SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome is a book detailing much of Rome’s history published in 2015 and written by the historian Mary Beard. Detailed and illuminating, SPQR is a great text for those interested in Rome and the development of empires.
Beard begins the book by writing that Rome had an extremely large impact on civilization and humanity as a whole due to its prevalence. Furthermore, when it comes to Roman history, discoveries are constantly being made regarding artifacts: “we now have a manuscript of a touching essay by a Roman doctor whose prized possessions had just gone up in flames, which resurfaced in a Greek monastery only in 2005. We have wrecks of Mediterranean cargo ships that never made it to Rome, with their foreign sculpture, furniture and glass destined for the houses of the rich, and the wine and olive oil that were the staples of everyone. As I write, archaeological scientists are carefully examining samples drilled from the ice cap of Greenland to find the traces, even there, of the pollution produced by Roman industry. Others are putting under the microscope the human excrement found in a cesspit in Herculaneum, in southern Italy, to itemise the diet of ordinary Romans as it went into-and out of-their digestive tracts. A lot of eggs and sea urchins are part of the answer” (16). This clearly demonstrates that our understanding of history constantly changes. “SPQR” itself translated into “Senatus PopulusQue Romanus,” which translates into “The Senate and People of Rome.” Beard first states that Rome shouldn’t be idealized: though it had many strengths, it was still brutal when it came to colonizing other areas (like most other cities at the time) due to it struggling for survival in the beginning. Beard writes that Roman history demands much intellectual stimulation and experimentation: “In some ways, to explore ancient Rome from the twenty-first century is rather like walking on a tightrope, a very careful balancing act. If you look down on one side, everything seems reassuringly familiar: there are conversations going on that we almost join, about the nature of freedom or problems of sex; there are buildings and monuments we recognise and family life lived out in ways we understand, with all their troublesome adolescents; and there are jokes that we ‘get’. On the other side, it seems completely alien territory. That means not just the slavery, the filth (there was hardly any such thing as refuse collection in ancient Rome), the human slaughter in the arena and the death from illnesses whose cure we now take for granted; but also the newborn babies thrown away on rubbish heaps, the child brides and the flamboyant eunuch priests” (19). Beard moves on to discuss “Cicero’s finest hour,” which took place in 63 BCE: he denounced one of his enemies, Catiline, as supposedly plotting a conspiracy against Rome itself. Beard writes that Catiline was a large threat to Rome: he ran for consul but lost, which thrust him into financial hardship (it takes an exorbitant amount of money to run for that position). As for the reason as to why he lost, Catiline lost the election because the aristocrats didn't want him to distribute money and food to the Roman people. Cicero came across some documents which implicated Catiline in a plot against Rome and proceeded to denounce Catiline in the Senate; Catiline fled the same night. When it comes to portraying the incident, most of the visual representations were quite inaccurate: many paintings (ex. the most famous one by Maccari) presented Cicero as “a white-haired elder statesman, Catiline as a moody young villain, when actually both were in their forties, and Catiline was the elder by a couple of years. Besides, this is far too sparsely attended a meeting; unless we are to imagine more of them somewhere offstage, there are barely fifty senators listening to the momentous speech” (32).
By 63 BC, there were 600 members in the senate. All the senators were men: there was not a single female senator in Roman history due to the patriarchy. By that time, Rome had around 1 million people, and there was much class struggle. Sometime after, Cicero found more evidence for the Catiline conspiracy (I highly recommend you to read my summary of The Assassination of Julius Caesar for another opinion on the Catiline Conspiracy), causing Catiline to amass an army outside of Rome. Cicero then proposed for all suspected conspirators to be imprisoned and executed without trial: his request was fulfilled, and they were subsequently put to death. Catiline’s army was defeated and Catiline killed (he died fighting in front of his allies), ending the threat to Rome. Cicero faced much backlash for executing Romans without trial (many were civilians) and left Rome before he would face charges. Rome is truly amazing in that we know much about it from its various sources: as expected, an empire as large as Rome left behind a gargantuan amount of documents, letters, and data, to the benefit of the study of history as a whole, including the information on the Catiline Conspiracy. Beard tellingly notes that not all of what Cicero said could or should be trusted: he was infamous for viciously slandering his opponents (sometimes he outright lied, as detailed in The Assassination of Julius Caesar). For instance, he said that Catiline was a scoundrel because he gambled all his money away: however, if you look at Rome at the time, there was an economic crisis. Therefore, it is very possible that Catiline wasn’t a gambler: he was short on money, but it might’ve been because of the economy at large, not due to his own personal issues. Catiline himself was portrayed in multiple instances and opinions throughout history: “One medieval tradition in Tuscany has Catiline surviving the battle against the Roman legions and going on, as a local hero, to have a complicated romantic entanglement with a woman called Belisea. Another version gives him a son Uberto, and so makes him the ancestor of the Uberti dynasty in Florence. Even more imaginatively, Prosper de Crébillon’s play Catilina, first performed in the mid eighteenth century, conjures up an affair between Catiline and Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, complete with some steamy assignations in a Roman temple” (49). Indeed, this shows that the way people can be viewed in history can greatly change.
