SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome Review
Historian Mary Beard covers the first 1000 years of Roman history, from its humble beginnings when (supposedly) Romulus killed his brother Remus before founding what would become the city of Rome, to around the time when Christianity sunk its fangs into the empire to become its main religion, in SPQR. It sounds exhausting and I’m here to tell you that it’s even worse in the reading! I got through the whole mammoth affair but it wasn’t worth it.
Beard’s core thesis essentially centres around this one question: how did the Romans become such a major player in the ancient world? And the answer is fairly simply: it conquered one group of people in one country after another, taking their land and rebranding the people as Roman citizens. It was the great melting pot, the America, of its day. Simple. Got it. I’m not enough of a Roman historian to argue its veracity but it sounds kosher to me.
Except Beard repeats this point ad infinitum. Oh my word, it becomes beyond tedious to read this same statement again and again as it gets run into the ground over the course of the entire book! Not that she’s much more interesting in other areas. Beard is a scholar and her book tends to read like most academic texts: it’s dry, esoteric and dull, with a tendency to cram in vast amounts of detail that nobody could possibly retain.
Which isn’t to say it’s inaccessible – Beard writes in a way most people will be able to follow – it’s just that a lot of the book focuses on the minutiae of how Roman society operated and that turned out to not be very enthralling. She’s also writing narrative history but completely fails to create a compelling, clear or easy-to-follow overall picture of the first 1000 years of Roman history. She jumps about constantly, going off on tangents, skipping over entire periods - the book is mostly a lethal combination of boring and confusing.
I do appreciate the difficulty of her task. It’s ambitious and I don’t think anyone can condense a millennia’s worth of history into 600 pages, particularly given the huge number of surviving documents from this era. And that’s another thing that really annoyed me: the repetition that a lot of what was written shouldn’t be trusted outright as the Romans had a habit of self-mythologizing. A good historian will only believe something if there’s evidence to back it up. Duuuuh! As a history student myself, that seemed blindingly obvious, and, even if someone reading this isn’t, does it bear mentioning over and over and over and… ?
Her book begins just before the Roman Republic ends and the Roman Empire begins, with the rise of Rome’s most famous ruler, Julius Caesar (before jumping back to the very beginning with the early Roman kings - gah!). And Beard makes the worthwhile note that, though an important point in Rome’s history, it was a superficial change at best - Rome was never a bastion of democracy to begin with (and the ancient form of democracy was immensely different from today’s version of democracy anyway).
It’s the most salient piece of information I learned – I was aware of this before but never had it fully formed in my mind until Beard stated it. The title SPQR - meaning Senātus Populusque Rōmānus ("The Roman Senate and People") – in addition to being an accurate description of the book is cleverly ironic. That was basically it for me unfortunately – what history I didn’t already know felt too bitty, mundane and inconsequential to register.
SPQR is, of course, an informative book but, man alive, I was damn near bored to tears most of the time! It hasn’t killed my interest in the Romans but it has dampened my enthusiasm for the subject for some time. I honestly think I’ve learned more about the Romans from fiction than I have from Beard’s nonfiction. So instead of this, if you’re interested in the Romans, I heartily recommend Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy, Robert Graves’ I, Claudius novels, and even the Asterix comics instead. They too are illuminating but vastly more engaging to read!