SPQR by Mary Beard - Review
SPQR ( Senatus PopulusQue Romanus meaning, for the Senate and People of Rome, the indelible banner stamped below the eagle standards of the Roman legions) is a chunky book that traces Rome from its beginnings as a bandit village in the 750’s BC through to the grant of universal citizenship across the empire by Caracalla in 212 AD. A period of nearly a thousand years. Or, as Mary Beard writes, Rome’s first millennium. As we all know, the Western Roman Empire continued for another 250 years whereas the Eastern Roman Empire - popularly now known as the Byzantium Empire - lasted for a further 1200 years until its eventual fall in 1453.
The problem with any book spanning a thousand years of history is that - no matter how large - it can only give a surface presentation of the narrative as it moves along. There’s no in depth analysis of each event. If you want that, then specialist books are what you need and that’s what I usually prefer. I get frustrated that the author is, necessarily, constrained and so has to arbitrarily choose what to include and what to leave out. That applies here (Marius and the Cimbrian War hardly get a mention for instance). However, I was gifted this book and so once I started, I needed to finish!
The first part of SPQR, covering the foundation and growth of the Republic through to its subsequent transformation under Augustus in the latter part of the 1st century BC, is episodic but essentially follows a linear narrative. The following 200 odd years, detailing the period of the ‘Principate’ emperors, feels much more rushed and thematic. The problem with this latter half of the book is the tendency to indulge in what I call ‘magpie’ historicism - selecting random examples from a wide variety of ages to justify an argument. Part of this is due to the periodic lack of sources handed down to us across the ages. Was Rome’s most thrilling period - the fall of the Republic - so famous because it marked a major turning point or because the surviving source material is so rich?
The central question of any book covering a thousand years is why Rome went from being a tribe of brigands in central Italy to a world power. The usual suspects are present in this book - the Romans’ love of adaption - in army tactics, in building, even in gods. Mary Beard advances that Rome was unique in its ability to absorb its defeated enemies, from Veii, to the Sabines, the Samnites etc, in a loose embrace so all might prosper. The Romans weren’t fussy about local gods or systems of government, they co-opted them. What however was sine qua non was the supply of manpower for wars.
As to the question whether the Romans better in battle or just able to muster more men, Mary Beard believes that - with technology the same, the largest army was predisposed to win. It’s an argument and a plausible if obvious one. There is some truth to this. For example, the Second Punic War where Hannibal, clearly the better general, could win the battles but never the war. Rome kept recruiting armies, harassing the Carthaginians and recapturing towns, in order to continue fighting even when all seemed lost. That was, until they found their own master tactician in Scipio Africanus. Another example may be the most famous if only due to the popular adage that it spawned following the Battle of Asculum. Fighting King Pyrrhus in the 270’s BC, the Romans kept losing battles but extracted unsustainable casualties on Pyrrhus, thus giving rise to the popular phrase “Pyrrhic victory”.
I think my major objection to this type of book is that it clearly comes from an academic. Nothing wrong with that, of course. However, there is hair-splitting and ‘on the one hand, but on the other’ isms that can annoy after a while. Much of the book seems to be negative; finding a popular story or commonly held piece of knowledge and then finding issues with it. It’s a tendency I like least in academics, the pursuit of the obscure in preference to the universal. At best this can advance knowledge and provide balance to a flabby prevailing narrative, at worst, it can be obscurantist and distorting. You can lose the big picture by being needlessly pedantic. In broad based books - like this - the approach can lose the narrative thrust in a welter of qualifications.
Maybe it wasn’t the book for me but then I never expected it to be. I’ve long moved beyond large overviews of the Roman world - however scholarly - and into more niche areas like Julian or Aurelian. So, if someone wants to gift me a Roman history then Josephus’ The Jewish War might be a good place to start.
A couple of factoids-
The word rostrum, for a speaker’s platform, comes from the Latin word for a ship’s ram (rostra). After the naval battle of Antium in 338bc, the victorious commander of the Roman fleet, Gaius Maenius, took the rams from six captured enemy ships and placed them on the platform in the Forum. Hence rostrum.
“They make a wasteland and call it peace,” said Calgacus, ancient British leader, as quoted by Roman historian Tacitus. An interesting quote (wasteland can be interrupted as ‘desert’ or ‘desolation’) which shows as much about Roman freedom of thought to write this down as it does a critique of Roman pacification efforts. Rome usually was magnanimous in victory, the exceptions (like Caesar’s massacre of the Tencteri and Usipetes) providing the exceptions to the rule. They wanted money, taxes, slaves, markets and manpower for the army.