Beard moves on to discuss the origin of Rome. According to legend, the twins Romulus and Remus were the sons of Ares (known in Rome as Mars - Beard states that their mother most definitely had a sexual affair with a human, seeing that the Greek gods probably aren’t real). That is, their mother’s name was Rhea Silvia, who claimed to have been raped by Mars (the Greek gods and goddesses are extremely petty: they sexual assault others, murder large numbers of people and animals for stupid reasons, and have bad tempers - in short, they act like humans, thereby rendering them very disappointing) to protect her reputation, seeing that she was made a virgin priestess against her will (to prevent her from having any heirs, which obviously didn't work in hindsight). Regardless, when the twins were born, they were left to die. Fortunately, they were suckled (fictitiously, of course) by a lupa, or female wolf. A shepherd later found them, and brought them to his wife and raised them as their children, as they were infertile. As stated before, this event is fictitious, but it clearly demonstrates how the Romans viewed their own history: they interpreted reality as a mixture of fact and fiction (to be specific, legend). Romulus and Remus, while deciding where to build their city, got into a fight: Romulus stabbed Remus, killing him. This is quite the foreshadowing, for Rome would be plagued by internal conflicts and even civil wars, as if hearkening from the fratricide which marked its founding. To attract settlers, Romulus said that anyone can come join his city. After having enough men, he lured some women from other cities and areas (most prominently the Sabines) into Rome under the false pretense of a religious holiday. During the festivities, he gave a signal to the male citizens of Rome, who proceeded to rape (besides denoting sexual assault, it also was a synonym for “kidnap”) the women. The families of the Sabine women, outraged that Rome had violated the basic concept of hospitality towards guests, declared war on it. The Sabine women, who probably suffered from Stockholm Syndrome (along with severe emotional stress), begged both sides to stop, as they didn't want any bloodshed. Overall, the women’s requests were heeded: “Not only was peace brought about, but Rome was said to have become a joint Roman-Sabine town, a single community, under the shared rule of Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius. Shared, that is, until a few years later, when, in the kind of violent death that became one of the trademarks of Roman power politics, Tatius was murdered in a nearby town during a riot that was partly of his own making. Romulus became the sole ruler again, the first king of Rome, with a reign of more than thirty years” (64). When it comes to the accuracy of Romulus as a historical figure, it’s true that his “life” (the life many Romans believed he led) was fictitious, seeing that “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 … Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder” (73). Another myth that supposedly tells the origin of Rome is Aeneas: his city, Troy, was sacked by the Greeks, and he fled to Carthage (after carrying his father from Troy on his shoulders). The legend says that once he got to Carthage, he met the Carthaginian queen Dido, who was a widow. Dido and Aeneas fell in love (the legend says that they began an intense relationship after being stuck in a cave together during a rainstorm), but when Aeneas left (he was told by the gods his destiny was to found Rome, not to settle down in Carthage), Dido, heartbroken, supposedly committed suicide by stabbing herself and then jumping onto a funeral pyre. Overall, this story, like the story of Romulus, can be read as appealing to Rome’s preferences and biases: Rome later destroyed Carthage and massacred its inhabitants. In truth, they did so out of fear, envy, and greed. However, to disguise their motives, they adopted the story of Aeneas: Dido supposedly cursed Aeneas after he left to fulfill his destiny, making Carthage the enemy of Rome: this painted Rome as the victim of her pettiness (since, from this angle, she started the enmity between Rome and Carthage), and portrayed her as a hassle and Aeneas as a moral exemplar.
Rome itself had the “Septimontium,” or the “Seven Hills.” They are as follows (the following list has eight names, which is quite contradictory to “Septimontium,” Mary Beard hypothesizes that this could be read as Rome having been formed by eight separate villages): the Palatium, Velia, Fagutal, Subura, Cermalus, Oppius, Caelius, and Cispius. Overall, Rome was said to be founded in 753 BCE, and “by the sixth century BCE … was an urban community, with a centre and some public buildings'' (84). Furthermore, archaeology reveals that Rome was a regular village for quite some time. When it comes to what caused Rome to become the empire it would be known for, one of the main answers was in its method of expansion: as it defeated other areas, it would methodically absorb their resources into itself, expanding its army in the process. Rome’s history as a unique place began with numerous kings. Beard elucidates, “However else we may choose to describe the urban community of the early Romans, it remains somewhere on the spectrum between tiny and small. Population size in what is effectively prehistory is notoriously difficult to estimate, but the best guess is that the ‘original’ population of Rome - at whatever moment was when the aggregate of little settlements started thinking of itself as ‘Rome’ - amounted to at most a few thousand. By the time the last king was thrown out, towards the end of the sixth century BCE, according to standard modern calculations, we are probably dealing with something in the region of 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants. This is only a best guess based on the size of the place, the amount of territory that Rome probably controlled at that point and what population we could reasonably expect it to support. But it is much more likely than the exaggerated totals that ancient authors give. Livy, for example, quotes the very first Roman historian, Quintus Fabius Pictor, who wrote around 200 BCE and claimed that towards the end of the regal period the number of adult male citizens was 80,000, making a total population of well over 200,000. This is a ludicrous figure for a new community in archaic Italy (it is not far short of the total population of the territories of Athens or Sparta at their height, in the mid fifth century BCE), and there is no archaeological evidence for a city of any such size at this time, although the number does at least have the virtue of matching the aggrandising views of early Rome found in all ancient writers” (98). According to myth, the reign of the kings was tumultuous (which was also backed by some historical evidence when it came to the fact that violence was associated with the kings): “Of the seven kings, it was alleged that three were murdered; a divine lightning bolt struck another as punishment for a religious error; and Tarquinius Superbus was expelled. Only two died in their beds. It was the sons of Ancus Marcius, in resentment at being passed over for the throne, who hired the assassins of Tarquinius Priscus. Servius Tullius was murdered for similar reasons by Superbus, who was in league with his victim’s own daughter. In a particularly gruesome twist, the daughter is supposed to have deliberately driven over the dead body with her carriage and brought her father’s blood into her house on its wheels. This theme certainly picks up the idea that civil conflict was embedded in Roman politics … It is worth noting that more than half a millennium later, the first dynasty of new autocrats, the emperors from Augustus to Nero, had a similar, or even worse, record of brutal death, largely murder, or alleged murder, from within the family” (100-1). Regardless, some of the kings did improve Rome greatly: Servius Tullius helped create the census while Numa introduced the idea of peaceful rule, as he used religion (he claimed that his lover, Egeria, was a nymph) to justify the absence of warfare. When it comes to Roman religion, one of the staples was the Vestal Virgins: they were priestesses who were given much autonomy and privileges (they could travel without being escorted by a male, and their words were taken into consideration whenever they were uttered - their main goal was keeping the fire of a certain hearth in the Forum alight, as it is stated that if the fire was to ever go out, Rome would fall into turmoil), though, as their name suggested, they were supposed to be both unmarried and chaste. That is, if they copulated, they would be executed: however, it was believed that shedding the blood of a Vestal Virgin was ill-advised, causing them to be put to death by being buried alive. When it comes to the Roman calendar, their method of keeping time continues to the present day, as “November” means “nine” while “December” means “ten” - while calendars have obviously changed, the basic Roman template is undeniably there.
