SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Roman scholars discussed his career intensely, accepting some aspects of the tradition about him but firmly rejecting others.

I find it interesting that the scholars of Roman antiquity were like historians of today, unafraid to call historical events legends or myths.

that the month Sextilis, next to Julius Caesar’s July, should be renamed August – and so Augustus became part of the regular passage of time, as he remains.

Made me shiver a bit

Livia already had Drusus and was pregnant with another son, Tiberius, when they married in 37 BCE.

Actually the opposite was true

there is no sign at all that the character of the ruler affected the basic template of government at home or abroad in any significant way.

I wonder if this is an American truth as well. Is Trump just our Claudius or Nero?

I have spent a good deal of the past fifty years of my life with these ‘first millennium Romans’. I have learnt their languages as well as I can. I have read a good deal of the literature they have left us (no one has read it all), and I have studied some of the hundreds of thousands of books and papers written over the centuries about them, from Machiavelli and Gibbon to Gore Vidal and beyond. I have tried to decipher the words they carved into stone, and I have dug them up, quite literally, on wet, windy and unglamorous archaeological sites in Roman Britain. And I have wondered for a long time about how best to tell Rome’s story

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. We do not need to read of the difficulties of the Roman