by Mary Beard
In the city of Rome, the best indication of the changed world is the arch erected in 315 CE in honour of the emperor Constantine’s victory over one of his internal rivals. It still stands, preserved because it was once built into a Renaissance fortress, between the old Roman Forum and the great amphitheatre of the Colosseum. At first glance it looks entirely traditional, harking back to the arches erected in honour of many military victories in Rome and copied in imperial memorials ever since, from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner in London. It is decorated with an array of scenes that celebrate Constantine’s authority in an idiom familiar from the first two centuries of autocratic power in Rome. The emperor is shown doing battle against barbarian enemies, addressing his troops, pardoning captives, sacrificing to the traditional gods, being crowned by Victory and giving handouts to the people. All this could have been carved 150 years earlier.
103. The Arch of Constantine. Almost all the sculpture visible on this façade came from earlier monuments. That includes the roundels above the side arches, which are Hadrianic, and the rectangular panels on the attic level, which come from a monument of Marcus Aurelius. The standing barbarians, also at the attic level, are Trajanic.
In fact, much of it was. Apart from a few modest panels, all these sculptures had been prised or hacked off earlier monuments that commemorated Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. The faces of the original emperors were roughly recut in the likeness of Constantine, and the pieces were reassembled for display on the new arch. It was a costly and destructive exercise in nostalgia. For a few ancient onlookers, it may have succeeded in placing the new emperor in the illustrious tradition of the old. But, more than anything, this careful refabrication points to the historical distance between the first millennium of ancient Rome, which is the subject of my SPQR, and Rome’s second millennium, which is a story for another time, another book – and another writer.
And so to end
I have spent a good deal of the past fifty years of my life with these ‘first millennium Romans’. I have learnt their languages as well as I can. I have read a good deal of the literature they have left us (no one has read it all), and I have studied some of the hundreds of thousands of books and papers written over the centuries about them, from Machiavelli and Gibbon to Gore Vidal and beyond. I have tried to decipher the words they carved into stone, and I have dug them up, quite literally, on wet, windy and unglamorous archaeological sites in Roman Britain. And I have wondered for a long time about how best to tell Rome’s story and to explain why I think it matters. I have also been one of those 5 million people who each year queue to step inside the Colosseum. I have let my children be photographed there, for a fee, with the chancers who ply their trade dressed up as gladiators. I have bought them plastic gladiator helmets, and, turning a blind eye to the cruelties of the modern world, I have reassured them that we do not do anything as cruel as that now. For me, as much as for anyone else, the Romans are a subject not just of history and inquiry but also of imagination and fantasy, horror and fun.
I no longer think, as I once naively did, that we have much to learn directly from the Romans – or, for that matter, from the ancient Greeks, or from any other ancient civilisation. We do not need to read of the difficulties of the Roman legions in Mesopotamia or against the Parthians to understand why modern military interventions in western Asia might be ill advised. I am not even certain that those generals who claim to follow the tactics of Julius Caesar really do so in more than their own imaginations. And attractive as some Roman approaches to citizenship may sound, as I have tried to explain them, it would be folly to imagine that they could be applied to our situation, centuries later. Besides, ‘the Romans’ were as divided about how they thought the world worked, or should work, as we are. There is no simple Roman model to follow. If only things were that easy.
But I am more and more convinced that we have an enormous amount to learn – as much about ourselves as about the past – by engaging with the history of the Romans, their poetry and prose, their controversies and arguments. Western culture has a very varied inheritance. Happily, we are not the heirs of the classical past alone. Nevertheless, since the Renaissance at least, many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury and beauty have been formed, and tested, in dialogue with the Romans and their writing.
We do not want to follow Cicero’s example, but his clash with the bankrupt aristocrat, or popular revolutionary, with which I started this book still underlies our views of the rights of the citizen and still provides a language for political dissent: ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ The idea of ‘desolation’ masquerading as ‘peace’, as Tacitus put into the mouths of Rome’s British enemies, still echoes in modern critiques of imperialism. And the lurid vices that are attributed to the most memorable Roman emperors have always raised the question of where autocratic excess ends and a reign of terror begins.