When it came to political representation, the few rich had almost all the power: “the Centuriate Assembly (so called after the centuries), which in Cicero’s day came together to elect senior officials, including the consuls, and to vote on laws and on decisions to go to war. Each century had just one block vote; and the consequence (or intention) was to hand to the centuries of the rich an overwhelming, built-in political advantage. If they stuck together, the eighty centuries of the richest, first class plus the eighteen centuries of elite cavalry could outvote all the other classes put together. To put it another way, the individual rich voter had far greater voting power than his poorer fellow citizens … The richest citizens were far fewer in number than the poor, but they were divided among eighty centuries, as against the twenty or thirty for the more populous lower classes, or the single century for the mass of the very poorest. Power was vested in the wealthy, both communally and individually” (108). Indeed, this highly inequitable (and indeed, rigged method of representation) continued for all of Rome’s history. However, if there was one advantage the poor got, it was that they were mostly exempt from military service: the rich, including Cicero, viewed political power as going hand-in-hand with military service. Following this logic, the rich, who had something to lose, would serve in the army (they could also afford it), while the mass of Roman citizens, who had basically little to nothing to lose, would rarely join. Some of the kings of Rome were said to be Etruscan, including Tarquinius Superbus, known for his arrogance (hence his last name, “Superbus”). In Beard’s own words, “two things distinguished this group of kings from their predecessors. First was their particularly bloody story: Priscus was murdered by the sons of his predecessor; Servius Tullius was eased on to the throne in a palace coup masterminded by Tanaquil and was eventually murdered by Superbus. Second was their Etruscan connection. For the two Tarquins, this was a case of direct ancestry. Priscus is supposed to have migrated to Rome from the Truscan town of Tarquinii, along with his Etruscan wife, Tanaquil, to seek his fortune” (110). The reign of the potentially Etruscan Tarquins was known as “The Great Rome of the Tarquins,” and it should be noted that while they did complete many projects (ex. the Cloaca Maxima, or the “Greatest Drain”), they frequently did so by exploiting and terrorizing others: “In a particularly lurid, and gloriously fantastical, account, Pliny the Elder (that is, Gaius Plinius Secundus, the extraordinary Roman polymath now best remembered as the one celebrity victim of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE) describes how the people of the city were so exhausted by the construction work on the drain that many killed themselves. The king, in response, nailed the bodies of the suicides to crosses, in the hope that the shame of crucifixion would be a deterrent for others” (120). Tarquinius Superbus was eventually driven out of Rome (ushering in a long and deep-rooted fear of kings and despots) after his son Sextus raped a noblewoman named Lucretia. After Lucretia was raped, she committed suicide, and her friends and family, who were aristocrats, jointly rebelled against the Tarquins. That is, “After ensuring the support of the army and the people, who were appalled by the rape and fed up with labouring on the drain, Lucius Junius Brutus forced Tarquin and his sons into exile” (123). As expected, the Tarquins fought fiercely: after Tarquinius Superbus was forced out, he allied himself with King Lars Porsenna of the Etruscan town of Clusium. He attempted to take Rome back for himself, but failed due to the bravery of the inhabitants, including Horatius Cocles (who supposedly single-handedly stopped the Etruscan army from advancing by fighting fiercely on a bridge) and Cloelia (she was taken as a hostage, but managed to escape with other prisoners and even returned when Lars Porsenna demanded her to come back, much to his surprise). There was also Scaevola, or “lefty,” an assassin who was supposed to murder Lars Porsenna: when he was caught (he murdered by stabbing one of Lars Porsenna’s officials, seeing that he couldn’t ask people where Lars Porsenna was due to the risk of appearing suspicious), he shoved his right hand into a fire, burning it severely, to show Lars Porsenna he doesn’t fear what he might do to him. Lars Porsenna, impressed, let him go free. It is rumoured that Lars Porsenna might’ve become a king of Rome, while the standard tale states that Tarquin was eventually defeated at the Battle of Lake Regillus, marking his total defeat.
When Tarquinius Superbus was finally defeated, Rome declared itself a republic: the leaders of Rome were two consuls (there were two of them so they could each guarantee the other wasn’t acting like a despot). The term “king” became an extremely offensive term in Roman society (even later Roman emperors generally wouldn’t dare to call themselves that). Despite this, Rome remained a highly inequitable society: even though the concept of libertas (liberty) was established, one of the main questions was who should enjoy that liberty. That is, should slaves, freedmen, and plebeians also enjoy that privilege, or is it only for the aristocrats? These questions would continue for the rest of Rome’s history, clearly demonstrating the importance of the distribution of wealth. Mary Beard writes that when the Republic formed, Rome was struggling. To deal with this issue, a series of laws known as the Twelve Tables was formed. The Twelve Tables not only consisted of rules for people to follow, but they also clarified the appropriate punishments for certain crimes and misdemeanors (ex. not being able to pay a debt) and how different classes of people should be treated. In Beard’s own words, “There were hierarchies within the free citizen population too. One clause draws a distinction between patricians and plebeians, another between assidui (men of property) and proletarii (those without property - whose contribution to the city was the production of offspring, proles). Another refers to ‘patrons’ and ‘clients’ and to a relationship of dependency and mutual obligation between richer and poorer citizens that remained important throughout Roman history. The basic principle was that the client depended on his patron for protection and assistance, financial and otherwise, in return for a variety of services rendered, including votes in elections … In the Twelve Tables, the rule simply states: ‘If a patron has done harm to his client, he is to be cursed’ - whatever that meant” (144). Beard also elucidates, “For the most part, the Twelve Tables confront domestic problems, with a heavy focus on family life, troublesome neighbours, private property and death. They lay down procedures for the abandonment or killing of deformed babies … for inheritance and for the proper conduct of funerals” (144). Sometime after the beginning of the Republic and the establishment of the Twelve Tables, the plebeians recognized that they were being excluded from politics by the wealthy. Angry, they left Rome multiple times (they organized mass walkouts). The aristocrats, terrified, made some concessions by introducing the office of the tribune (powerful officials in this position can literally shut down the government with their veto to protest abusive measures on the part of the aristocrats). Also, more public offices were open to the idea of commoners joining. However, the aristocrats still fought back: they said that commoners can’t marry aristocrats, and went so far to defend the rich sexually assaulting people (even young and betrothed people for the sick pleasure of the rapists). In one instance, “the patrician Appius Claudius (a great-great-grandfather of the road builder) demanded sex with a young plebeian woman, the aptly named Virginia, unmarried but betrothed. Deception and corruption followed. Appius suborned one of his hangers-on to claim that she was his slave, who had been stolen by her so-called father. The judge in his case was Appius himself … and strode through the Forum to grab Virginia. In the arguments that followed, her father, Lucius Virginius, picked up a knife from a nearby butcher’s stall and stabbed his daughter to death: ‘I am making you free, my child, in the only way I can,’ he shouted” (149). In response to the death of Virginia, the aristocrats faced more setbacks, though the Twelve Tables remained largely intact in their power. Rome continued to expand, absorbing much territory, and fought in many wars that cost a huge number of lives. For instance, Alexander the Great fought with the Romans, and was able to lead a huge struggle against the Romans in his quest for territory. Although he didn't succeed in his conquest, he still clearly affected the Romans: Beard describes that the Roman historian Livy basically wrote down (in different words, of course) that “Alexander … was a great general … But the Romans had the advantage of not depending on a single charismatic leader. They had depth in their command, supported by extraordinary military discipline. They also, he insisted, could call on far greater numbers of well-trained troops and - thanks to Roman alliances throughout Italy - summon reinforcements more or less at will. His answer, in short, was that, if given the chance, the Romans would have beaten Alexander” (161). Beard reiterates that although Rome was very belligerent, other nations acted in the same way. Furthermore, their expansion was unplanned and largely accidental in its massive success: “No Roman cabal in the fourth century BCE sat down with a map, plotting a land grab in the territorial way that we associate with imperialist nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries … These Romans saw their expansion more in terms of changing relationships with other peoples than in terms of control of territory … Yet Roman dominion was primarily over people, not places. As Livy saw, the relations that the Romans formed with those people were the key to the dynamics of early Roman expansion” (163).
