SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

SPQR

‘They create desolation and call it peace’ is a slogan that has often summed up the consequences of military conquest. It was written in the second century CE by the Roman historian Tacitus, referring to Roman power in Britain.

Lucius Sergius Catilina (‘Catiline’ in English), a disgruntled, bankrupt aristocrat and the architect of a plot, so it was believed, to assassinate Rome’s elected officials and burn the place down – writing off all debts, of rich and poor alike, in the process. On the other side is Marcus Tullius Cicero (just ‘Cicero’ from now on), the famous orator, philosopher, priest, poet, politician, wit and raconteur, one of those marked out for assassination – and a man who never ceased to use his rhetorical talents to boast how he had uncovered Catiline’s terrible plot and saved the state.

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.

‘Sono Pazzi Questi Romani’ is an Italian favourite: ‘These Romans are mad’.

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.

For a start, Cicero is presented 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. 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).

Anyone who had held the junior position of quaestor, twenty of them elected each year, went automatically into the senate with a seat for life.

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. A visitor from Athens or Alexandria in Egypt, which did have many buildings in the style of Maccari’s painting, would have found the place unimpressive, not to say squalid. It was such a breeding ground of disease that a later Roman doctor wrote that you didn’t need to read textbooks to research malaria – it was all around you in the city of Rome. The rented market in slums provided grim accommodation for the poor but lucrative profits for unscrupulous landlords.

Ill-advisedly, as it turned out, they had tried to involve in the plot a deputation of men from Gaul who had come to Rome to complain about their exploitation at the hands of Roman provincial governors. For whatever reason – maybe nothing more profound than an instinct for backing the winner – these Gauls decided to work secretly with Cicero, and they were able to provide clinching evidence of names, places, plans and some more letters with incriminating information.

Sallust did not simply tell the unfolding story of the attempted uprising, its causes and its upshot. He used the figure of Catiline as an emblem of the wider failings of first-century BCE Rome. In Sallust’s view, the moral fibre of Roman culture had been destroyed by the city’s success and by the wealth, greed and lust for power that had followed its conquest of the Mediterranean and the crushing of all its serious rivals. 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.

that is to say, 753 BCE. Other calculations narrowed this down further, to 21 April,

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.

The Etruscans were known for their expertise in terracotta statuary; here the influence of Greek art is also clear – suggesting Rome’s contacts with the wider world.

One particular skill of the Etruscans was reading signs sent by the gods in the entrails of sacrificial animals. This bronze liver (second to third century BCE) was a guide to interpreting the organs of the victim. The liver is carefully mapped, with the gods concerned with each part clearly identified, to help make sense of the particular characteristics or blemishes that might be found there.

Nevertheless, what we see here gives a much more plausible vision of the warrior world of these early urban communities than do the aggrandising versions offered by Roman writers, and by some of their modern followers. It was a world of chiefdoms and warrior bands, not of organised armies and foreign policy.

was not just a wonder but also a reminder of the cruel tyranny that for the Romans marked the end of the regal period. 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.

the rape of Lucretia by one of the king’s sons. This rape is almost certainly as mythic as the rape of the Sabines: assaults on women symbolically marking the beginning and the end of the regal period.

At the same time, this was seen as a fundamentally political moment, for in the story it leads directly to the expulsion of the kings and the start of the free Republic. As soon as Lucretia stabbed herself, Lucius Junius Brutus – who had accompanied her husband to the scene – took the dagger from her body and, while her family was too distressed to speak, vowed

to rid Rome of kings for ever. This was, of course, partly a retrospective prophecy, for the Brutus who in 44 BCE led the coup against Julius Caesar for his kingly ambitions claimed descent from this Brutus.

dated its origin to the very beginning of Republican rule, when the grain that had been growing on the private land of the Tarquins was thrown into the river. Because the water level was low, this piled up on the riverbed and gradually, as it collected silt and other refuse, formed an island. It is as if the shape of the city was born only with the removal of the monarchy.

But there are enough pieces in place to be confident that the decisive change in Rome came in the fourth century BCE, in the generation of Barbatus and Appius Claudius Caecus and that of their immediate predecessors,

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, for example, who more than two millennia later gave his name to the American city of Cincinnati, is supposed to have returned from semi-exile in the 450s BCE to become dictator and lead Roman armies to victory against their enemies before nobly retiring straight back to his farm without seeking further political glory.

In ancient Athens, for example, the work of Draco in the seventh century BCE, though now a byword for harshness (‘draconian’), was notable as the first attempt there to put what had been oral rules into writing; a thousand years before that in Babylon, Hammurabi’s code did something similar. The Twelve Tables are much on that pattern.

But there were powerful reasons why this defeat was a useful episode for Roman historians to stress. It set the scene for Roman anxieties about invaders from over the Alps, of whom Hannibal was the most dangerous, but not the only one. It helped to explain why so little hard information survived for early Rome (it had gone up in flames), and so it marked the start, in ancient terms, of ‘modern history’. It answered the question of why in the later Republic the city of Rome, despite its world renown, was such an ill-planned rabbit warren: the Romans had had to rebuild hurriedly when the Gauls left. And it opened a new chapter in Rome’s relations with the outside world.

‘Latin’ so that it was no longer an ethnic identity but a political status unrelated to race or geography. This set the stage for a model of citizenship and ‘belonging’ that had enormous significance for Roman ideas of government, political rights, ethnicity and ‘nationhood’. This model was shortly extended overseas and eventually underpinned the Roman Empire.