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    SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
    SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
    SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
    Audiobook18 hours

    SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

    Written by Mary Beard

    Narrated by Phyllida Nash

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A sweeping, revisionist history of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists. Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a "mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war" that served as the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria. Yet how did all this emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? In S.P.Q.R., world-renowned classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of a civilization that even two thousand years later still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty. From the foundational myth of Romulus and Remus to 212 cenearly a thousand years laterwhen the emperor Caracalla gave Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire, S.P.Q.R. (the abbreviation of "The Senate and People of Rome") examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries by exploring how the Romans thought of themselves: how they challenged the idea of imperial rule, how they responded to terrorism and revolution, and how they invented a new idea of citizenship and nation. Opening the book in 63 bce with the famous clash between the populist aristocrat Catiline and Cicero, the renowned politician and orator, Beard animates this "terrorist conspiracy," which was aimed at the very heart of the Republic, demonstrating how this singular event would presage the struggle between democracy and autocracy that would come to define much of Rome's subsequent history. Illustrating how a classical democracy yielded to a self-confident and self-critical empire, S.P.Q.R. reintroduces us, though in a wholly different way, to famous and familiar charactersHannibal, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Augustus, and Nero, among otherswhile expanding the historical aperture to include those overlooked in traditional histories: the women, the slaves and ex-slaves, conspirators, and those on the losing side of Rome's glorious conquests. Like the best detectives, Beard sifts fact from fiction, myth and propaganda from historical record, refusing either simple admiration or blanket condemnation. Far from being frozen in marble, Roman history, she shows, is constantly being revised and rewritten as our knowledge expands. Indeed, our perceptions of ancient Rome have changed dramatically over the last fifty years, and S.P.Q.R., with its nuanced attention to class inequality, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, promises to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 9, 2015
    ISBN9781501910791
    SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
    Author

    Mary Beard

    Mary Beard is one of the most original and best-known classicists working today. She is Professor of Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Classics editor of the TLS. She is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books include the Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (2008) and the best-selling SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015). Her popular TLS blog has been collected in the books It's a Don's Life and All in a Don's Day. Her latest book is Women & Power: A Manifesto (2017).

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    Reviews for SPQR

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      SPQR.......What a brilliant book. Beard goes so deep into the dynamics of Rome. From the ruling upper class to the using of urine for laundry. Her closing remarks on the book are fantastic and eye opening. What an amazing piece of work.
    • 4/5
      Takes the history of Rome from Remus and Romulus to the first 1,000 years of the common era. Managing to the keep the information entertaining and relevant.
    • 4/5
      A really good survey of Ancient Roman History. I really like the author's writing style for this book. She not only delivers the history of the period, but she also explains why historians think certain things happened (or did not happen) the way we understand them. She provides the evidence and the logic behind interpreting that evidence. When studying the ancient time period, this explanation is really essential and I found it refreshing in a history book. Highly recommended to those who enjoy reading about Ancient Rome.
    • 3/5
      IT IS NOT EASY TO GIVE A JUDGEMENT. My first impression is that this is, in a way, a minimalistic view of the Roman history, which seems to be painted as a sequence of skirmisches, murders, civil wars. Not a word on the greatnes of the Roman history and its legacy to our preesent civilisation. Very interesting the description of day to day life.
    • 4/5
      Lackluster narration. Covers a lot of territory. Overall I enjoyed it, although I was hoping for a bit less about famous men and more about society in general. I expect the source material is to blame for that. If you enjoy this, definitely check out the Emperors of Rome podcast.
    • 5/5
      Her new tome “SPQR”, very fine. She really gets into chucking the history around: is this true? is this likely? how do we know? is this like us? what was it really like for them? I was able to keep pace with the factual side of it (the one damn thing after another, which she skimps and skirts) because i did a pile of reading to help Zoe through her Classics Higher exam in her last year at school- already nearly 6 years ago, my God, tempus don’t 'arf fugit.
    • 5/5
      Excellent and approachable treatment of first millennium of Rome. Certainly on a par with Mary Beards television documentaries
    • 5/5
      All Western civilisations trace some or all of their history to Ancient Rome, whether that be political, cultural, military or geographic. The Rome that existed for 2,000 years from the 700's BCE to the 1400's CE shaped almost every aspect of European life and provided foundations that still support our societies today. Mary Beard, a classicist and world expert on Roman history and civilisation, has produced a masterful history of the first 1,000 years of the Roman experience. In this book she clearly lays out what we do and do not know (as well as what we could or could not know) about Rome debunking many myths. More than a chronology of events, Beard gives us her view of what lay behind the growth and success of Rome - why it grew, why it became so successful and how its people lived and its institutions worked.Clearly written in a confident style, I took from this book a more intimate understanding of the Roman people and how they lived and worked. Thoroughly recommended.
    • 4/5
      A history of Rome, exploring its founding myths and realities, to the extent they’re knowable from the evidence. History is always about the present; Beard’s Rome is notable because it made conquered subjects into Roman citizens, with Roman citizens’ rights (although such rights could be hard to exercise from far away), and because many important figures from Roman history were immigrants, or near descendants of immigrants: Rome as melting pot. There are some repeating tics, like “it was more complicated than that,” but overall I enjoyed it as a history of people (almost all men, since that’s who left the records) scheming and fighting and doing the best they could to govern.
    • 1/5
      Woke nonsense. Author mentions “gender identity “ within the first few paragraphs. Hard avoid. ❤️
    • 4/5
      Listened on Audible. Interesting, engaging, and broad history of the rise of Rome.
    • 5/5
      Just wonderful.One of the better history books I have ever read. It is amazing that one person can know so much about a topic and distill it in such a marvelous manner. Provides both a long-term arc of the thousand years of Rome covered by the book, but also a sense of the details that make it all more memorable and relatable.
    • 4/5
      Excellent introduction to the history of Rome. Written for a popular audience without any background in Roman history.
    • 5/5
      Excellent. Well written throughout.
    • 4/5
      The Rooman Empire still holds quite a sway in modern imaginations and culture. Gladiator and the tv show Rome are only two examples of its pop culture hold, and we still quote what may, or may not be, actual Roman lines. Rome is still important to us, and in this book, covering the beginnings of the empire up to the death (roughly) of Commodus, Beard shows the reader what it was like to live in Rome. This is a book about Rome the empire, but also Rome the people. What did it mean to be a Roman citizen?