As stated before, Romans required subjugated towns and cities to give soldiers to strengthen the army. Remarkably, the Romans didn't persecute many of the towns they entered, as they assimilated them fairly easily into itself: they largely left the new territories alone, seeing that “they had no Roman occupying forces or Roman-imposed government” (164). Overall, “The results may have been unintended, but they were groundbreaking. For this system of alliances became an effective mechanism for converting Rome’s defeated enemies into part of its growing military machine; and at the same time it gave those allies a stake in the Roman enterprise, thanks to the booty and glory that were shared in the event of victory. Once the Romans’ military success started, they managed to make it self-sustaining, in a way that no other ancient city had ever systematically done. For the single most significant factor behind victory at this period was not tactics, equipment, skill or motivation. It was how many men you could deploy. By the end of the fourth century BCE, the Romans had probably not far short of half a million troops available (compare the 50,000 or so soldiers under Alexander in his eastern campaigns, or perhaps 100,000 when the Persians invaded Greece in 481 BCE). This made them close to invincible in Italy: they might lose a battle, but not a war” (164). When it came to the new territories, Rome differed in which they offered full citizenship and those which they viewed only as colonies. While only a few were seen as fully Roman, most had “Latin rights,” which consisted of “intermarriage with Romans, mutual rights to make contracts, free movement … It was a halfway house between having full citizenship and being a foreigner, or hostis” (165). Ultimately, Roman resourcefulness and pragmatism allowed it to become a military powerhouse. However, when it came to what caused Rome to expand as such, there is no clear answer, although a cause which is quite likely can be fear of foreign tribes invading. Furthermore, Beard describes that some of the important wars which Rome participated in involved the ones with Pyrrhus (a brilliant military general - he was named as the 2nd best military leader by Hannibal of Carthage himself, and was noted to have utilized elephants for the sole purpose of intimidation) and the ones with Carthage (there were three in total, and they were known as the “Punic Wars'' - the Third Punic War saw the complete annihilation of Carthage and most of its inhabitants). Overall, the Roman tendency to control foreign colonies (especially ones in Africa) took place over small periods of time, as their efforts to subjugate other areas was largely unplanned (and therefore haphazard and difficult to predict). Rome could be extremely greedy, and utilized taxation to extract much of the wealth of lands they conquered: “They imposed vast cash indemnities on some states, a total of more than 600 tonnes of silver bullion in the first half of the second century BCE alone. Elsewhere they took over the ready-made regular taxation regimes set up by earlier rulers. Occasionally they devised new ways of raking off rich revenues. The Spanish silver mines, for example, once part of Hannibal’s domain, were soon producing so much more ore that the environmental pollution from its processing can still be detected in datable samples extracted from deep in the Greenland ice cap … The Romans’ form of political control were equally varied, ranging from hands-off treaties of ‘friendship’, through the taking of hostages as a guarantee of good behaviour, to the more or less permanent presence of Roman troops and Roman officials” (195-6). For instance, Macedon, which was ruled by King Perseus, was split into four separate states which all paid tax to Rome in an attempt to keep it from rebelling against Rome (their mines were also closed, wiping out a key way they made money). Overall, the Roman Empire was coercive: if provinces don’t submit, they can expect swift and brutal military interference. To demonstrate, when the king known as Antiochus invaded Egypt for the second time, the Egyptians asked the Romans for assistance. “A Roman envoy, Gaius Popilius Laenas, was dispatched and met Antiochus outside Alexandria. After his long familiarity with the Romans, the king no doubt expected a rather civil meeting. Instead, Laenas handed him a decree of the senate instructing him to withdraw from Egypt immediately. When Antiochus asked for time to consult his advisors, Laneas picked up a stick and drew a circle in the dust around him. There was to be no stepping out of that circle before he had given his answer. Stunned, Antiochus meekly agreed to the senate’s demands. This was an empire of obedience” (197).
Although Rome relied on strict control, it still saw much diversity: so many people were being assimilated into Rome (aside from the civilians, you have captured enemy soldiers and the slaves of the countries defeated) that there was an influx of the Roman population. To be exact, most of the people who were forcibly brought back to Rome were made slaves. This leads to another point: Rome was unique as a society because it was possible for slaves to earn their freedom and to become Roman citizens (they would be known as freedmen - though they wouldn’t have full Roman rights, they would still have a significant number). However, while a significant number of slaves were able to earn their freedom (not proportionally: only on an absolute numerical scale), many remained in servitude for the rest of their lives. Slaves were frequently tortured, beaten, and sexually abused by their masters: their situation is not to be romanticized, even if they did have a chance at liberation. As expected, another major change Rome saw with the large influx of people is what truly defined Roman culture: there was no clear answer, causing some Romans to choose a few traditions (or they would make some up) to have something which would separate them from foreigners who were sometimes mocked as “barbarians.” After Carthage was destroyed, Rome proceeded to destroy Corinth, “nearly 1,000 miles from Carthage, and the richest city in Greece” (210). As could be noted, after Corinth and Carthage were gone, Rome had few competitors, which caused it to become greedy: the wealthy oppressed the poor citizens even more. Tribunes like the Gracchi brothers (Tiberius and Gaius) were callously murdered by the aristocrats (along with hundreds to thousands of their allies). The Triumvirate was eventually formed in the 60s BCE by three people - Crassus (absurdly rich - he made most of his money by buying houses which were on fire at a bargain price, only to put the flames out once he has it, generating a large profit), Julius Caesar (a brilliant tactician, politician, and author), and Pompey (also a military commander, was famous for largely getting rid of the threat of pirates). Beforehand, Rome suffered from internal issues: some people who were assimilated into it rebelled. That is, there was the “Italian question,” which focused on whether some of the people of Italy should be counted as Romans. Beard describes, “In the autumn of 91 BCE the proposal of one Marcus Livius Drusus to extend citizen rights more widely in Italy ended with him being murdered at home, knifed as he was saying goodbye to a crowd of visitors. That murder heralded full-blown war on a terrible scale. The tipping point came at the end of 91 BCE, when a Roman envoy insulted the people of Asculum in central Italy. They responded by killing him and all the other Romans in the town … it involved fighting throughout much of the peninsula, including at Pompeii, where the marks of the battering by Roman artillery in 89 BCE can be seen even now on the city walls. The Romans invested enormous forces to defeat the Italians and won victory at the cost of heavy losses and considerable panic … most of the conflict was over relatively quickly, within a couple of years. Peace was apparently hastened by one simple expedient: the Romans offered full citizenship to those Italians who had not taken up arms against Rome or were prepared to lay them down” (237). The Italian question caused Rome to extend citizenship to more people. Soon after, a general named Sulla (who was sadistic and brutal) became the leader of Rome after entering it with his army, and he murdered thousands of people due to their politics not lining up with him. Beard discusses Spartacus’s slave rebellion: though his force was to be reckoned with, it was not enough to face Rome (Spartacus, to clarify, was a gladiator whose forces were composed of both slaves and gladiators). That is, when his army was defeated, those who were captured were crucified along the Appian Way to serve as a stern warning when it came to future treason. Beard writes that Rome’s conquering of other areas would almost always be followed by corruption and mistreatment of the native population: though officials like Verres (a man who was infamous