We do the Romans a disservice if we heroise them, as much as if we demonise them. But we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to take them seriously – and if we close our long conversation with them. This book, I hope, is not just A History of Ancient Rome but part of that conversation with its Senate and People: SPQR.
FURTHER READING
The bibliography on the history of Rome is more than any one person could master. What follows are suggestions for exploring further the topics I have discussed, directions to some of the more out-of-the-way texts and sources that I have mentioned, including some personal favourite contributions to the subject, new and old. Under specific chapters I first note important thematic studies before identifying the source of particular arguments or pieces of information which might otherwise be hard to track down.
General
Almost all the ancient literature I draw on is available in good modern translation. The volumes of the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press) include all but a handful of mainstream classical authors, with a Greek or Latin text and facing English translation. The series of Penguin Classics is more selective and does not include the original Greek or Latin but is more affordably priced. Increasingly, texts are available free online. The most useful sites are Lacus Curtius (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/home.html) and the Perseus Digital Library (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections). Both include a mixture of the original language and translations, and often have both. I give pointers here mainly to translations not available in these standard series.
Ancient inscriptions and papyri can be harder to track down. Their original texts are often included in huge ongoing collections, which began to be compiled in the nineteenth century (and, in what was then a gesture to easy understanding across different modern countries, were written entirely in Latin). The main collection (the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum) also has a website, http://cil.bbaw.de/cil_en/index_en.html. It is technical, but now mostly available in English. The website of the Oxford Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (www.csad.ox.ac.uk/) gives a glimpse into the vivid evidence that can come from papyri. Some smaller collections of translations of these documents, chosen by period or theme, are available, noted below.
Anyone who has the nerve to write about a thousand years of Roman history follows in the footsteps of distinguished predecessors. The beginning of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains one of the most memorable accounts of the first two centuries CE; the abridged version edited by David Womersely (Penguin, 2000) is in a handy single volume with a good introduction but omits substantial sections in this period. Two useful multi-authored series cover the period of SPQR. The Routledge History of the Ancient World includes two especially relevant volumes: T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC) (1995), and Martin Goodman, The Roman World, 44 BC–AD 180 (2nd edition, 2011). In the Edinburgh History of Ancient Rome (Edinburgh UP),
note Nathan Rosenstein, Rome and the Mediterranean 290 to 146 BC: The Imperial Republic (2012), Catherine Steel, The End of the Roman Republic 146 to 44 BC: Conquest and Crisis (2013), J. S. Richardson, Augustan Rome 44 BC to AD 14: The Restoration of the Republic and the Establishment of Empire (2012) and, picking up more or less where I stop, Clifford Ando, Imperial Rome AD 193 to 284 (2012). The relevant weighty parts – volumes 7.2 to 11 – of the Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge UP, 2nd edition, from 1990 on) include even more detailed accounts and analysis. On a more succinct scale, I have learned a lot from Christopher Kelly, The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2006), Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine (Viking, 2011), Brian Campbell, The Romans and Their World: A Short Introduction (Yale UP, 2011), Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story (Oxford UP, 2013) and Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2nd edition, 2014). All these underlie my discussion throughout this book.
Most aspects of Roman religion can be followed up in Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge UP, 1998), and I have discussed the details and history of the ceremony of triumph in my The Roman Triumph (Harvard UP, 2007). The essays in The Cambridge Economic History of the GrecoRoman World, edited by Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris and Richard P. Saller (Cambridge UP, 2007), offer up-to-date discussion of the economy and demography of the Roman world, though all population estimates in SPQR should be taken for what they are: (rough) estimates.
For general reference, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (Oxford UP, 4th edition, 2012, and online), includes reliable entries on hundreds of classical people, places and topics (a good present for anyone interested in the history of Rome). For maps, the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, edited by Richard J. A. Talbert (Princeton UP, 2000), is the gold standard, and also available cheaply as an app. Free online, Orbis, the rather ponderously subtitled “Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World”, allows you to plot routes and distances across the Roman world and shows the time and money it would have taken to get from A to B (http://orbis.stanford.edu/). All my journey times are based on this. For anyone planning a visit to ancient sites in Rome, the guidebook to take is Amanda Claridge, Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide (Oxford UP, 2nd edition, 2010).
