She wants us to engage with the Romans: “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.” Beard is of our time and yet invariably avoids anachronism when discussing the values of the ancientsĪnd it is in the deconstruction of these ideals that she is at her most vital. Mary Beard doesn’t want you to learn how to live from the Romans, or anything as trite as that.

He was the first to pull off the stunt of bringing elephants to Italy and on one occasion was supposed to have tried, unsuccessfully, to disconcert a visiting Roman by revealing one of his beasts from behind a curtain.” It’s hard to imagine the elephant could have come as a complete surprise, unless it was an astonishingly thick curtain, but the image of Pyrrhus as a sort of proto-Barnum is delightful.īut the breezy tone belies the serious academic weight behind her narrative. And then there is Pyrrhus (who survives for modern audiences in the phrase Pyrrhic victory): “… he was something of an engaging showman. There is the great-grandfather of Cicero’s nemesis, Catiline, who “was a hero of the war against Hannibal, with the extra claim to fame of being the first man known to have entered combat with a prosthetic hand – probably just a metal hook that replaced his right hand, lost in an earlier battle”. She has also filled her pages with the kind of stories that lure students to study classics in the first place. Were the soldiers actually dismantling a temporary camp and not on a shell hunt?” And as for Caligula’s famous military debacle, when he ordered his soldiers to gather seashells as though they were the spoils of a victorious battle over the ocean? “The one about the seashells may well go back to a confusion about the Latin word musculi, which can mean both ‘shells’ and ‘military huts’. The likelihood of Hannibal cracking open the chunks of Alpine rock blocking his way is dismissed in a heartbeat (“probably not”). Cleopatra’s final moments are on the receiving end of some trademark scepticism: “Suicide by snakebite is a hard feat to pull off, and anyway the most reliably deadly snakes would be far too hefty to conceal in even a regal fruit basket.” Too few academics have a working knowledge of both the size of a royal fruit pile and the relative bulk of a snake.

She is never less than a vastly engaging tour guide around some of the best-known parts of the Roman story, debunking its myths with ease. Nonetheless, she embarks on the colossal task of telling as much of the story of Rome and its provinces as she can fit into 544 pages.

SPQR by Mary Beard