SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

OUR HISTORY OF ancient Rome begins in the middle of the first century BCE, more than 600 years after the city was founded.

It begins with promises of revolution, with a terrorist conspiracy to destroy the city, with undercover operations and public harangues, with a battle fought between Romans and Romans, and with citizens (innocent or not) rounded up and summarily executed in the interests of homeland security.

The year is 63 BCE. 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 –...

On the other side is Marcus Tullius Cicero (just ‘Cicero’ from now on), the famous orator, philosopher, priest, poet, politician, wit and raconteur, one of those marked out for assassination – and a man who never ceased to use his rhetorical talents to boast how he had uncover...

In 63 BCE the city of Rome was a vast metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, larger than any other in Europe before the nineteenth century; and, although as yet it had no emperors, it ruled over an empire stretching ...

It was a sprawling mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war. In the chapters that follow we shall look much further back, to the very start of Roman time and to the early exploits, belligerent and otherwise, of the Roman people. We shall think about what lies behind some of those stories of earl...

It is only in the first century BCE that we can start to explore Rome, close up and in vivid detail, through contemporary eyes. An extraordinary wealth of words survives from this period: from private letters to public speeches, from philosophy to poetry – epic and erotic, scholarly and straight from the street.

Thanks to all this, we can still follow the day-to-day wheeling and dealing of Rome’s political grandees. We can eavesdrop on their bargaining and their trade-offs and glimpse their back-stabbing, metaphorical and literal.

We can even get a taste of their private lives: their marital tiffs, their cash-flow problems, their grief at the death of beloved children, or occasionally of their beloved slaves. 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 millenniu...

What is more, it was during the first century BCE that Roman writers themselves began systematically to study the earlier centuries of their city and their empire. Curiosity about Rome’s past certainly goes back further than that: we can still read, for example, an analysis of the cit...

Sixty-three BCE is a significant year in that crucial century. It was a time of near disaster for the city. Over the 1,000 years that we will be exploring in this book, Rome faced danger and defeat many times.

Around 390 BCE, for example, a posse of marauding Gauls occupied the city. In 218 BCE the Carthaginian warlord, Hannibal, famously crossed the Alps with his thirty-seven elephants and inflicted terrible losses on the Romans before they eventually managed to fight him off.

Roman estimates of casualties at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE, up to 70,000 deaths in a single afternoon, make it as great a bloodbath as Gettysburg or the...

And, almost equally fearsome in the Roman imagination, in the 70s BCE a scratch force of ex-gladiators and runaways, under the command of Spartacus, proved mor...

The story of this crisis can still be traced in intimate detail, day by day, occasionally hour by hour. We know precisely where much of it happened, and in a few places we can still look up to some of exactly the same monuments as dominated the scene in 63 BCE.

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? The Romans never ceased to debate ‘The Conspiracy of Catiline’, as it came to be known.

Whatever its rights and wrongs, ‘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).

Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Roman plutocrat who notoriously remarked that you could count no one rich if he did not have the cash to raise his own private army, played some mysterious part behind the scenes.

But centre stage, as Catiline’s main adversary, we find the one person whom it is possible to get to know better than anyone else in the whole of the ancient world. Cicero’s speeches, essays, letters, jokes and poetry still fill dozens of volumes of modern printed text. There is no one else in antiquity until Augustine – Christian saint, prolific theologian and avid self-scrutiniser – 450 years later, whose life is documented in public and private fully enough to be able to reconstruct a plausible biography in modern terms.

The year 63 BCE was the turning point of his career: for things were never quite so good for Cicero again. His career ended twenty years later, in failure.

Cicero’s grisly death presaged a yet bigger revolution in the first century BCE, which began with a form of popular political power, even if not a ‘democracy’ exactly, and ended with an autocrat established on the throne and the Roman Empire under one-man rule.

The conflict between Cicero and Catiline was partly a clash of political ideology and ambition, but it was also a clash between men of very different backgrounds.

Catiline, the would-be revolutionary, had the more conventional, more privileged and apparently safer start in life, as in politics.

He came from a distinguished old family that traced its lineage back centuries to the mythical founding fathers of Rome. His ancestor Sergestus was said to have fled from the East to Italy with Aeneas after the Trojan War, before the city of Rome even existed. 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.

Catiline himself had a successful early career and was elected to a series of junior political offices, but in 63 BCE he was close to bankruptcy. A string of crimes was attached to his name, from the murder of his ...

Electioneering at Rome could be a costly business. By the first century BCE it required the kind of lavish generosity that is not always easy to distinguish from bribery.

That was Catiline’s position after he had been beaten in the annual elections for the consulship in both 64 and 63 BCE.

