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SPQR : a history of ancient Rome / Mary Beard.

by Beard, Mary, 1955-

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Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, [2015]

Rome -- History -- Kings, 753-510 B.C.

Rome -- History -- Republic, 510-30 B.C.

Rome -- History -- Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D.

9780871404237 (hc.)

Alternate title:

S.P.Q.R. : a history of ancient Rome

Senatus populusque Romanus : a history of ancient Rome

History of ancient Rome

606 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 537-562) and index.

Prologue : the history of Rome -- Cicero's finest hour -- In the beginning -- The kings of Rome -- Rome's great leap forward -- A wider world -- New politics -- From empire to emperors -- The home front -- The transformations of Augustus -- Fourteen emperors -- The haves and have-nots -- Rome outside Rome -- Epilogue : the first Roman millennium.

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? 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 A.D. -- nearly a thousand years later -- when 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") explores 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 B.C. with the famous clash between the populist aristocrat Catiline and Cicero, the renowned politician and orator, Beard animates this singular event and the struggle between democracy and autocracy that would come to define much of Rome's subsequent history. S.P.Q.R. reintroduces us to famous and familiar characters -- Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Augustus, and Nero -- and those overlooked in traditional histories: the women, the slaves and ex-slaves, conspirators, and those on the losing side of Rome's glorious conquests. A professor of classics at Cambridge University, Mary Beard is the author of The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. She is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and discussed this book on the YouTube "92nd Street Y" series. She lives in England.

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