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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome Paperback – Illustrated, September 6, 2016
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New York Times Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Wall Street Journal, the Economist,Foreign Affairs, and Kirkus Reviews
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction)
Shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History)
A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Gift Guide Selection
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection
A sweeping, "magisterial" history of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists shows why Rome remains "relevant to people many centuries later" (Atlantic).
In SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" (Wall Street Journal). Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" (Economist) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" (Christian Science Monitor) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" (Dallas Morning News) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, SPQR will to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.
100 illustrations; 16 pages of color; 5 maps- Print length608 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLiveright
- Publication dateSeptember 6, 2016
- Dimensions5.4 x 1.1 x 8.3 inches
- ISBN-101631492225
- ISBN-13978-1631492228
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Editorial Reviews
Review
― Greg Woolf, Wall Street Journal
"Though she here claims that 50 years of training and study have led up to SPQR, Beard wears her learning lightly. As she takes us through the brothels, bars, and back alleys where the populus Romanus left their imprint, one senses, above all, that she is having fun."
― James Romm, New Republic
"By the time Beard has finished, she has explored not only archaic, republican, and imperial Rome, but the eastern and western provinces over which it eventually won control…She moves with ease and mastery though archaeology, numismatics, and philology, as well as a mass of written documents on stone and papyrus."
― G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books
"In SPQR, her wonderful concise history, Mary Beard unpacks the secrets of the city's success with a crisp and merciless clarity that I have not seen equaled anywhere else."
― Ferdinand Mount, New York Times Book Review
"Beard does precisely what few popularizers dare to try and plenty of dons can’t pull off: She conveys the thrill of puzzling over texts and events that are bound to be ambiguous, and she complicates received wisdom in the process. Her magisterial new history of Rome, SPQR…is no exception…. The ancient Romans, Beard shows, are relevant to people many centuries later who struggle with questions of power, citizenship, empire, and identity."
― Emily Wilson, The Atlantic
"A masterful new chronicle…. Beard is a sure-footed guide through arcane material that, in other hands, would grow tedious. Sifting myth from fact in dealing with the early history of the city, she enlivens―and deepens―scholarly debates by demonstrating how the Romans themselves shaped their legendary beginnings to short-term political ends…. Exemplary popular history, engaging but never dumbed down, providing both the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life."
― The Economist
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Liveright; Reprint edition (September 6, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 608 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1631492225
- ISBN-13 : 978-1631492228
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.4 x 1.1 x 8.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Beard begins her history at the dawn of Roman civilization and ends with Emperor Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to everyone living in the empire in 212 AD. She starts by writing that Rome’s seven kings were likely more myth than reality. It is highly unlikely, she says, that just seven men served over the course of 250 years. It is noteworthy, she says, that many of the enduring features of Roman life were introduced by the kings. “Abominated as they were, kings were credited with creating Rome,” Beard writes. For instance, Numa created much of Rome’s religion and Servius Tullius developed the census and the associated centuriate assembly system that gave weight to the wealthier classes. Moreover, some of the kings were clearly Etruscan in background, which underscored from the earliest days that Roman leaders could come from outside of the city, a key theme of Roman self-identify. Much like the United States, Rome was a city of asylum where anyone could rise to the top.
Next Beard turns to the Republic, which she is quick to note did not spring full grown in the wake of the rape of Lucretia in 509 BC. Rather, she argues, it took centuries for the Republic of Cicero’s day to develop. Major turning points occurred in the early fourth century BC. First came the Roman destruction of Veii, Rome’s Trojan War, in 396, and then the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC. The pattern of conquest and fear of conquest was thus established, she writes. “Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.” The sophistication in building the massive defensive walls around the city and the logistics of incorporating large contingents of allied forces required “infrastructure unthinkable in the fifth century.” Next, in 367 BC, the plebs were allowed to stand for the consulship. Henceforth, Beard writes, being a patrician “carried a whiff of snobbery attached to it and not much more.”
Beard agrees with the historian Polybius who saw the Roman political system as responsible for the success of the city during the Republic. The mixed constitution provided the state with strength and stability. She writes that the tradition of ancestor worship and the competition for political office and military spoils is what drove the expansion of empire, not any formal plan of imperial conquest. It was a coercive empire, she says, not one of annexation. The Latin word imperium meant “the power to issue orders that are obeyed,” and that is what the Roman’s did. However, the influx of conquered people and wealth would challenge what it meant to be traditionally Roman.
