Мэри Бирд «SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome»

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SPQR

MARY BEARD is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Classics editor of the TLS. She has world-wide academic acclaim, and is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her previous books include the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii, Confronting the Classics, The Roman Triumph and The Parthenon. Her TLS blog has been collected in the books It’s a Don’s Life and All in a Don’s Day.

Also by Mary Beard

Laughter in Ancient Rome

The Roman Triumph

Confronting the Classics

Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

It’s a Don’s Life

All in a Don’s Day

The Parthenon

The Colosseum (with Keith Hopkins)

A HISTORY OF ANCIENT ROME

MARY BEARD

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X 9HD

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 4410

CONTENTS

Maps

Prologue: The History of Rome

1 · Cicero’s Finest Hour

2 · In the Beginning

3 · The Kings of Rome

4 · Rome’s Great Leap Forward

5 · A Wider World

6 · New Politics

7 · From Empire to Emperors

8 · The Home Front

9 · The Transformations of Augustus

10 · Fourteen Emperors

11 · The Haves and Have-Nots

12 · Rome Outside Rome

Epilogue: The First Roman Millennium

FURTHER READING

TIMELINE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INDEX

MAPS

1 · Early Rome and its neighbours

2 · The site of Rome

3 · Roman Italy

4 · The city of Rome in the imperial period

5 · The Roman World

1 · Early Rome and its neighbours

2 · The site of Rome

3 · Roman Italy

4 · The city of Rome in the imperial period

5 · The Roman World

PROLOGUE

THE HISTORY OF ROME

ANCIENT ROME IS important. To ignore the Romans is not just to turn a blind eye to the distant past. Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy.

After 2,000 years, it continues to underpin Western culture and politics, what we write and how we see the world, and our place in it.

The assassination of Julius Caesar on what the Romans called the Ides of March 44 BCE has provided the template, and the sometimes awkward justification, for the killing of tyrants ever since. The layout of the Roman imperial territory underlies the political geography of modern Europe and beyond. The main reason that London is the capital of the United Kingdom is that the Romans made it the capital of their province Britannia – a dangerous place lying, as they saw it, beyond the great Ocean that encircled the civilised world. Rome has bequeathed to us ideas of liberty and citizenship as much as of imperial exploitation, combined with a vocabulary of modern politics, from ‘senators’ to ‘dictators’. It has loaned us its catchphrases, from ‘fearing Greeks bearing gifts’ to ‘bread and circuses’ and ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ – even ‘where there’s life there’s hope’. And it has prompted laughter, awe and horror in more or less equal measure. Gladiators are as big box office now as they ever were. Virgil’s great epic poem on the foundation of Rome, the Aeneid, almost certainly found more readers in the twentieth century CE than it did in the first century CE.