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SPQR

a History of Ancient Rome
Dec 01, 2016tirjan rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Loved it! But it is long. Mary Beard is a brilliant historian and a very good writer. As she reveals in the epilogue, the book is her product of fifty years of research. SPOR is Latin for Senate and the People Of Rome. She begins with the myth about Romulus and Remus being suckled by the wolf to 212 CE when the emperor Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to every inhabitant of the empire. Beard doesn't drill down only on dates, battles and rulers but also on what it was like for common people living at the time. This kind of detail is rare to find and beard cites discoveries in Germany, Britain, Syria and Africa as recently as 2012 to shed light on the breadth of Roman influence. She also makes comparisons to modern empires and draws inferences about mistakes they are making based on what these previous empire builders made 2000 years ago. She doesn't get on a soapbox about this, however, to insult the reader. You are left to draw your own conclusions. I came upon SPOR after reading Roman Mask by Thomas M D Brooke (on Kindle, not in the library). Brooke's novel is about the disastrous campaign of the Romans against the barbarian German tribes in the Teutoburg Forest east of the Rhine River. The Germans wiped out three entire Roman legions after which the empire's decline began. Beard's deals with this near the end of SPOR. The conclusion of both is that empires like everything else lasts for only a finite time period. The more the empire relies on provincial allies the more likely is the probability that the provincials will rebel against the overlord. Clearly a message for the US in 2016.