for his despicable behavior towards the people he was supposed to be governing) were loathed, most of the military commanders who took over other lands were just like him. Rome eventually faced off against Jugurtha, a leader of a force in North Africa. Gaius Marius, a “new man” (he didn't come from an already rich family, to the displeasure of the aristocrats) became the consul multiple times to deal with Jugurtha. To deal with the foreign threat, Gaius Marius recruited soldiers not just from the wealthy, but from all walks of life: by doing so, Marius “created a dependent, quasi-professional Roman army, which destabilised domestic politics for eighty years or so. These new-style legions increasingly relied on their commanders not only for a share of the booty but also for a settlement package, preferably of land, at the end of their military service, which would give them some guarantee of making a living in the future … Where the land for these soldiers was to come from, and at whose expense, became a perennial problem … the soldiers exchange absolute loyalty to their commander for the promise of a retirement package - in a trade-off that at best bypassed the interests of the state and at worst turned the legions into a new style of private militia focused entirely on the interests of their general. When the soldiers of Sulla, and later of Julius Caesar, followed their leader and invaded the city of Rome, it was partly because of the relationship between legions and commanders forged by Marius” (268).
Marius won his war against Jugurtha, and won another war for Rome (against Germans across the Alps). He died at an elderly age (around seventy-years). Beard goes back to the Triumvirate, and discusses Caesar as well as Pompey (for Pompey, as stated before, just know that he did the remarkable feat of getting rid of pirates in the Mediterranean by using massive military force): Caesar went to Gaul to deal with the Roman fear of outside invaders, and “laid the foundations for the political geography of modern Europe, as well as slaughtering up to a million people over the whole region. It would be wrong to imagine that the Gauls were peace-loving innocents brutally trampled by Caesar’s forces. One Greek visitor in the early first century BCE had been shocked to find enemy heads casually pinned up at the entrance to Gallic houses, though he conceded that, after a while, once got used to the sight … Yet the mass killing of those who stood in Caesar’s way was more than even some Romans could take … Pliny the Elder, trying later to arrive at a headcount of Caesar’s victims, seems strikingly modern in accusing him of a ‘a crime against humanity.’” (284-5). Caesar, after defeating the Gallic leader Vercingoterix, refused to go back to Rome without his army (he knew he would most likely be put on trial for his actions in Gaul and the fear of the aristocrats when it came to his populist attitude); he crossed the Rubicon with his army across Rome, launching four years of civil war. In the civil war, Caesar defeated his previous ally Pompey (Pompey was later murdered by a young Egyptian pharaoh who was urged by a court official to have Pompey killed, as they believed that Caesar would appreciate the gesture - they were wrong, as Caesar had the assassins executed after he was shown Pompey’s decapitated head) and became the dictator of Rome (the first emperor, so to speak). He was assassinated by some senators on March 15th, 44 BCE. Beard writes that Caesar was an innovative individual: although he was responsible for multiple mass slaughters, he frequently tried to make allies out of his enemies by offering them mercy if they were to join his side, a policy known as clementia. Ironically, Brutus and some of the other senatorial assassins were allowed to live only by Caesar’s decree, which ended up badly for Caesar himself. Beard acknowledges that the senators were definitely motivated by self-interest, though they probably believed in a romanticized version of Rome. She states that “If the assassination of Julius Caesar became a model for the effective removal fo a tyrant, it was also a powerful reminder that getting rid of a tyrant did not necessarily dispose of tyranny. Despite all the slogans, the bravado and the high principles, what the assassins actually brought about, and what the people got, was a long civil war and the permanent establishment of one-man rule” (296).
Beard writes of Roman marriage: although the patriarchy frequently deluded itself into believing that Roman women were happy and glad to be married, that was most untrue, as women had virtually no rights in Roman society. Furthermore, child brides were very common (one gravestone that commemorates the memory of a Roman couple states that the husband fell in love with the wife when she was only seven), and many Roman wives were married as teenagers (or beforehand). Cicero himself married a woman who was forty-five years younger than him, an astonishing age difference. As expected, childbirth was extremely dangerous in Rome, seeing how it “was always the biggest killer of young adult women at Rome, from senators’ wives to slaves. Thousands of such deaths are recorded … To put this in a wider perspective, statistics available from more recent historical periods suggest that at least one in fifty women were likely to die in childbirth, with a higher chance if they were very young” (313-4). The biggest killers involving childbirth were infection, haemorrhaging, and obstruction, causing most women to depend “on the support of midwives. Beyond that, interventionist obstetrics probably only added to the danger. Caesarian sections, which despite the modern myth had no connection with Julius Caesar, were used simply to cut a live foetus out of a dead or dying woman. For cases where the baby was completely obstructed, some Roman doctors recommended inserting a knife into the mother and dismembering the foetus in the womb, a procedure which few women could probably have come through safely” (314). As expected, if there were problems in a couple’s attempts to have children, the woman would be usually blamed. Furthermore, a contributing reason as to why so many women died of complications was that they had no access to contraception: huge numbers of women had numerous consecutive pregnancies. Furthermore, babies which were born deformed, disabled, or weak would be left in the wilderness to die or simply thrown into a pile of garbage to die of starvation and dehydration (at that point, it would’ve been more merciful to directly kill it to spare it unnecessary pain). When it came to the children, half of them died before the age of ten. However, “According to the same figures, a ten-year-old would on average have another forty years of life left, and a fifty-year-old could reckon on fifteen more. The elderly were not as rare as you might think in ancient Rome. But the high death rate among the very young also had implications for women’s pregnancies and family size. Simply to maintain the existing population, each woman on average would have needed to bear five or six children. In practice, that rises to something closer to nine when other factors, such as sterility and widowhood are taken into account. It was hardly a recipe for widespread women’s liberation” (316-7). Beard then writes that money was extremely important in Rome (like most other societies, obviously). Cicero made most of his money by charging rent (like many other aristocrats who sneered on the poor for their “laziness,” despite the fact that they did little to no work themselves, as they simply manipulated the intricacies of the existing system for their selfish reasons). Furthermore, the wealthy identified with where they lived, as their houses were their own private space. Cicero himself owned around twenty slaves, though in truth, “The servicing of twenty properties suggests an absolute minimum staff of 200 … It says a lot about the invisibility of slaves to the master that Cicero pays no attention to the vast majority of them. Most of those he does mention in his letters are, like the message boys and secretaries, concerned with the production and delivery of the letters themselves” (329). Overall, Beard states that “there might have been between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy in the middle of the first century BCE, making up perhaps 20 per cent of the total population” (329). The living situations of the slaves varied greatly: though many suffered from cruel and harsh conditions (especially the ones which worked in mines - the death rates were extremely high), some who were comparatively “lucky” lived with wealthy aristocrats. Some slaves, as stated before, were freed, which only increased the social anxiety and xenophobia of certain Romans: for instance, during Nero’s reign, a proposal to help identify slaves by making them wear uniforms was quickly silenced, as it was alleged that Nero didn't want the slaves to know just how numerous they were.
