SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

ambitious

anachronistic

to

garrets.

leitmotiv

internecine

murdered in a nearby town during a riot that was partly of his own making.

deepest Roman cultural anxieties. They have a lot to tell us about Roman values and preoccupations, or at least about the preoccupations of those Romans with time, money and freedom to spare; cultural anxieties are often a privilege of the rich. One theme, as we have just seen, was the nature of Roman marriage. Just how brutal was it destined to be, given its origins? Another, glimpsed already in the words of

some of the innovations

visible

a

polymath

frisson

who happened

history

or

endemic,

ambivalence

polyglot

acquisitive

‘obeisance’

Teans

depilation.

ploughmen.

120

hectares)

left,

manpower readily available near Rome, soldiers with considerable practice in fighting their Italian kith and kin. The recent precedents for violence in the city, controversial and brutal

better

uprisings

optimates

had

ethnography.

until the power of Rome had closed their market. Yet the mass killing of those who stood in Caesar’s way was more than even some Romans could take. Cato, driven partly no doubt by his enmity of Caesar and speaking from partisan as well as humanitarian motives, suggested that he should be handed over for trial to those tribes whose women and children he had put to death. Pliny the Elder, trying later to arrive at a headcount of Caesar’s victims, seems strikingly modern in accusing him of ‘a crime against humanity’.

For any period as a private citizen, out of office, would provide a window for a prosecution, among other things over the questionable legality of his acts in 59 BCE. On the one hand were those who, for whatever reasons, personal or principled, wanted to bring Caesar back down to size; on the other, Caesar and his supporters insisted that this treatment was humiliating, that his dignitas – a distinctively

‘The die is cast’, which again appears to hint at the irrevocable step being taken – Caesar’s Greek was much more an expression of uncertainty,

bathos

fashion. He turned out to have a large appetite, partly because he had been following a course of emetics, which was a popular regime of detoxification among wealthy Romans involving regular vomiting; and he enjoyed urbane conversation

inveterate

efficacious

apotheosis.

cosseted

prosaic:

gradually,

anecdotes

frisson

aphorisms

primogeniture

quixotic

desiccated