Spqr

SPQR tells the history of Rome across roughly a thousand years, from foundation stories and the early monarchy to the extension of Roman citizenship under Caracalla in 212 CE. Mary Beard begins with Cicero’s confrontation with Catiline and then moves backwards and forwards through the evidence to explain republican institutions, military expansion, civil conflict and the creation of imperial government. Political history is integrated with slavery, family life, migration, religion, public works, social mobility and the experiences of people living far from the capital.

The book rejects the idea that Rome’s rise was inevitable or that its history can be reduced to a parade of generals and emperors. Beard asks how Romans defined citizenship, absorbed defeated communities and justified unequal systems of power, while showing how later accounts reshaped uncertain beginnings into national myth. The result presents Rome as an evolving and contested society whose institutions, identities and contradictions changed as a city-state became a Mediterranean empire.