SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

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.

SPQR takes its title from another famous Roman catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, ‘The Senate and People of Rome’.

Rome was not simply the thuggish younger sibling of classical Greece, committed to engineering, military efficiency and absolutism,

The Greek city-states were as keen on winning battles as the Romans were, and most had little to do with the brief Athenian democratic experiment.

‘They create desolation and call it peace’ is a slogan that has often summed up the consequences of military conquest.

In 63 BCE the city of Rome was a vast metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, larger than any other in Europe before the nineteenth century; and, although as yet it had no emperors, it ruled over an empire stretching from Spain to Syria, from the South of France to the Sahara.

There is no earlier period in the history of the West that it is possible to get to know quite so well or so intimately (we have nothing like such rich and varied evidence from classical Athens). It is not for more than a millennium, in the world of Renaissance Florence, that we find any other place that we can know in such detail again.

Everyday Roman clothing – tunics, cloaks and even occasionally trousers – was much more varied and colourful than this. Togas, however, were the formal, national dress: Romans could define themselves as the gens togata, ‘the race that wears the toga’, while some contemporary outsiders occasionally laughed at this strange, cumbersome garment. And togas were white, with the addition of a purple border for anyone who held public office. In fact, the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’ and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters.

In the middle of the first century BCE, the senate was a body of some 600 members; they were all men who had been previously elected to political office (and I mean all men – no woman ever held political office in ancient Rome).

Our modern image of the ancient city as an extravaganza of gleaming marble on a vast scale is not entirely wrong. But that is a later development in the history of Rome, beginning with the advent of one-man rule under the emperors and with the first systematic exploitation of the marble quarries in Carrara in North Italy, more than thirty years after the crisis of Catiline.

The Rome of Cicero’s day, with its million or so inhabitants, was still built largely of brick or local stone, a warren of winding streets and dark alleys.

Exactly how influential the people were has always – even in the ancient world – been one of the big controversies in Roman history; but two things are certain. At this period, they alone could elect the political officials of the Roman state; no matter how blue-blooded you were, you could only hold office as, say, consul if the Roman people elected you. And they alone, unlike the senate, could make law.

The single most extraordinary fact about the Roman world is that so much of what the Romans wrote has survived, over two millennia.

The survival is largely due to the diligence of medieval monks who transcribed by hand, again and again, what they believed were the most important, or useful, works of classical literature, with a significant but often forgotten contribution from medieval Islamic scholars who translated into Arabic some of the philosophy and scientific material. And thanks to archaeologists who have excavated papyri from the sands and the rubbish dumps of Egypt, wooden writing tablets from Roman military bases in the north of England and eloquent tombstones from all over the empire, we have glimpses of the life and letters of some rather more ordinary inhabitants of the Roman world.

The crucial moment came eighty-three years before the war against Catiline, when in 146 BCE Roman armies finally destroyed Carthage, Hannibal’s home base on the north coast of Africa. After that, Sallust thought, no significant threats to Roman domination were left.

Nor is it just about the figure of Catiline as a byword for villainy, though he certainly plays that part often enough in Roman literature. His name came to be used as a nickname for unpopular emperors, and half a century later Publius Vergilius Maro (or ‘Virgil’, as he is now usually known) gave him a cameo role in the Aeneid, where the villain is pictured being tortured in the underworld, ‘trembling at the face of the Furies’.

How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?’), still lurks in twenty-first-century political rhetoric, is plastered on modern political banners and is fitted conveniently into the 140 characters of a tweet.

the Temple of Jupiter where Cicero harangued Catiline on 8 November 63 BCE had been established seven centuries earlier by Romulus, Rome’s founding father. Romulus and the new citizens of his tiny community were fighting their neighbours, a people known as the Sabines, on the site that later became the Forum, the political centre of Cicero’s Rome.

Things were going badly for the Romans, and they had been driven to retreat. As a last attempt to snatch victory, Romulus prayed to the god Jupiter – not just to Jupiter, in fact, but to Jupiter Stator, ‘Jupiter who holds men firm’. He would build a temple in thanks, Romulus promised the god, if only the Romans would resist the temptation to run for it, and stand their ground against the enemy. They did, and the Temple of Jupiter Stator was erected on that very spot, the first in a long series of shrines and temples in the city built to commemorate divine help in securing military victory for Rome.

Romulus chose the hill known as the Palatine, where the emperors’ grand residence later stood and which has given us our word ‘palace’.

Romulus responded by killing his brother and so became the sole ruler of the place that took his name.

Romulus declared Rome an ‘asylum’ and encouraged the rabble and dispossessed of the rest of Italy to join him: runaway slaves, convicted criminals, exiles and refugees.

Yet, in a process unique in any pre-industrial empire, the inhabitants of those conquered territories, ‘provinces’ as Romans called them, were gradually given full Roman citizenship, and the legal rights and protections that went with it.

The Roman senate gradually became what we might now describe as a decidedly multicultural body, and the full list of Roman emperors contains many whose origins lay outside Italy: Caracalla’s father, Septimius Severus, was the first emperor from Roman territory in Africa; Trajan and Hadrian, who reigned half a century earlier, had come from the Roman province of Spain.

But for many Roman slaves, particularly those working in urban domestic contexts rather than toiling in the fields or mines, it was not necessarily a life sentence. They were regularly given their freedom, or they bought it with cash they had managed to save up; and if their owner was a Roman citizen, then they also gained full Roman citizenship, with almost no disadvantages as against those who were freeborn.

