SPQR

I believe I picked up Mary Beard's "A History of Ancient Rome" because Paul Krugman suggested it was a great book. Say what you like about Krugman's politics, but please acknowledge that, especially for an economist, he is remarkably broad-minded, historically literate, and capable of writing in the English language. He also happens to be mostly correct about SPQR; it was a thoughtful and enlightening introduction to the history of Rome. It's only major flaw is that, despite leading "A Don's Life", Beard's English could use some serious red-pen barbering. How is it that someone who has been an academic for decades can still come up with sentences like this one?

By the end of the second century CE more than 50 per cent of the senators were from the provinces. They were not drawn evenly from different parts of the empire (none came from Britain), and some of them, like the first 'foreign' emperors, may have been the descendants of earlier Italian settlers in the provinces rather that 'native', but not all, or even most (SPQR, 522)

And how can any self-respecting editor not fix this sort of thing? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules!?

Examples of such linguistic atrocities abound, and clearly reduce the readability of the book. But I cite this particular one to give you a sense of those fascinating tidbits that redeem it. Because I had no concept of the fact that she points to here. It turns out that the Roman empire didn't work very much like we imagine empires are supposed to work. It certainly attacked and dominated all its neighbors for thousands of kilometers in every direction. And once it gained military control of an area it relentlessly extracted resources from it. But it also incorporated many of these people directly into Roman life, while still mostly allowing them to preserve all of their local uniqueness. Over time, Roman citizenship became increasing widespread, so that even people from Briton, or Egypt, or Greece could consider themselves 'Roman'. This process of absorption is how they ended up, at the height of the empire, with half the senate coming from somewhere other than Rome. So this little fact actually contains of wealth of insight into how Rome became so powerful – it kept expanding its politics to include the people it enslaved. Any resemblance between this strategy and the remarkable success of a certain modern capitalist empire are purely coincidental, surely.

The book is filled with all sorts of other surprising facts, word origin trivia, and eye-opening political analyses. Naturally, since this is the first history of Rome I've read, I can hardly be sure that Beard's account is not somehow biased or one sided. If it is, however, it's not clear on which side that would be; while she gives a necessarily selective overview of 1000 years of history, she had no particular political ax to grind as far as I could detect. Indeed, one of the refreshing things about the book is the frequency with which it admits what we don't know about this history. Beard is often at pains to point out that stories we receive from ancient sources have their own built in biased perspective, and that modern scholars often try build an elaborate theoretical edifice on scanty information. Along the way, almost casually, she does a fair job of outlining for us non-specialist how we came to know what we think we do know about this history – whether through Cicero or Pliny's letters, reveling epitaphs on tombstones, or archaeological explorations of former garbage dumps. Overall then, I'd recommend it as a good place to start if you just want an overview of the upward arc of Empire. The decline and fall are for another day.