After Antony and Octavius (later to be known as Augustus) defeated Brutus and Cassius, wiping out their forces, Octavius defeated Antony at the naval battle of Actium. Antony and Cleopatra later committed suicide, leaving Octavius the undisputed ruler of Rome. When it came to Roman warfare, it should be noted that the Romans utilized quite advanced technology, including projectiles which needed to be placed on catapults to work. These “bullets” would frequently have messages on them, some of which were ironic and insulting. As Beard describes, “earlier Greek specimens appear with the equivalent of ‘Gotcha’ or ‘Ouch,’ and some from the Social War declare … ‘In your gut’. But the bullets from Perugia are far more eloquent. Some are taunting: ‘You’re famished and pretending not to be’, reads a message lobbed into the city, where starvation eventually led to surrender. Several others carry brutally obscene messages aimed at predictable parts of the anatomy of their different targets, male and female: ‘Lucius Antonius you baldy, and you too, Fulvia, open your arsehole’; ‘I’m going for Madam Octavius’ arsehole’; or ‘I’m going for Fulvia’s clitoris’ (landica, the earliest attested use of the term in Latin). The unsettling overlap of military and sexual violence, plus the standard Roman potshot at a receding hairline, is probably typical of the ribaldry found on the legionary front line: part bravado, part aggression, part misogyny, part ill-concealed fear” (345). Antony as the emperor increased the privileges of the wealthy, and even tried to punish certain individuals if they didn't produce enough offspring (reminiscent of parasitic behavior - parasites and diseases like cancer focus on multiplying themselves as much as possible: however, they’re not conscious of what they’re doing, while humans are a different matter entirely). Aside from that, he portrayed himself as a god, placing statues and portraits of himself all over Rome. He also focused heavily on reconstructing buildings and temples. Furthermore, Augustus “secured his position by severing the links of dependence and personal loyalty between armies and their individual commanders, largely thanks to a simple, practical process of pension reform. This must count among the most significant innovations of his whole rule. He established uniform terms and conditions of army employment, fixing a standard term of service of sixteen years (soon raised to twenty) for legionaries and guaranteeing them on retirement a cash settlement at public expense amounting to about twelve times their annual pay or an equivalent in land. That ended once and for all the soldiers’ reliance on their generals to provide for their retirement … In other words, after hundreds of years of a semi-public, semi-private militia, Augustus fully nationalised the Roman legions and removed them from politics. Although the Praetorian Guard continued to be a problematic political force, simply because of its proximity to the centre of power in Rome, only during two brief periods of civil war over the next two centuries, in the years 68 to 69 CE and again in 193 CE, were legions stationed outside the city instrumental in putting their candidates on the Roman throne" (371).
Augustus’s attempt to nationalize the army and to decrease the power of certain generals was extremely expensive: it cost around 450 million sesterces, which was more than half the total annual tax revenue of Rome. To deal with the issue, the age to receive pension and land was increased repeatedly. Augustus’s reign also saw the beginning of the emperors and the death of whatever was left of the Roman Republic: Augustus won the Senate over by bribery and promises of wealth and power. In return, the senators became his cronies. His successor (of the Julio-Claudian dynasty) was very hard to decide, as he had no biological children. In the end, his wife Livia’s son Tiberius (from a previous marriage) became the emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in 14 CE. It was rumoured that Livia murdered other potential successors to guarantee that her son Tiberius would become the emperor of Rome (one of her supposed victims was stated to have been under her care - while he was young and strong, he died of a stomach ailment, causing some to believe that Livia poisoned his food to murder him to make way for her son). One of the emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty was the infamous Gaius (known best as “Caligula,” or “Bootikins”) who was noted for his depravity: “His incest with his sisters and his mad plans to make his horse a consul have become notorious. His vanity building projects have been placed somewhere on the spectrum between an affront to the laws of nature and ludicrous display. (Imagine him, as more than one ancient writer pictures the scene, prancing on horseback along a roadway constructed on top of a bridge of boats across the Bay of Naples, wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great …) His valiant soldiers were disgracefully humiliated by being made to hunt for seashells on a French beach … On one famous occasion he was caught bursting into laughter at a palace dinner party when he was reclining next to the two consuls. ‘What’s the joke?’ one asked politely. ‘Just the thought that I would only have to nod and your throats would be cut on the spot,’ came the reply” (392). Expectedly, the Praetorian Guard eventually had enough of his intense stupidity and depravity and murdered him (Caligula believed he was a god, so his assassination proved to him that he wasn’t a deity after all). After his murder, the Praetorian Guard established Claudius as the emperor: fortunately, Claudius wasn’t nearly as depraved as Caligula. It should be noted that while it was very likely for Cailuga to have been depraved, there was definitely a large degree of exaggeration, miscommunication, and misunderstanding. As Beard describes herself, “Some of these tales are simply implausible. Leaving aside his histrionics in the Bay of Naples, could he really have built a huge bridge in Rome from the Palatine Hill to the Capitoline Hill of which no sure trace remains? Almost all our stories were written years after the emperor’s death, and the most extravagant look weaker the more they are examined. The one about the seashells may well go back to a confusion about the Latin word musculi, which can mean both ‘shells’ and ‘military huts’. Were the soldiers actually dismantling a temporary camp and not on a shell hunt? And the first surviving reference to incest is found only at the end of the first century CE, while the clearest evidence for it seems to be his deep distress at the death of his sister Drusilla, which is hardly clinching proof of sexual relations. The idea of some modern writers that his dinner parties came close to orgies, with his sisters ‘underneath’ him and his wife ‘on top’, rests simply on a mistranslation of the words of Suetonius, who is referring to the place settings - ‘above’ and ‘below’ - at a Roman dining table” (396). Beard states that moderation is needed when it comes to coming up with an opinion for people like Caligula: “It would be naive to imagine that Gaius was an innocent and benevolent ruler, horribly misunderstood or consistently misrepresented. But it is hard to resist the conclusion that, whatever kernel of truth they might have, the stories told about him are an inextricable mixture of fact, exaggeration, wilful misinterpretation and outright invention - largely constructed after his death, and largely for the benefit of the new emperor, Claudius, whose legitimacy on the throne depended partly on the idea that his predecessor had been rightfully eliminated … To put it another way, 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” (397). Beard concedes that if the stories were actually true, Caligula would be both a psychopath and a Stalin: regardless, despite his assassination, the rule of emperors continued unabated.