Next, she points to the year 146 BC as a turning point, the year both Carthage and Corinth were razed. Roman violence was suddenly turned inward, beginning with the controversial tribunates of the Gracchi brothers. The road to Augustus, she claims, runs directly from the brothers to Marius versus Sulla and then Pompey versus Caesar. Each did their part to undermine key elements of the Republican system that led inexorably to dictatorship. The feud of the Gracchi brothers introduced violence to the domestic political process. The reforms of Marius allowed men without property to serve, thus turning the army into “a new style of personal militia” directly controllable by only the commanding general. Sulla added the military march on Rome and Roman soldiers spilling Roman blood, not to mention proscriptions and reviving the dictatorship. Pompey, for his part, climbed to the top of the political system outside of the natural order of the Republic, gaining commands without officially holding office. Caesar was just a culmination of his predecessors’ careers.
Beard affirms the remarkable legacy of Augustus in the transition from Republic to Empire, “a puzzling and contradictory revolutionary.” Perhaps his greatest reform – and certainly his most expensive – was the introduction of pensions for soldiers. No longer were the Roman legions dependent on their commander for taking care of them. Now after 20 years of service soldiers received 12 years salary or the equivalent in land. The reform cost an estimated 450 sesterces or half of the annual imperial income. But it effectively removed the army from politics, at least for the time being. Augustus also made the Senate hereditary for three generations and allowed the Senate’s bills to have the weight of law. Now that Augustus was solely responsible for receiving positions in the imperial infrastructure, elections slowly died off and the old patron/client system, once the bedrock of Roman society and politics, was rendered nugatory. Although Augustus held the consulship 13 times, the position had largely become symbolic. The Roman Republic was dead but kept alive as fiction by filling old positions and offices. Or as Beard explains it, “Augustus was cleverly adapting the traditional idioms to serve a new politics justifying and making comprehensible a new axis of power by systematically reconfiguring the old language.”
Concerning the first two centuries of emperors, Beard writes that for all of their idiosyncrasies and outlandish behavior they were far more similar than they were different. “There is no sign at all,” she writes, “that the character of the ruler affected the basic template of government at home or abroad in any significant way.” Moreover, “there was hardly any such thing as a general policy for running the empire or an overarching strategy of military deployment.” The emperor did represent a new tier in the structure of command, but “his role was largely a reactive one; he was not a strategist or forward planner.” The truth was that the emperorship provided “a remarkably stable structure of rule,” at least for the first two centuries of the empire. Between ascension of Augustus in 31 BC and the assassination of Commodus in 192 AD there were just 14 emperors (not counting the three short-term emperors of 69 AD). In a period half as long, between 193 and 293, there were no fewer than 70. For all of its stability, however, succession was an enduring challenge, as naming a new emperor always came down to “some combination of luck, improvisation, plotting, violence and secret deals.”
In closing, SPQR is a marvelous synthesis of one renowned scholar’s take on one thousand years of Roman history. I’ve read much Roman history, particularly the Republican period, but I learned a lot from SPQR. I suspect Beard has delivered something very few authors can, a learned piece of scholarship that advances our understanding of Roman times that is as much admired by her academic peers at is enjoyed by the general educated public.
Beard covers the major battles and political events, however much of the book focuses on what we know and do not know about Rome’s people, its subjects, its society, and its culture. She does an impressive job bringing together archeological evidence, documents, and common sense to reconstruct Ancient Rome. Her aim, as she explains, is to show a full portrait of ancient Rome, based on what we know and on our current thinking. In other words, the history of “the Senate and People of Rome” the English rendering of the SPQR.
Before 390 BCE or so, we only have Rome’s founding myths and legends. Beard looks at these stories and at many different elements of archeological evidence. This allows her to put together a number of different possibly histories of the early history. Did Romulus found Rome after being raised by a she-wolf and killing his twin brother? No. But many of the origin stories and legends may have some basis in fact.
As the book moves forward, it focuses more and more on what we know from the documentary evidence and tries to answer questions about the period. For example, how revolutionary or populist were Julius Caesar or rabble rousers like Clodius? How dedicated was Brutus and friends to the cause of liberty? How did Romans transfer large sums of money? Or how many people really knew how to read and write (20%?).
