SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

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.

much repeated, slogan ‘O tempora, o mores’ (‘O what a world we live in!’, or, literally, ‘O the times, O the customs!’).

To all intents and purposes, much of the southern part of the peninsula, and Sicily, was part of the Greek world, with a literate and artistic tradition linked to match.

What is more, notwithstanding all kinds of later innovations and refinements, the modern Western calendar remains a direct descendant of this early Roman version, as the names we give to our months show: every single one of them is Roman.

The biggest challenge facing primitive calendars everywhere is the fact that the two most obvious, natural systems of timekeeping are incompatible: that is to say, twelve lunar months, from new moon to new moon, add up to just over 354 days; and this cannot be made to match in any convenient way the 365¼ days of the solar year, which is the time it takes for the earth to make one complete circuit of the sun, from spring equinox to spring equinox, for instance.

The first aqueduct to bring water into the growing conurbation was constructed in 312 BCE, a watercourse that ran mostly underground for some 10 miles from the nearby hills,

The earliest literature actually to survive in any bulk, written around the turn of the third and second centuries BCE – the twenty-six comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus and Publius Terentius Afer (‘Plautus’ and ‘Terence’ from now on) – are carefully Romanised versions of Greek predecessors, featuring hapless love stories and farcical tales of mistaken identity often set in Athens but also sprinkled with gags about togas, public baths and triumphal parades. Terence, who lived in the early second century BCE, was reputed to be another ex-slave, originally from Carthage.

the Greek scientist Archimedes, who was killed in the Second Punic War,

When, three centuries later, the historian Tacitus insinuated that true ‘Roman’ virtue was to be found in the ‘barbarians’ of Scotland and not in Rome itself, he was developing a tradition of argument that went right back to these early days of empire, and of literature.

Gaius Gracchus. For it was he who first arranged that tax collecting in the new province of Asia should, like many other state responsibilities, be contracted out to private companies, often owned by equestrians. These contractors were known as publicani – ‘public service providers’ or ‘publicans’, as tax collectors are called in old translations of the New Testament, confusingly to modern readers.

For – with some help from the specialist scientists he met in Alexandria – Caesar introduced into Rome what has become the modern Western system of timekeeping.

Using Alexandrian know-how, Caesar corrected the error and, for the future, established a year with 365 days, with an extra day inserted at the end of February every four years.

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.

died’. To put this in a wider perspective, statistics available from more recent historical periods suggest that at least one in fifty women were likely to die in childbirth, with a higher chance if they were very young.

Caesarian sections, which despite the modern myth had no connection with Julius Caesar, were used simply to cut a live foetus out of a dead or dying woman.

half the children born would have died by the age of ten, from all kinds of sickness and infection, including the common childhood diseases that are no longer fatal.

size. Simply to maintain the existing population, each woman on average would have needed to bear five or six children.

When Virgil in his Aeneid, written just a few years after Octavian’s victory, imagines Queen Dido ‘burning with love’ in her African kingdom of Carthage and attempting to seduce Aeneas from his destiny of founding Rome, there is more than a faint echo of Cleopatra.

‘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.

In 8 BCE the senate decided (who knows with what nudging?) that the month Sextilis, next to Julius Caesar’s July, should be renamed August – and so Augustus became part of the regular passage of time, as he remains.

Augustus’ birthday. The 23rd of September, the governor urged (in words still preserved in an inscription), might ‘justly be considered equal to the beginning of all things … for [Augustus] has given a different appearance to the whole world, a world which would have met

With the accession of Hadrian in 117 CE, after more than a hundred years of imperial portraits with no trace of facial hair (only a little stubble, if they were supposed to be in mourning), emperors started to be portrayed with full beards, a trend that lasted throughout the rest of the century and well after the period covered by this book. It is a guaranteed way of dating all those imperial heads that now line museum shelves: if they are bearded, they are after 117 CE.

Latin vocabulary itself captured the idea: the desired state of humanity was otium (not so much ‘leisure’, as it is usually translated, but the state of being in control of one’s own time); ‘business’ of any kind was its undesirable opposite, negotium (‘not otium’).

Child labour was the norm. It is not a problem, or even a category, that most Romans would have understood. The invention of ‘childhood’ and the regulation of what work ‘children’ could do only came fifteen hundred years later and is still a peculiarly Western preoccupation.

These were a long way from guilds in the medieval sense; they did not set qualifications for practising particular crafts or impose what was effectively a closed shop.

But at some point an historic stake in Roman society was invented for these associations. There was a tall, but important, story that it was the second king of Rome, Numa, who first established them, to include the builders, bronze workers, potters, goldsmiths, dyers, leather processers and musicians. Whoever dreamt this up, and it was a dream, was giving the craftsmen and their organisations a genealogy that went back almost as far as it was possible to go in Roman history.

The majority of the quotes are of the first words of the first book of the Aeneid (‘Arma virumque cano’, ‘Arms and the man I sing’) or the first words of the second book (‘Conticuere omnes’, ‘Everyone fell silent’) – lines that had probably become as quotable as ‘To be or not to be’.

And for the first time, at the start of another long tradition whose origins lie in the Roman Empire, a substantial quantity of wine was being made in what is now France, outperforming the Italian vintages.

revealed a military base, small villages for

At a rough estimate, that basic requirement amounted to 20 million litres of olive oil per year (for lighting and cleaning, as well as cooking), 100 million litres of wine and 250 tons of grain. Almost all of this came to Rome from outside Italy.

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’.