Reading: SPQR
Aug. 20th, 2016 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI bought Mary Beard's new(ish) book about Rome* to read on holiday, though in fact I only started it on the last leg of the journey home. This was probably just as well; it's interesting, well-written and very accessible, but it is a serious academic book and not really the ideal thing to read to unwind after a tough day's walking. (Or, indeed, after a busy day at a convention, so I read very little of it last weekend.)
Beard concentrates on the first thousand years of Rome, from its mythical founding (bringing a sceptical eye to the stories of Remus and Romulus and Aeneas), through the growth and fall of the Republic to Caracalla's extension of Roman citizenship throughout the Empire in 212CE. Her focus is mainly on events in Rome itself, though one of the final chapters takes a wider look at the Empire and its provinces, and necessarily more on the wealthy and powerful men whose words and memorials still survive than on women and the lower classes, but she tries to look beyond the obvious stories. Rather than taking the more traditional approach of presenting Rome as the great empire we should learn from and model ourselves on, she considers Rome largely in the light of its influences on our world, from models of government to rhetorical devices. The structure isn't strictly chronological; she starts with Cicero's conflict with Catiline, towards the end of the Republic, and then goes back to tell the story of how Rome got to that point and forward into the empire, although all the way through she makes links between events in different periods and references later retellings (Cicero in particular looms large across the whole Republican period).
I feel I learned a lot about Rome from the book**, though I'm not entirely sure how much of it is going to stick!
* not, as I keep worrying I've told people, Mary Berry's book about Rome, which would be a very different beast. Dormouse pie, anyone?
** probably not hard, as most of my prior knowledge of ancient Rome came from Rosemary Sutcliff, who has been thoroughly Jossed by modern archarology, and I Claudius.
Beard concentrates on the first thousand years of Rome, from its mythical founding (bringing a sceptical eye to the stories of Remus and Romulus and Aeneas), through the growth and fall of the Republic to Caracalla's extension of Roman citizenship throughout the Empire in 212CE. Her focus is mainly on events in Rome itself, though one of the final chapters takes a wider look at the Empire and its provinces, and necessarily more on the wealthy and powerful men whose words and memorials still survive than on women and the lower classes, but she tries to look beyond the obvious stories. Rather than taking the more traditional approach of presenting Rome as the great empire we should learn from and model ourselves on, she considers Rome largely in the light of its influences on our world, from models of government to rhetorical devices. The structure isn't strictly chronological; she starts with Cicero's conflict with Catiline, towards the end of the Republic, and then goes back to tell the story of how Rome got to that point and forward into the empire, although all the way through she makes links between events in different periods and references later retellings (Cicero in particular looms large across the whole Republican period).
I feel I learned a lot about Rome from the book**, though I'm not entirely sure how much of it is going to stick!
* not, as I keep worrying I've told people, Mary Berry's book about Rome, which would be a very different beast. Dormouse pie, anyone?
** probably not hard, as most of my prior knowledge of ancient Rome came from Rosemary Sutcliff, who has been thoroughly Jossed by modern archarology, and I Claudius.
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