myth Romulus had started a thousand years earlier.\u00a0 \u2018Rome\u2019s founding father had been able to establish his new city only by offering citizenship to all comers, by turning foreigners into Romans.\u2019<\/p>\n

Or dissidence.\u00a0 We cannot read first-hand the views of provincial dissidents of the empire, but Roman writers could well imagine what it was like to be one.\u00a0 Famously, during his account of the conquest of Britain, the historian Tacitus has one local chieftain expressing what many must have felt: \u2018Plunder, butchery, theft – they call it empire. They create desolation and call it peace.\u2019 As Beard says: \u2018No one has ever framed a better critique of Roman power than the words put into the mouths of rebels against Rome by Roman writers themselves.\u2019<\/p>\n

Beard takes us through the stages of Rome\u2019s growth, from the stories of Romulus and Remus through the era of the Tarquins to the rise and fall of both Republican Rome and Rome under the emperors.\u00a0 One of the most interesting aspects of the early history is her emphasis on Rome\u2019s small-town beginnings, in relation to which Rome\u2019s eventual imperial reach is all the more astounding.\u00a0 And, although I would have liked a little more on quite how the infrastructure was designed, funded and maintained, we do see the expansion of Rome\u2019s military might, upon which everything else depended.<\/p>\n

It is a feature of this branch of ancient history that we do not see as much of the common man as we might like.\u00a0 For all the charm of glimpses caught in sites such as Pompeii and Herculaneum or Vindolanda on Hadrian\u2019s Wall, we still see Rome largely through the self-revelation of the elite – in their letters and poetry, especially.\u00a0 It may be that, along with Roman roads and the stories memorialized in the histories of the time, and in Western literature ever after, the real legacy of Rome, if we seek to know it in a nutshell, lies in the language they used to think about life in a world they were dominating – and having to organize – from scratch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

We cannot read first-hand the views of provincial dissidents of the empire, but Roman writers could well imagine what it was like to be one. Famously, during his account of the conquest of Britain, the historian Tacitus has one local chieftain expressing what many must have felt: \u2018Plunder, butchery, theft – they call it empire. They create desolation and call it peace.\u2019 As Beard says: \u2018No one has ever framed a better critique of Roman power than the words put into the mouths of rebels against Rome by Roman writers themselves\u2019 […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6303"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6322,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6303\/revisions\/6322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}