Beard offers a great deal of insight about the Roman republic, both as it rises to power and is it falls into civil war and political chaos. I found her discussion of the rise of warlords (Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, etc.) quite engaging. As Rome became richer and more powerful, it was transformed from an oligarchic republic to a failed state. More money, greater inequality, and less stability.
To my mind, the books starts to lose its steam after the reign of Augustus Caesar (31 BC to 14 AD). Augustus (who was still called Octavian), through cunning and military force, is able to stabilize the republic and create a monarchy that restores the peace. Beard explains in detail how Augustus sets up his republican monarchy, along with its compromises and accommodations.
However Beard provides little discussion of what happens next. While she does outline the reigns of the twelve legitimate emperors from Tiberius to Caracalla (there were two short civil wars during this period), it is done in short form. Possibly Nero and Domitian were not as bloody as history tells us; perhaps Caligula was not as mad as much as maddening (to the Roman elite). There is a good discussion of the expansion of Christianity in its first two centuries. Beard also discusses the expansion of “Romanization” as the empire expands.
The narrative ends in 212, the year that Caracalla grants citizenship to the entire free population. This was on the cusp of the so-called “Crisis of the Third Century.” As Beard herself points out, it is not clear why citizenship was extended or what this meant in practice. I think that this date was chosen because the empire that emerged after sixty years of revolts and civil wars was a very different sort of place with very different rules. It is not an entirely satisfactory answer but at some point the book does have to end.
Looking back two thousand years, it is quite common to ask what we can learn from Rome or if we (our civilization) is falling like the Roman Empire fell. Mary Beard argues that there is little that we can directly learn from Rome. From this book, I learned that a lot of modern institutions that we take for granted—ranging from targeted social safety nets to a proto-nation state to the republican government that is really an authoritarian dictatorship—have their origins in Ancient Rome. Certainly, we are not destined to repeat anything but there is much that we can learn.
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However from the point of view of literature most "histories" concerning the world of ancient Rome have seemed to fall somewhere along a continuum between the dry and stuffy academic sort and the lurid and over sexualised variety. So with these thoughts in mind it was with a slight degree of trepidation I embarked on Professor Beard's exploration and dissection of the history of the Roman Empire.
Thankfully however, I had nothing to fear. The book is an absolute triumph. It is very accessible and presents the development of Rome chronologically from its inception till the second century ce. The details of individuals and events are scrupulously investigated and scrutinised. Professor Beard does not fall into the trap of trying to speculate or interpret, but instead deals in known facts. If she believes events are purely mythological then she attempts to weave them into the larger narrative in order to present a fuller picture.
I could go on. However, all I will say is that this book is the most informative and enjoyable I have ever read on the subject. Highly recommended.
Much has been written before her about the rise and fall of this astonishing empire, which spanned most of Europe and the Mediterranean basin and spread its culture and laws far beyond, and far past its demise. Today, we can still hear and see the effects of Rome around us everywhere. How did the Romans accomplish this?
Beard attempts to explain, from the early days of a settlement on the Tiber, under barely recorded kings until the peak of the Empire ruled by astonishing emperors. Most histories gloss over the beginnings of Rome, but Beard takes on this task to explain how the settlement grew, and gained power. For myself, this is the least interesting section, but once past the first 150 pages, the book really takes off.
Through the brilliant Cicero, we learn a lot about everyday life in Rome, mostly because he wrote so much and most of it has survived. This is an interesting method to convey her story of how the Romans lived, ate, worked, served, and died. The empire expanded, and moved from being a republic ruled by the Senate, to the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, civil wars, and then the astonishing reign of Augustus, the first emperor. Again, we know this, and in detail, because pieces of this greatness are still around us, in museums, in ruins, and still being unearthed in far flung outposts.
Not all of this book is in chronological order, such as covering the 14 emperors following Augustus. Beard is following a theme here, what did these emperors accomplish, why, and how did it impact the Roman world, and our world today. We are left incredulous at what Roman civilization really was, and that after its collapse in the West, how it could take 1000 years for Europe to recover and reach the heights that imperial Rome had achieved.
SPQR is a work that helps us understand what was Rome. Beard is a noted professor of classics and frequent contributor on the television. Recently uploaded to YouTube is her somewhat ambitiously titled: "Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit". In many ways this 4 part series is a companion piece to SPQR, much of it covering similar material. It is worth watching to see her travel around what was once a global empire.