While it was probably true that Caligula was a very screwed-up ruler, Claudius himself was responsible for many atrocities: he had 35 senators and 300 equestrians executed. All in all, Beard writes that emperors were greatly identical (they were all technically despots and thereby had the potential to commit egregious crimes), and assassinations were only momentary hassles rather than major interruptions to the trend of the rule of the emperors. Beard writes that when it comes to the emperors, historians have frequently viewed them extremely, classifying some as “good” and others as “bad” despite the small intricacies of their respective reigns. For instance, even Marcus Aurelius the Stoic emperor was responsible for much bloodshed: “And some of the modern admirers of the gentle philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius would be less admiring if they reflected on the brutality of his suppression of the Germans, proudly illustrated in the scenes of battle that circle their way up his commemorative column that still stands in the centre of Rome” (402). To be more specific, the brutality mentioned was the decapitation of prisoners of war (though, to be fair, decapitation was probably the most merciful method of execution then, as some of the others included mutilation and protracted agony, such as crucifixion, disembowelment, and hanging). Another emperor, Hadrian, noted for being involved in the management of the Roman government and for his impressive creation, Hadrian’s Wall, also had a petty, sadistic side: he had an expert architect executed over a simple disagreement when it came to a building’s design. Regardless, the emperors followed the numerous examples of Augustus when it came to demonstrating their power: “Vespasian’s most famous construction, the amphitheatre inaugurated under his son Titus in 80 CE, cleverly combined all three aims. Eventually known as the Colosseum, from a colossal statue of Nero that stood close by and lasted long after Nero’s end, this was simultaneously a massive building project (it took almost ten years to finish, using 100,000 cubic metres of stone), a commemoration of his victory over Jewish rebels (the booty from the war paid for it) and a conspicuous act of generosity to the Roman people (the most famous popular entertainment venue ever). It was also a criticism of his predecessor, pointedly built on the site that had once belonged to Nero’s private park” (413). One of the biggest issues the emperors faced was succession, seeing how Augustus “had left the role of the senate and the relationship between the emperor and the rest of the elite highly contested” (413). Despite the thorny issue of succession, there were fourteen emperors for almost two-hundred years, clearly demonstrating the potential of the Roman government. Regardless, assassination was an issue that most emperors feared, as quite a few died from that exact cause, the most infamous being Caligula, Nero, and Domitian. Furthermore, succession was frequently made possible with said assassinations: other times, rulers adopted potential leaders. As Beard stated, “It was not at all surprising that Augustus and his successors in the Julio-Claudian dynasty used adoption, as other elite families sometimes did, to mark out their favoured heir among the wider group of relatives. Hence Augustus adopted his grandsons and, when they died, did the same thing with Livia’s natural son, Tiberius; Claudius likewise adopted his wife’s son, Nero. But from the end of the first century CE there was a new pattern. When Domitian was assassinated in 96 CE, the senate offered the throne to the elderly and childless Nerva … Between Nerva and Marcus Aurelius heirs to the throne were selected and adopted without obvious concern for family relationships. Some had no link to the existing emperor by blood or marriage at all, or only a remote one … Trajan, the first such adoptee, was originally from Spain; the families of others came from either there or Gaul. They were the descendants of early Roman settlers abroad, who had probably married into the local communities, rather than from the indigenous population. But, in a way that dramatically fulfilled the Roman project of incorporation, they made the point that the emperor could come from the provinces of the empire” (418). This system lasted for most of the 2nd century CE, and popularized the concept of adoption: however, rulers still tried to produce biological offspring before resorting to adoption when it came to their heirs.
One of the main themes to living like an emperor was being honored as a god: generally, the names of the current Roman emperor would be incorporated into prayers, religious ceremonies, and sacrifices. However, though the emperor would be treated like a god, it was greatly discouraged for them to declare that they were so: Romans, noted humorously by Beard, knew the difference between a human and a deity. After their deaths, emperors would be given lavish burials. If the emperor was an impressive or important one, they could be deified by the Senate and other government officials. This phenomenon was critiqued by the emperor Vespasian: as he lay dying, he quipped, “Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god.” In another instance, “The whole process of becoming, or not becoming, a god is the theme of a long skit probably written in the mid 50s CE by Lucius Annaeus Seneca - Nero’s one time tutor and later victim, reputedly on the margins of a conspiracy against him, and forced to a difficult suicide. He was so old and dessicated that, according to another ghastly set piece from Tacitus, he found it hard to get enough blood to flow from his slashed arteries. The subject of his skit is the attempt of the emperor Claudius to be admitted to the company of the gods. We find him, just having died (last words: ‘Oh dear, I think I’ve shat myself …’), limping up to heaven to join the gods. Things look promising at first, especially when Hercules is the first deity to greet him, quoting Homer, which impresses the dead emperor. But when the adjudication of his case begins, the divine Augustus, giving his maiden speech in the heavenly senate (the implication is that deified emperors are rather low in the pecking order), holds up Claudius’ vicious cruelty against him: ‘This man, fellow senators, who looks to you as if he couldn’t hurt a fly, used to kill people as easily as a dog squats.’ And there is a dark reference to those thirty-five senators put to death … in this fantasy he fails the test, and a tailor-made punishment is devised for him. Given his known passion for gambling, he is to spend eternity shaking dice in a bottomless dice shaker. Or that is exactly what would have happened, had not the emperor Gaius [Caligula] appeared from nowhere, claimed Claudius as his slave and handed him over to one of his staff to work for eternity as a very junior secretary in the imperial legal department” (432-4). Overall, this shows that even emperors weren’t immune to satire and comedy, though it was generally safer to make fun of dead ones than those which were still living.