The scale was so great that some historians reckon that, by the second century CE, the majority of the free citizen population of the city of Rome had slaves somewhere in their ancestry.

Learned minds ingeniously counted back in time from the Roman dates they did know to earlier dates they did not and tried to synchronise events in Rome with the chronology of Greek history.

the Book of Chronology, by none other than Cicero’s friend and correspondent Atticus. It does not survive, but it is supposed to have pinpointed Romulus’ foundation of the city to the third year of the sixth cycle of Olympic Games; that is to say, 753 BCE. Other calculations narrowed this down further, to 21 April,

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’.

One Greek idea, for example, brought the renowned Odysseus and echoes of Homer’s Odyssey into the story by suggesting that Rome’s real founding father was a man called Romus, the result of Odysseus’ affair with the witch Circe, whose magical island was sometimes imagined to lie just off the coast of Italy.

the Trojan hero Aeneas, who escaped from the city of Troy after the mythical war between Greeks and Trojans that is the backdrop of Homer’s Iliad.

It is a paradox of national identity, which stands in glaring contrast to the foundation myths of many ancient Greek cities, such as Athens, which saw their original population as springing miraculously from the very soil of their native land.

in December each year, known as the Septimontium (‘Seven hills’). What happened at this celebration is not at all clear, but one learned Roman noted that ‘Septimontium’ was the name of Rome before it became ‘Rome’,

On that basis, the earliest burials in the Forum would be around 1000 BCE, the huts on the Palatine around 750–700 BCE

What is certain is that by the sixth century BCE Rome was an urban community, with a centre and some public buildings.

Over the period in between, we can be fairly confident that larger villages grew up, probably (to judge from what ends up in the graves) with an increasingly wealthy group of elite families; and that at some point these coalesced into the single community whose urban character was clear by the sixth century BCE.

The Italian peninsula between about 1000 and 600 BCE was extremely mixed. There were many different independent peoples, with many different cultural traditions, origins and languages.

The best documented are the Greek settlements in the south, towns such as Cumae, Tarentum and Naples (Neapolis), founded from the eighth century BCE on by immigrants from some of the major cities in Greece – conventionally known as ‘colonies’ but not ‘colonial’ in the modern sense of the word. To all intents and purposes, much of the southern part of the peninsula, and Sicily, was part of the Greek world, with a literate and artistic tradition linked to match.

is much harder to reconstruct the history of any of the other inhabitants of the peninsula: from the Etruscans to the north, through the Latins and Sabines on Rome’s doorstep to the south, to the Oscans, who formed the original population of Pompeii, and Samnites beyond them.

It was the tyrannical behaviour of this second Tarquin, and of his family, that led to revolution, to the end of monarchy and to the establishing of ‘liberty’ and the ‘free Republic of Rome’.

the best guess is that the ‘original’ population of Rome – at whatever moment it 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.

Conflict of all sorts was regularly in the hands of individuals with their own following, the ancient equivalents of what we might call private warlords; and there was a blurry distinction between what was conducted on behalf of the ‘state’ and what on behalf of some powerful leader. Almost certainly that was the case in early Rome.

When we are discussing the realities, rather than the myths, of this early period of Rome’s history, it might be better to think in terms of chiefs or big men instead of kings, and to think of the ‘chiefly’ rather than the ‘regal’ period.

it was his successor, the peace-loving Numa, who was given the role of ‘the founder of Roman religion’. This did not make Numa a holy figure along the lines of Moses, the Buddha, Jesus or Muhammad.

In Rome there was no doctrine as such, no holy book and hardly even what we would call a belief system. Romans knew the gods existed; they did not believe in them in the internalised sense familiar from most modern world religions. Nor was ancient Roman religion particularly concerned with personal salvation or morality. Instead it mainly focused on the performance of rituals that were intended to keep the relationship between Rome and the gods in good order, and so ensure Roman success and prosperity.

He is supposed to have been the first to organise a census of the Roman citizens, formally enrolling them in the citizen body and classifying them in different ranks according to their wealth. But more than that, he linked this classification to two further institutions: the Roman army and the organisation of the people for voting and elections.

The army was to be made up of 193 ‘centuries’, distinguished according to the type of equipment the soldiers used; this equipment was related to the census classification, on the principle of ‘the richer you are, the more substantial and expensive equipment you can provide for yourself’. Starting at the top, there were eighty centuries of men from the richest, first class, who fought in a full kit of heavy bronze armour; below these came four more classes, wearing progressively lighter armour down to the fifth class, of thirty centuries, who fought with just slings and stones. In addition, above these there were an extra eighteen centuries of elite cavalry, plus some special groups of engineers and musicians, and at the very bottom of the pecking order a single century of the very poorest, who were entirely exempt from military service.

To put it another way, the individual rich voter had far greater voting power than his poorer fellow citizens. This was because, despite their name – which looks as if it should mean that they comprised 100 (centum) men each – the centuries were in fact very different in size. 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.

In the census, they were highlighting the power of the state over the individual citizen, as well as that characteristic commitment of Roman officialdom to documenting, counting and classifying.

The plural (Etruscans) is important. For these people did not form a single state but were a group of independent towns and cities which shared a language and distinctive artistic culture;