SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

In fact, the modern word ‘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.

twelve lunar months, from new moon to new moon, add up to just over 354 days;

There were hierarchies within the free citizen population too. One clause draws a distinction between patricians and plebeians, another between assidui (men of property) and proletarii (those without property – whose contribution to the city was the production of offspring, proles).

hostis (a ‘foreigner’ or an ‘enemy’; the same Latin word, significantly, can mean both)

the Roman destruction of the nearby town of Veii under the heroic Camillus in 396 BCE,

the destruction of Rome by Gauls in 390 BCE.

world-conquering Alexander the Great, who between 334 and 323 BCE had led his Macedonian army on a spree of conquest from Greece to India.

In other cases they offered a more limited form of rights that came to be known (self-explanatorily) as ‘citizenship without the vote’, or civitas sine suffragio.

The implications, however, were again revolutionary. In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city.

The beginning of empire and the beginning of literature were two sides of the same coin.