SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

SPQR takes its title from another famous Roman catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, ‘The Senate and People of Rome’.

Rome was not simply the thuggish younger sibling of classical Greece, committed to engineering, military efficiency and absolutism, whereas the Greeks preferred intellectual inquiry, theatre and democracy.

several Roman writers were the most powerful critics of imperialism there have ever been. ‘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.

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.

‘The Conspiracy’ takes us to the centre of Roman political life in the first century BCE, to its conventions, controversies and conflicts. In doing so, it allows us to glimpse in action the ‘Senate’ and the ‘Roman People’ – the two institutions whose names are embedded in my title, SPQR (Senatus PopulusQue Romanus).

Romulus promised the god, if only the Romans would resist the temptation to run for it, and stand their ground against the enemy. They did, and the Temple of Jupiter Stator was erected on that very spot, the first in a long series of shrines and temples in the city built to commemorate divine help in securing military victory for Rome.

Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder.

‘He divided the people in this way to ensure that voting power was under the control not of the rabble but of the wealthy, and he saw to it that the greatest number did not have the greatest power – a principle that we should always stand by in politics.’

There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies.

The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed.

In doing this, Caesar laid the foundations for the political geography of modern Europe, as well as slaughtering up to a million people over the whole region. It would be wrong to imagine that the Gauls were peace-loving innocents brutally trampled by Caesar’s forces.

phrase borrowed from gambling, ‘Let the dice be thrown.’ Despite the usual English translation – ‘The die is cast’, which again appears to hint at the irrevocable step being taken – Caesar’s Greek was much more an expression of uncertainty, a sense that everything now was in the lap of the gods.

Greeks had occasionally shared citizenship, on an ad hoc basis, between two cities. But the idea that it was the norm, as the Romans insisted, to be a citizen of two places – to count two places as home – was fundamental to Roman success on the battlefield and elsewhere, and it has proved influential right up into the twenty-first century. This was a Roman revolution, and we are its heirs.

It is clear, however, that Roman women in general had much greater independence than women in most parts of the classical Greek or Near Eastern world, limited as it must seem in modern terms.

A woman did not take her husband’s name or fall entirely under his legal authority. After the death of her father, an adult woman could own property in her own right, buy and sell, inherit or make a will and free slaves – many of the rights that women in Britain did not gain till the 1870s.

Augustus to all intents and purposes had writers such as Virgil and Horace on his payroll, and the work they produced offers a memorable and eloquent image of a new golden age for Rome and its empire, with Augustus centre stage. ‘I have given them empire without limit’ (imperium sine fine), Jupiter prophesies for the Romans in Virgil’s Aeneid, national epic, instant classic and a book which landed straight on the school curriculum in Augustan Rome. It still remains (just) on the modern Western curriculum 2,000 years later.

few posthumous wishes hold as much weight as the dead had hoped for while alive.

There was always a fuzzy zone where Roman control faded gradually into non-Roman territory, and there were always peoples who were not formally part of the provinces of the empire but nevertheless did what the Romans told them to, on the old model of obedience. That is why modern maps that claim to plot the edges of the empire in a simple line can be more misleading than helpful.

Tacitus’ biography of his father-in-law, one of Rome’s enemies, as part of a set-piece speech delivered before he enters battle with Agricola, challenges Roman rule and what it adds up to. The Romans, he insists, are the robbers of the world, insatiable for domination and profit. And in a much-quoted phrase that still hits home, he sums up the Roman imperial project: ‘they create desolation and call it peace’, ‘solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant’.

Citizenship brought with it all kinds of specific rights under Roman law, covering a wide range of topics, from contracts to punishments. The simple reason that, in the 60s CE, Saint Peter was crucified while Saint Paul enjoyed the privilege of being beheaded was that Paul was a Roman citizen.