Beard proceeds to discuss the highly inequitable standards of living of Rome: while the emperors and the aristocrats lived extremely luxurious lives, the majority of Roman citizens were poor (they lived in extremely cramped apartments, and were especially susceptible to fires, disease, and crime). Even farmers, who were supposed to produce the food of the Roman Empire, would frequently struggle to make ends meet: “The majority of the 50 million [Roman citizens] would have been peasant farmers, not the fantasy creations of Roman writers but smallholders across the empire, struggling to grow enough to feed themselves in some years, doing better, with a small surplus to sell, in others. For these families, Roman rule made little difference, beyond a different tax collector, a bigger economy into which to sell their produce and a wider range of trinkets to buy if they had any spare cash. In Britain, for example, so far as we can tell from the archaeological traces, there was little significant change in the lives of peasant farmers over more than a millennium, from the end of the Iron Age immediately before the successful Roman invasion in 43 CE, through the Roman occupation, and into the Middle Ages … The only ordinary people in the Roman world we can get to know … or whose style of life we can begin to reconstruct, are those who lived in the towns and cities” (442-3). Going back to inequity, while aristocrats had their children studying subjects like rhetoric and philosophy (said philosophy was frequently used to justify things like slavery: Aristotle and Plato both expressed their affirmations of slavery in their writings), most children worked for a living, seeing how the concept of childhood wasn’t invented until many more centuries later. The rich also had double-standards: while they frequently criticized the poor for supposedly being irresponsible with their wealth (sound familiar?) they would frequently gamble and waste enormous sums of money. For instance, Claudius was basically an addict when to gambling (he was so hooked he had a special carriage that allowed him to continue gambling as he traveled around the Roman empire), as well as the first emperor Augustus. When it came to entertainment, there was the Colosseum (though this was mostly for rich people), gambling (although some regular citizens indulged in it, the stakes were much lower, if there were any at all), the baths, dice games, and going to the theatre to watch productions that followed the themes of comedies and tragedies (at that point in time, actors were viewed poorly: they were seen as being as immoral as prostitutes). When Rome expanded, it also created trade routes to areas including Egypt, Africa, and even India: “The natural products of empire, its luxuries and curiosities, also flooded to Rome and signalled the city’s status as an imperial power. Balsam trees of Judaea were paraded in the triumphal procession of 71 CE. Exotic animals captured in Africa, from lions to ostriches, were slaughtered in the arena. Luscious coloured marbles, quarried in remote locations across the Roman world, decorated the theatres, temples and palaces in the capital. The images of trampled barbarians were not the only things to stand for Roman domination. So too did the colours of the floors on which the Romans walked in the grandest buildings of their city: these stones amounted to an assertion - and a map - of empire” (505). To demonstrate Rome’s great scope, we know today of the Pantheon, finished under Hadrian in the 120s CE: “carved from a single block of Egyptian grey granite,” the Pantheon “was an extremely prestigious stone used in many imperial projects, partly because it was found only in one faraway place, 2,500 miles from Rome, Mons Claudianus (the ‘Mountain of Claudius’, named after the emperor who first sponsored work there) in the middle of the eastern Egyptian desert. It was only with immense difficulty and a huge investment of labour and cash that columns of this size could be quarried and transported to Rome in one piece” (505). Beard writes of the Roman effort to crush the Jewish rebellion at Judaea, and describes the precarious situation Christians found themselves in - Romans loathed Christianity due to its differences when compared with Roman religion. After all, Christianity didn't really have a place of origin, not to mention it was monotheistic, while Roman religion was the definition of polytheistic. Beard writes that when Rome assimilated various peoples, it wasn’t racist, as that wasn’t a main focus - they expected, however, for the civilians present to practice Roman religion at least some of the time, as that was a key way for a conquered people to show their submission to the emperor.
The Augustan Dynasty collapsed in 192 CE with the assassination of Commodus, marking the beginning of a tumultuous period full of turmoil: “In the nearly 180 years between 14 and 192 CE - apart from the single brief interlude of civil war after the death of Nero, when there were three unsuccessful claimants to the throne - there were just fourteen emperors. In the hundred years between 193 and 293 CE there were more than seventy … any attempts to keep the legions out of the process of making emperors dramatically failed. Almost all the men who claimed the throne in the middle of the third century CE did so with the backing of one army unit or another. It was more or less continuous civil war. And there were flagrant subversions of traditional claims to power. For Septimus Severus to announce that he and his family had been adopted as heirs by an emperor who had died more than ten years earlier strained even the most flexible Roman standards of adoption” (530-1). Rome soon lost its prestige as the center of Rome: as emperors went to foreign areas with their armies, they wouldn’t stay in Rome for long. Furthermore, Rome was eventually pillaged by the Gauls. Prior to that, the emperor Constantine was baptised on his deathbed as a Christian, and he institutionalized Christianity as the official state religion of Rome. Beard ends the book with the following statement regarding history: “I no longer think, as I once naively did, that we have much to learn directly from the Romans - or, for that matter, from the ancient Greeks, or from any other ancient civilisation … 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 … 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 … We do the Romans a disservice if we heroise them, as much as if we demonise them. But we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to take them seriously - and if we close our long conversation with them” (535-6).
Personal thoughts:
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard is a fantastic book which provides much information about Rome and its people: it discusses virtually all of the big points, including Rome’s founding (however dubious), development, policies (towards its own citizens and foreigners), military, leaders (beginning with kings, moving on to consuls, ending in emperors), politics (an oligarchy, though people claimed it was a republic during the period of the Middle and Late Republic), economy (which was greatly financed by warfare and looting other areas, though it was greatly improved with infrastructure that facilitated safer and more efficient travel), wars, customs, religions, and weaknesses. Furthermore, the book isn’t bland to read at all, and is entertaining due to its novelty. It’s also worthy to mention that Beard’s discussion of the subject of history can be greatly appreciated, as she calls for her readers to be curious, to think outside the box, to draw connections between various pieces of evidence, and to question everything. Beard has succeeded in showing the vital importance of Rome on human history: I highly recommend SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome to anyone interested in Rome, the development of empires, politics, foreign policies, and culture.
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