      SPQR: A History of Ancient RomeIt is an overview of the period, and it covers a huge swath of time, so don’t expect to be reading about every detail in the life of Augustus, or Claudius. And I think it works well if you have some familiarity with the history. Its been years and years since I studied anything about Rome, but that knowledge, hiding somewhere in my brain, certainly helped with my reading of this book.

      Which isn’t to say that it is an overly academic book, it isn’t, it is a popular history book. And it is very readable. Almost too readable in parts, because, I don’t know about you, but for me, sometimes have a complex read forces me to slow down and take in the facts better than something that doesn’t need to be translated into words my brain understands.

      It is also a book that is full of quotable lines, such as

      It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not.

      If you have an interest in Roman history, then this is a very good place to start, or even to continue. Although a word of warning, if you are anything like me when you are reading about good old Augustus you’ll be picturing the TV version, not to mention James Purefoy when Beard is talking about Marc Antony.

      That is actually one of the things I really enjoyed about the book, how Beard shows us that all we think we know about Rome may not be true. And this goes double when talking about their enemies, or indeed the Romans that ended up on the wrong side of history themselves. That line about victors writing the history certainly comes into play.
    • 4/5
      A good one-volume history of Rome through the early third century. Self-consciously "revisionist", it goes out of its way to challenge and bolster traditional narratives with both archaeological evidence and applications of skepticism and common sense. She also uses these sources to illuminate what daily life was like, and to try to shed light on women, slaves and the non-rich, who are mostly marginalized in traditional Roman narratives.

      Shaping all this is a vague theme about the extension of Roman citizenship to ever broader groups — but Beard never develops to the point it could be. She addresses this argument in passing a few times, and then returns to it briefly in an epilogue, but never engages fully with either the struggle or its consequences.

      Don't make this your only look at Roman history, but if you've got a basic grounding (I'd recommend Mike Duncan's "The History of Rome" podcast for that if you've got a few hundred hours to burn) SPQR does a good job offering a new angle on familiar history.

      (N.B.: I consumed this book in audiobook format, not in print, which might have shaped my experience.)
    • 4/5
      Let's get this out of the way: this is in no way a history of ancient Rome; this is a history of Rome from its mythical founding up till the year 212. It's heavily biased towards the Republic and the transition to Imperial structures, so you learn virtually nothing about the last, say, 150 of the years the book claims to cover. That's fine, but to say that Beard is breaking new ground by writing about the Republic and early Empire is ridiculous, and to give the book such a broad subtitle is simply misleading.

