SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, ‘The Senate and People of Rome’.

This is a book about how Rome grew and sustained its position for so long, not about how it declined and fell, if indeed it ever did in the sense that Gibbon imagined.

Mine ends with a culminating moment in 212 CE, when the emperor Caracalla took the step of making every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen,

Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul has not unfairly been compared to genocide and was criticised by Romans at the time in those terms.

Most of Rome’s enemies were as militaristic as the Romans;

On the one side is 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.

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.

Around 390 BCE, for example, a posse of marauding Gauls occupied the city.

Roman imagination, in the 70s BCE a scratch force of ex-gladiators and runaways, under the command of Spartacus, proved more than a match for some ill-trained legions.

The tough response by Cicero – including those summary executions – presented in stark form issues that trouble us even today. Is it legitimate to eliminate ‘terrorists’ outside the due processes of law? How far should civil rights be sacrificed in the interests of homeland security?

Individually, and sometimes in bitter opposition, these were the main sources of political authority in first-century BCE Rome.

Among his blue-blooded forebears, his great-grandfather was a hero of the war against Hannibal, with the extra claim to fame of being the first man known to have entered combat with a prosthetic hand – probably just a metal hook that replaced his right hand, lost in an earlier battle.

consul, was Gaius Antonius Hybrida, uncle of a more famous Antonius (‘Mark Antony’), whose reputation turned out to be not much better than Catiline’s.

Everyday Roman clothing – tunics, cloaks and even occasionally trousers – was much more varied and colourful than this. Togas, however, were the formal, national dress:

togas were white, with the addition of a purple border for anyone who held public office.

‘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).

law, there was always the awkward question of what would happen if a decree of the senate was flouted or simply ignored.

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. In...

‘O fortunatam natam me consule Romam’ – a jingle with something of the ring of ‘Rome was sure a lucky state / Born in my great consulate’. And, in what has been seen as a major, if slightly hilarious, lapse of modesty, it seems to have featured an ‘assembly of the gods’ in which our superhuman consul discusses with the divine senate on Mount Olympus how he should handle Catiline’s plot.

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’.

the Sabines,

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’.

bronze wolf is keenly debated.

Or is it, as a recent scientific analysis has suggested, really a masterpiece of the Middle Ages?

The Tiber, he explains, made it easy to import supplies from abroad and to export any local surplus; and the hills on which the city was built provided not only an ideal defence against enemy attack but also a healthy living environment in the midst of a ‘pestilential region’.

‘pestilence’ (or malaria) was one of the biggest killers of the ancient city’s inhabitants (it remained so until the end of the nineteenth century).

The Latin word for ‘wolf’ (lupa) was also used as a colloquial term for ‘prostitute’ (lupanare was one standard term for ‘brothel’). Could it be that a local whore rather than a local wild beast had found and tended the twins?

a kindly herdsman or shepherd soon found the boys and took them in. Was his wife the prostitute? Livy wondered.

‘So perish anyone else who shall leap over my walls.’

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.

In the middle of the proceedings, he gave a signal for his men to abduct the young women among the visitors and to carry them off as their wives.

Livy defends the early Romans. He insists that they seized only unmarried women; this was the origin of marriage, not of adultery.

Love Lessons, about how to pick up a partner. In this he turns Livy’s story of the abduction on its head and presents the incident as a primitive model of flirtation: erotic, not expedient.

‘I’ll sign up,’ Ovid jokes, ‘if you give me that kind of pay.’

Not only was peace brought about, but Rome was said to have become a joint Roman–Sabine town,

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.

In particular, it reflected Roman political culture’s extraordinary openness and willingness to incorporate outsiders, which set it apart from every other ancient Western society that we know.

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.

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, the date on which modern Romans still, to this day, celebrate the birthday of their city, with some rather tacky parades and mock gladiatorial spectacles.

The message is clear: however far back you go, the inhabitants of Rome were always already from somewhere else.

one learned Roman noted that ‘Septimontium’ was the name of Rome before it became ‘Rome’,

Abominated as they were, kings were credited with creating Rome.

even now – pontifex, or ‘pontiff’ – derives or was borrowed from the title of one of the priesthoods supposedly founded by Numa.

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 first reform in 494 BCE was the appointment of official representatives, known as tribunes of the people

Centuriate Assembly,

Instead, the voting groups were defined geographically, with voters enrolled in tribes (tribus), or regional subdivisions of Roman territory, nothing to do with any ethnic grouping that the modern sense of ‘tribe’ might imply.