SPQR:
A History of Ancient Rome

Main Review:

Having recently spent a week in beautiful Italia, and conscious of how many Ancient Greek myths have made an appearance on this blog – I figured it was probably time to let the Romans have their moment in the spotlight. Ego sum benignus deus and all that.

Whilst trying to pick out a book, I wanted to avoid picking something out that would either be dryer than a Carthaginian stone tablet or be a little too excited about how many special swords a Roman legion would go to war with. Mary Beard came highly recommended by several individuals (including Sandi Toksvig in an episode of QI) so I entrusted myself into her care and picked up a copy of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

To begin with, I found myself in very good hands. From the outset there’s an inviting nature to Beard’s writing, she writes directly to the reader, almost like an invisible tour guide showing you around the sights and smells of Ancient Rome. The way she talked about Cicero and his penchant for over the top self-aggrandizement convinced me that he should be played by Kenneth Branagh in the next big Roman movie.

Given that she is introducing ancient history, Beard drives home time and again that there’s a real lack of definitive answers available for historians or classicists. Another interpretation or another side to the story always looms just out of view at pretty much every juncture. Whilst I liked how open she was about this in the first instance, it’s done so frequently that by 100 pages in I was questioning to what extent we could know anything definitively about the period.

In the end though, much like Julius Caesar himself, I found the book’s expansive ambition to be its undoing. In trying to cover such a broad scope of time, much of the history flies by in the quickest of whistle-stops, with barely a moment to take anything in. As it is, there’s often just a lot of names thrown at you that you have to try and keep separate in your mind; which is no easy matter when you’re trying to distinguish your Scipio Aemilianus from your Scipio Africanus.

Whilst I appreciate that this book is angled to be a layman’s introduction to the history, a little more ‘meat-on-the-bones’ would have helped make the book more of a springboard for further reading. Rather than swinging from interesting fact to interesting fact as I had hoped, I ended up essentially just trundling through the second half of the book; careening into the end point when Emperor Caracalla made everyone a Roman citizen.

Whilst I understood Beard’s logic for stopping there in principle (the life of Rome, she says, was so fundamentally different afterwards that it would be difficult to maintain continuity); Beard immediately proceeds to talk about the events that come after this event with her seemingly signature brevity. As a result, it gave the closing chapter the air of a student who was running out of time in an exam and had therefore hurriedly written as much as they knew about the topic in the time that remained available to them. I would much rather have seen her take a leaf out of Stephen Fry’s book and release another instalment than cram everything into a single, frenetic book.

So where does that leave SPQR? I can’t say that I disliked it, but neither can I sing its praises particularly loudly. As I closed the back cover, I wasn’t filled with a burning desire to go and read more about the Romans, but neither did I want to throw my copy on top of the nearest mound of broken amphorae. Like a Roman legion of old, it came, it saw, it… just sort of fizzled out really.

Until the next time – appyhay eadingray!