SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

For a start, there was almost certainly no such thing as a founding moment of the city of Rome. Very few towns or cities are founded at a stroke, by a single individual. They are usually the product of gradual changes in population, in patterns of settlement, social organisation and sense of identity.

Where Romulus welcomed all comers to his new city, the story of Aeneas goes further, to claim that the ‘Romans’ really were originally ‘foreigners’. It is a paradox of national identity, which stands in glaring contrast to the foundation myths of many ancient Greek cities, such as Athens, which saw their original population as springing miraculously from the very soil of their native land.

Yet Roman culture was marked by a reluctance ever entirely to discard its past practices, tending instead to preserve all kinds of ‘fossils’ – in religious rituals or politics, or whatever – even when their original significance had been lost. As one modern writer has nicely put it, the Romans were rather like people who acquire all kinds of brand-new kitchen equipment but can’t ever bear to throw away their old gadgets, which continue to clutter up the place even though they are never used.

Its system is basically one of twelve lunar months, with an extra month (the distant precursor of our extra day in a leap year) inserted from time to time to keep this calendar in proper alignment with the solar year.

Sounds familiar...

Ancient Roman historians were experts at turning historical chaos into a tidy narrative and always keen to imagine that their familiar institutions went back much further than they really did.

Two things are clear and undermine a couple of misleading modern myths about Roman power and ‘character’. First, the Romans were not by nature more belligerent than their neighbours and contemporaries, any more than they were naturally better at building roads and bridges.

Throughout this period, somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the Roman adult male population would have served in the legions each year, a greater proportion than in any other pre-industrial state and, on the higher estimate, comparable to the call-up rate in World War I.

The widening horizons of empire, in other words, disturbed the simple hierarchy of ‘us over them’, the ‘civilised over the barbarous’, which had underpinned classical Greek culture.

Makes sense. How can us versus them work if now a huge percent age of them are at least technically part of "us."

The truth is that Cato’s version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defence of long-standing Roman traditions.

This seems to be acommon theme here.

Roman senators did not sit idly by as their political institutions lapsed into chaos, nor did they simply fan the flames of the crisis to their own short-term advantage (though there was certainly a bit of that). Many of them, from different ends of the political spectrum, tried to find some effective remedies. We should not allow our hindsight, their ultimate failure or the succession of civil wars and assassinations to blind us to their efforts,

There were, to be sure, uncomfortable restrictions on women in Rome too: the emperor Augustus, for example, relegated them to the back rows of the theatres and gladiatorial arenas; the suites for women in public baths were usually markedly more cramped than those for men; and in practice male activities probably dominated the swankier areas of a Roman house.

This also sounds familiar...

As is often the case in regime change, the new guard is more or less forced to rely on a carefully reformed version of the old guard, or – as we have seen in recent history – anarchy can result.

Some modern historians have even speculated that the popularity of games of chance among ordinary Romans had something to do with the close match to the structure of their lives. For most of the Roman people, life was always a gamble, and making money not far short of a lottery.