      That aside, it's an exceptionally easy read, with a form that lets Beard and her readers have it both ways: we get to grumble about the silliness of Great Man history and decry the lack of a focus on women, slaves, provinces and colonies etc in so much ancient history... while also reading a book structured around Cicero, the Ides of March, and Augustus, that more or less says "we don't know much about women or slaves etc because, well, they couldn't or didn't write anything". Depending on how you want to understand this you might call it saving the baby of narrative while losing the bathwater of hero-worship, or you might call it ingenuous liberal self-congratulation.

      I cannot stress how easy this book is to read. In many ways, it's a model history for the general reader. I stress this because I realize this review is going to sound very critical, and I think this is a good book that everyone should read. It's also very much of the moment, as the previous paragraph suggests.

      Less of-the-moment, and much stranger, is Beard contention that there's nothing to write about once Augustus has set in place the imperial framework. History, she assures us, more or less ended, just as everyone has said for generations that history ended in the Byzantine empire. Nothing notable happened. Nothing much changed. That's simply not true. However, it is very fortuitous for the book's structure. The last chapter that describes things changing is 'Fourteen Emperors,' which takes us from Tiberius to Commodus. The last two chapters proper are about class, and colonization/romanization; really more essays on these topics than chapter of a history. Again, this is fine, and good. But the idea that nothing much happened thereafter until the well-recorded 'fall' (was that in the fifth century? Or the sixteenth?)... well, time to head for the bar.