Although the usual story is that he had been leaning in that direction before, he now had little option but to resort to ‘revolution’ or ‘direct action’ or ‘terrorism’, whichever you choose to call it. Joining forces with other upper-class desperadoes in similar straits, he appealed to the support of the discontented poor within the city while mustering his makeshift army outside it. And there was no end to his rash promises of debt relief (one of the most despicable forms of radicalism in the eyes of the Roman landed classes) or to his bold threats to take out the leading politicians and to put the whole city to flames.

Or so Cicero, who was one of those who believed he had been earmarked for destruction, summed up his ...

He was of a very different stock from Catiline. He came from a wealthy, landed background, as all high-level Roman politicians did. But his origins lay outside the capital, in the small town of Arpinum, about 70 miles from Rome...

Though they must have been major players locally, no one in his family before him had ever been prominent on the Roman political scene. With none of Catiline’s advantages, Cicero relied on his native talents, on the high-level connections...

That crowning success had not been an entirely foregone conclusion.

For all his celebrity, Cicero faced the disadvantage of being a ‘new man’, as the Romans called those without political ancestry, and at one stage he even seems to have considered making an electoral pact with Catiline, seedy reputation or not.

But in the end, the influential voters swayed it. The Roman electoral system openly and unashamedly gave extra weight to the votes of the rich; and many of them must have concluded that Cicero was a better option than C...

By the summer of 63 BCE, Cicero appears to have got wind of definite danger from Catiline, who was trying his luck as a candidate again.

Using his authority as consul, Cicero postponed the next round of elections, and when he finally did let them go ahead, he turned up at the poll with an armed guard and wearing a military breastplate clearly visible under his toga. It was a histrionic display, and the combination of civilian and military kit was alarmingly incongruous, rather as if a modern politician were to enter the legislature in a business suit with a machine gun slung over his shoulder.

Soon after the elections, sometime in the early autumn, Cicero began to receive much clearer intelligence of a violent plot.

For a long time he had been getting trickles of information through the girlfriend of one of Catiline’s ‘accomplices’, a woman named Fulvia, who had more or less turned double agent. Now, thanks to a further piece of treachery from the other side, and via the wealthy Marcus Crassus as intermediary, he had a bundle of letters in his hands that directly incriminated Catiline and referred to the terrible bloodshed that was planned – information soon supplemented by definite reports of armed forces gathering north of the city in support of the insurrection.

The senators had already, in October, issued a decree urging (or allowing) Cicero as consul ‘to make sure that the state should come to no harm’, roughly the ancient equivalent of a modern ‘emergency powers’ or ‘prevention of terrorism’ act, and no less controversial.

Now, on 8 November, they listened while Cicero went through the whole case against Catiline, in a blistering and well-informed attack. It was a marvellous mixture of fury, indignation, self-criticism and apparently solid fact. One minute he was reminding the assembled company of Catiline’s notorious past; the next he was disingenuously regretting that he himself had not reacted to the danger speedily enough; the next he was pouring out precise details of the plot – in whose house the conspirators had gathered, on what dates, who was involved and what exactly their plans were.

This encounter in front of the senate between Cicero and Catiline is the defining moment of the whole story: the two adversaries coming face to face in an institution that lay at the centre of Roman politics.

It is also an image with which Cicero would no doubt have been delighted.

Catiline sits isolated, head bowed, as if no one wants to risk getting anywhere near him, still less to talk to him. Cicero, meanwhile, is the star of the scene, standing next to what seems to be a smoking brazier in front of an altar, addressing the attentive audience of toga-clad senators.

Everyday Roman clothing – tunics, cloaks and even occasionally trousers – was much more varied and colourful than this. Togas, however, were the formal, national dress: Romans could define themselves as the gens togata, ‘the race that wears the toga’, while some contemporary outsiders occasionally laughed at this strange, cumbersome garment. An...

In fact, the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’ and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore durin...

Maccari has captured the senators’ smart togas, even though he seems to have forgotten those significant borders.

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).

Anyone who had held the junior position of quaestor, twenty of them elected each year, went automatically into the senate with a seat for life. They met regularly, debating, advising the consuls and issuing decrees, which were, in practice, usually obeyed – though, as these did not have the force of law, there was always the awkward question of what would happen if a decree of the senate was flouted or simply ignored.

As for the setting, it looks Roman enough, but with that huge column stretching up out of sight and the lavish, brightly coloured marble lining the walls, it is far too grand for almost anything in Rome in this period.

Our modern image of the ancient city as an extravaganza of gleaming marble on a vast scale is not entirely wrong. But that is a later development in the history of Rome, beginning with the advent of one-man rule under the emperors and with the first systematic exploitation of the marble quarries in Carrara in North Italy, more than thirty years after the crisis of Catiline.