So, yes, SPQR can at times read like a subtweet of current American politics.

See also: From Cicero to Trump, They're All in Plutarch's 'Lives'įurther, Rome both precipitated and benefited from earth’s original globalization: This was a world, to paraphrase Beard, in which people could make their homes, fortunes, and graves thousands of miles from their place of birth where they relied on food grown on the fringes of the Empire and where trade distributed new tastes and luxuries across the Mediterranean, and not simply to the ultra-rich. “Romans could come from elsewhere,” Beard writes, “and those born low, even ex-slaves, could rise to the top.” This creation of a political status unrelated to ethnic identity or geography eventually “underpinned the Roman Empire.” As an early king of Macedon ruefully observed, Rome’s openness was the source of its strength. It was Rome’s revolutionary conception of citizenship, which much like the United States allowed people to retain their local identities while also becoming Roman, that best explains Rome’s success. But Beard’s overriding theme - hinted at by the title, meaning “The Senate and the People of Rome” - emphasizes something else. There are two conventional explanations: Roman virtue and Roman institutions. Mercifully for those not so indifferent to wonder, but idle enough to avoid exploring the topic themselves, Beard’s tome supplies answers. So asked the historian Polybius, as Mary Beard reminds us in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.

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