Prologue
The essay by a Roman doctor (Galen) is translated by Vivian Nutton in Galen: Psychological Writings, edited by P. N. Singer (Cambridge UP, 2014). The technical data from the Greenland ice cap are presented by, for example, S. Hong et al. in ‘Greenland ice’, Science 265 (1994), and by C. J. Sapart et al. in ‘Natural and anthropogenic variations’, Nature 490 (2012). The cesspit in Herculaneum has a share of the limelight in Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Herculaneum: Past and Future (Frances Lincoln, 2011).
Chapter 1
My favourite modern biography of Cicero is still Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait (Allen Lane, 1975; reprint, Bristol Classical Paperbacks, 1994). The Cambridge Companion to Cicero, edited by Catherine Steel (Cambridge UP, 2013), is a good guide to more up-to-date approaches. There is an astute discussion of Cicero’s rhetoric against Catiline in Thomas Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton UP, 1998). The Greek historian resident in the second century BCE was Polybius, who takes a leading part in Chapter 5. John R. Patterson, Political Life in the City of Rome (Bloomsbury, 2000) is a succinct guide to exactly that. For the conditions of Roman urban life at this period, John E. Stambaugh, The Ancient Roman City (Johns Hopkins UP, 1988) is a useful introduction.
Cicero ‘the lodger’ is put in the mouth of Catiline by Sallust, War against Catiline 31; his joke about the rats is found in his Letters to Atticus 14, 9; his abject self-pity when in exile is captured in his letters to his wife collected in Book 14 of his Letters to Friends, while the boastful fragments of his poem on his consulate are largely preserved in his treatise On Divination. The line ‘O fortunatam natam …’ is targeted by Juvenal, Satires 10, 122, and by Cicero’s admirer Quintilian, Handbook on Oratory 11, 1, 24, while defended, for example, by Sander M. Goldberg, Epic in Republican Rome (Oxford UP, 1995). The letter to Lucceius is Letters to Friends 5, 12; the Greek poet whom Cicero hoped would take on his consulship is Archias, who features in Chapter 6. Alvaro Sanchez-Ostiz analyses the bilingual fragments of the speeches on papyri in ‘Cicero graecus’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 187 (2013). The echoes of ‘Quo usque …’ are explored by Andrew Feldherr in ‘Free spirits’, American Journal of Philology 134 (2013); the story of Manlius is told, and his speech concocted, at Livy, History 6, 11–20; and Catiline’s cameo appearance comes at Aeneid 8, 666–70. The calculations of the money supply are clearly explained by Keith Hopkins in ‘Taxes and trade’, Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980), with more general reflections on the use of coins in ancient historical argument by Christopher Howgego, Ancient History from Coins (Routledge, 1995). The allegation that Cicero turned the conspiracy to his advantage is made in Ps-Sallust, Invective against Cicero 2. The medieval and Renaissance traditions of Catiline are the subject of Patricia J. Osmond, ‘Catiline in Fiesole and Florence’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 7 (2000).
Chapter 2
R. Ross Holloway, The Archaeology of Early Rome and Latium (Routledge, 1994), Christopher J. Smith, Early Rome and Latium: Economy and Society c. 1000–500 BC (Oxford UP, 1996) and G. Forsythe, A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War (Univ. of California Press, 2005) are useful introductions to the period of this and the next chapters. T. P. Wiseman brilliantly (if, in the end, unconvincingly) discusses the mythology of Romulus and Remus in Remus: A Roman Myth (Cambridge UP, 1995) and explores related themes in the earliest history of the city in Unwritten Rome (Exeter UP, 2008); the story of Troy at Rome is the theme of Andrew Erskine, Troy Between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power (Oxford UP, 2003). Livy’s account is dissected by G. Miles, Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome (Cornell UP, 1997). Emma Dench’s Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian (Oxford UP, 2005) is a sophisticated discussion of the role of foundation legends in Roman identity.
