SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not. But we come to Roman history with different priorities – from gender identity to food supply – that make the ancient past speak to us in a new idiom.

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

When Roman historians wrote about revolution, the image of Catiline almost always lay somewhere behind their accounts, even at the cost of some strange inversions of chronology.

Cicero’s eloquence, even if only half understood, still informs the language of modern politics.

Livy explicitly – and wildly anachronistically – refers here to the legal right of conubium, or ‘intermarriage’, which much later was a regular part of Rome’s alliances with other states.

‘From the very beginning they have possessed nothing except what they have stolen: their home, their wives, their lands, their empire.’

Understanding the history of Rome at this period partly depends on exploiting for all they are worth the few such precious pieces of evidence we have;

In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome. And in creating new Latin colonies all over Italy, they redefined the word ‘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’.

Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government?

Sulla also insisted that political offices be held in a particular order and at a minimum age (no one could become quaestor, for example, before the age of thirty), and no office was to be held twice within ten years. This was an attempt to prevent exactly the build-up of personal power that he himself enjoyed.

Roman rule was for the most part fairly hands off by the standards of more recent imperial regimes: the locals kept their own calendars, their own coinages, their own gods, their own varied systems of law and civic government. But wherever and whenever it was more direct, it seems to have fallen somewhere on the spectrum between ruthlessly exploitative at one end and negligent, under-resourced and inefficient at the other.

But by the middle of the first century BCE, the stakes were so much bigger, the size of Rome’s operations and obligations so much greater and the resources of cash and manpower available so much larger that the rise of men such as Pompey was more or less unstoppable.

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’.

Only those with the power to do otherwise can exercise mercy. Clementia, in other words, was the antithesis of Republican libertas. Cato was said to have killed himself to escape it.

Autocracy represented, in a sense, an end of history. Of course there were all kind of events, battles, assassinations, political stand-offs, new initiatives and inventions; and the participants would have had all kinds of exciting stories to tell and disputes to argue. But unlike the story of the development of the Republic and the growth of imperial power, which revolutionised almost every aspect of the world of Rome, there was no fundamental change in the structure of Roman politics, empire or society between the end of the first century BCE and the end of the second century CE.

Is that what history is? The change of politics and society? I have never thought so.

Gaius Octavius was then only eighteen years old and soon started capitalising on the famous name that came with his adoption by calling himself Gaius Julius Caesar – though to his enemies, as to most modern writers wanting to avoid confusion, he was known as Octavianus, or Octavian (that is, the ‘ex-Octavius’). It was not a name he ever used himself.

To put it another way, Gaius may have been assassinated because he was a monster, but it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated.

Besides, in the twenty years after Nero’s death in 68 CE at least three false Neros, complete with lyre, appeared in the eastern parts of the empire, making a bid for power by claiming to be the emperor himself, still alive despite all the reports of his suicide. They were all quickly eliminated, but the deception suggests that in some areas of the Roman world Nero was fondly remembered: no one seeks power by pretending to be an emperor universally hated.

No one has ever framed a better critique of Roman imperial power than the words put into the mouths of rebels against Rome by Roman writers themselves.

But if the emperor Tiberius, who succeeded the first Augustus, could have slipped fairly comfortably into the imperial shoes of Commodus at the end of the second century CE, he would not have understood what it was to be an emperor a few decades further on.