      I probably would have thought much more of this book had I never learned that Mary Beard once engaged Boris Johnson in a debate entitled something like "Rome or Greece." But enough: the fact that I was so irritated by this book shows that it's a good history book, which makes readers care about its topic.
    • 4/5
      I really liked Ms. Beard's engaging writing style that conveys her enthusiasm for her subject. I also liked her awareness that there is more than one side to every story. I also really liked the modern perspective she brought to the subject, which includes a multidisciplinary approach and a focus on "regular folks" as well as the powerful leaders. I was struck by the fact that many of the problems facing the Roman Empire are still with us today, including debt, inequality of influence and wealth, corruption. Makes me wonder if these are unsolvable problems that will be with us forever.
    • 5/5
      One of the finest surveys of the history of Rome I have read. Highly recommended.Frankly, I have never been a fan of the author based upon several of her lectures wherein she insists upon injecting her personal liberal ideologies.However, this work is both free of ideology and extraordinary well written. The author has clearly done extensive research and has a deep understanding of Roman history. She also has a user-friendly writing style which both informs and yet does not get bogged down in unnecessary minutiae.This book will appeal to those with a full understanding of Roman history, as well as novices. It is exceptional.
    • 4/5
      This is no standard history text, but a theme-based approach to the Roman Republic and it's replacement. The author makes it clear that many common assumptions are incorrect. She reminds us that we have little evidence of what happened in those days; the sources were invariably biased and/or written well after the event. Entertaining reading.
    • 5/5
      Readers who've studied antiquity formally or read secondary sources in the original might not have much reason to read this one, but for everyone else, "SPQR" is highly recommendable. Beard provides a panoramic view of Roman history here, but what makes it so good is the focus she keeps on a few issues that feel vital to her. She digs through ancient Roman history trying to disentangle fact from myth. She describes a historical record that is at once plentiful and full of gaps. And she consistently tries to figure out how the Romans viewed themselves and their empire's project. What she describes is a world that will seem both bizarre and strangely familiar to modern readers -- the same empire that exposed babies at rubbish dumps and rescued them for slave labor also seems to have been the foundation of what we think of as "citizenship." She also seems to take aim, as other historians have, I'm sure, at Hollywood's safely European view of Rome: the Rome that Beard describes was constantly expanding its borders and assimilating people, a Greek/Latin agglomeration that involved everyone from Britain to the Black Sea. Beard presents a Rome that was, in many ways, deeply influenced by its military culture, but I rather enjoyed what she revealed about the day-to-day lives of ordinary Romans, and, frankly, I was amazed at how much historians and archeologists have been able to learn about their lives from the bits of smashed statues and variegated junk that they left behind. Beard mentions inscriptions on game boards, and graves, commercial records and private correspondence. One of the best, and most thrilling, aspects of "SPQR" is that the author takes her readers through a historian's reasoning process, showing them how much knowledge can be gleaned from the little that's been left behind and the much that's disappeared along the way. Beard's command of the material she goes over here is impressive, and has the casual yet precise poise that can only really come from a lifetime studying the Romans and their times. I finished this one and told myself that it's time to start reading more history.
    • 4/5
      Mary Beard has put together an intelligent, in depth, and readable book about at ancient Rome. She covers Rome's founding, the changing politics (predominance of the Senate shifting to the Emperors), some of the famous (or infamous!) characters, and also the lives of the middle and lower classes. She really gives a good overall picture of the empire - it's people, politics, and how it hung together for so long. I really liked how she didn't get bogged down in any one famous person. I think this is one of those books that, while I won't remember all the specific details, it will inform my awareness of all things Roman. I really didn't know much going in, so it was great to get a better picture of this long-lasting and influential empire.Definitely recommended.
    • 4/5
      Perhaps more intriguing for a glimpse into how a contemporary classicist constructs their own image of Rome.
    • 2/5
      Ok...it took nearly all of the trip to finish Mary Beard's "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome". My rating? 2 out of 5. It is a revisionist history of Rome, starting in the height of Cicero. She draws off of scholarly material, and then tries to enhance it by pulling information on daily life from other sources - including pottery shards. All worthy aspects, but her revisionist history is merely adding suppositions of what daily life may have been like to already established material and fact about Roman history. While her material was much more lively than say, Gibbons...it was just not enthralling enough to keep my attention for long periods of time, thus the lengthy amount of time it took me to read it.
    • 5/5
      This 606 page book is the only book you need to read to understand the workings of the Roman Empire. To appreciate the level of detail the author provides I now quote from the book as follows: “Roman laundry work and textile processing (a combination conventionly known as “fulling”, which had as a staple ingredients: human urine.)” Pg. 454. I highly recommend this book!
    • 5/5
      Great book,
    • 5/5
      This is book I wanted to read for a while, and finally got down to sit and read it. Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge, and this novel is the culmination of 50 years of love and research into Roman culture.What to expectA review of the first millennium of Roman history. From the sketchy beginnings till the 3rd century, Beard covers many aspects of Rome’s development.The book deals with how much we know, and more importantly don’t know, about the early beginnings. How much of Rome’s early history is actually dubious myths, and how much is reconstructed by historians for fragmentary evidence.It covers the transformation from Republic to empire, as well as daily lives , so that we can glean from what it was like to be “Roman”.What I likedTrying to put everything in a larger context. Examining the surviving evidence (archaeological and literary), and critiquing it. The writing style itself, which is flowing and lets Beard passion for Roman history shine through.What to be aware ofThis is probably not the first book about Rome’s history you should read. Beard covers a thousand years of history, and necessarily somethings are left out. A working knowledge of the commonly accepted timeline and general events will make following the book easier.I also wish Beard would have gone into further depth at a few points, but again this is probably more than a single, non-technical book can cover.SummaryIf you want to take your knowledge of Rome to the next level, and before you delve into original sources and academic papers, this is the book for you.---Assaph Mehr, author of Murder In Absentia: a story of Togas, Dagger, and Magic - for lovers of Ancient Rome, Urban Fantasy, and Detective mysteries.
    • 4/5
      a good and interesting history of ancient rome. there were two eras in roman history, the republic and the empire. the republic lasted for about 600 years. the senate ruled but it was no democracy! to get into senate required wealth and family. however it did response to social pressures. then came the empire one person rule. an interesting aspect of rome was the rights of women. women had more rights and protect under the law than a woman in 19th century england.
    • 5/5
      SPQR.......What a brilliant book. Beard goes so deep into the dynamics of Rome. From the ruling upper class to the using of urine for laundry. Her closing remarks on the book are fantastic and eye opening. What an amazing piece of work.
    • 4/5
      This is a great read. Mary Beard knows her stuff, and presents it in a style that is absolutely engaging. She often tells the story of a particular period, pleasingly similar to the general story that we have all absorbed, but then goes on to tell you why that may not be the whole story, or even the story at all. She has the knowledge and the research and the writing style to bring this off successfully, and not sounding like a twat.I read this just before a trip to Rome - it made the reading and the travel that much more enjoyable.Read August 2016.