Cicero as the new Romulus is one theme in Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Univ. of California Press, 1993); ‘Romulus of Arpinum’ is a sneer in Ps-Sallust, Invective against Cicero 7. The case for the bronze wolf as a medieval work is put by Anna Maria Carruba, La Lupa capitolina: Un bronzo medievale (De Luca, 2007). Cicero’s version of the foundation legend is in On the State 2, 4–13. The tragedy on the Rape of the Sabines was by Ennius; the one line can be found in volume 1 of the Loeb collection Remains of Old Latin (Harvard UP, 1935). Juba’s calculations are recorded by Plutarch, Romulus 14; the passage of Sallust’s History (Book 4, 67) is translated by Patrick McGushin in Sallust, The Histories 2 (Oxford UP, 1992); the inheritance of Romulus is the view of an early Roman historian, quoted by Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13, 23, 13; and Ovid’s jokes are at Love Lessons 1, 101–34. What little is known about Egnatius is included in The Fragments of the Roman Historians, edited by T. J. Cornell (Oxford UP, 2014); Dionysius gives his view of Romulus’ reaction in Roman Antiquities 1, 87; Horace’s reflections on civil war are in Epode 7. P. S. Derow and W. G. Forrest discuss ‘An inscription from Chios’ in Annual of the British School at Athens 77 (1982); it is now in the Archaeological Museum at Chios. A translation of Claudius’ speech is included in David C. Braund, Augustus to Nero: A Sourcebook on Roman History 31 BC–AD 68 (Croom Helm, 1985; reprint, Routledge, 2014). The words of the king of Macedon (preserved in an inscription) are cited in Michel Austin, The Hellenistic World from Alexander to the Roman Conquest: A Selection of Ancient Sources in Translation (Cambridge UP, 2nd edition, 2006); Juvenal’s scorn is found in his Satires 8; the ‘crap’ of Romulus is a quip in Cicero�
�s Letters to Atticus 2, 1. The hut of Romulus was seen by Dionysius (Roman Antiquities 1, 79) and is discussed by Catharine Edwards in Writing Rome (Cambridge UP, 2006). The debates on the date of the origin of Rome are a major theme in Denis Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Times and the Beginnings of History (Univ. of California Press, 2007). For the ‘fate of Romulus’ as a threat, see Plutarch, Pompey 25. Dionysius mentions Romus and Odysseus in Roman Antiquities 1, 72, 5 and refers to the tomb of Romulus at 1, 64, 4–5; the embassy from Delos is discussed by Andrew Erskine in ‘Delos, Aeneas and IG XI.4.756’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 117 (1997). Dionysius’ attempt to make sense of ‘Aborigines’ is in Roman Antiquities 1, 10. For the learned Varro’s discussion of the Septimontium, see his On the Latin Language 6, 24. The hut at Fidenae is described by Rosanna Cappelli, Fidene: Una casa dell’età del ferro (Electa, 1996). The wattle and daub in the Forum is reanalysed by Albert J. Ammerman, ‘On the origins of the Forum Romanum’, American Journal of Archaeology 94 (1990). Various interpretations of the black stone are found in Festus, On the Significance of Words 184L (no convenient translation) and Dionysius, Roman Antiquities 1, 87 and 3, 1.
Chapter 3
The Roman Historical Tradition: Regal and Republican Rome, edited by James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo (Oxford UP, 2014), is an important collection of essays on this and the early Republican period. The working of the Roman calendar is the main theme of Jörg Rüpke, The Roman Calendar from Numa to Constantine: Time, History and the Fasti (Blackwell, 2011). For an introduction to Etruria, see Christopher Smith, The Etruscans (Oxford UP, 2014), and The Etruscan World, edited by Jean MacIntosh Turfa (Routledge, 2013). The central role of libertas throughout Roman history is recently discussed by Valentina Arena, Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge UP, 2012). The later debates around the story of Lucretia are analysed in Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation (Oxford UP, 1982).