I am a huge history buff, but I hate to say it, I don’t read all that many serious history books. Most of my knowledge comes from podcasts and documentaries (I love the History channel), but of late, I have been craving something more in-depth, and so I picked up a book from one of my favorite guests on the Empire podcast — Mary Beard.
Mary Beard is a professor of Classics at Cambridge. So, she’s an absolute top-rate scholar and a very entertaining and insightful podcaster (I loved her episode on slavery in Rome), and I just discovered she has her own show as well — Ancient Lives with Mary Beard — that I can’t wait to get cracking on.
About SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
SPQR stands for Senātus Populusque Rōmānus, which basically means the Senate and People of Rome. This book is essentially that — Rome’s origin story, the development of its political, economic, and military might, but also about the regular, everyday people, and what life must have been like in those times.
The book starts right from the origin of Rome – the founding by Romulus and Remus and explores the mythology vs the actual history of how the city might have been founded. She’s very frank about what we know and don’t know, and she spends much of this section exploring the various sources and their veracity. Because the history is unclear, I found some parts quite tedious, as she painstakingly explores all the possible theories. I did develop confidence in her research, though, and once she moved on from the early times of the city, the book gets a lot more engrossing.
For a historical book, it is not very long, and it sometimes reads as the best of — the juiciest stories and the best characters. But that’s what makes it interesting and stand out from a textbook of Roman history. It also makes this book very accessible to a non-expert reader such as me (who knows about Rome only through movies).
If there is one thing that I did not like and found confusing, it was her timelines. She did seem to move all over the place, and frequently interposed stories of the rulers with chapters on the local populace, which, although interesting, broke the flow for me a little.
Overall, though, this was a great immersive read that gave me some more detail and color on some of my favorite emperors, while at the same being a proper, scholarly text. Loved this little detour from my usual reading lists, and I look forward to trying more history books now.
Any recommendations for me?
