Her book begins just before the Roman Republic ends and the Roman Empire begins, with the rise of Rome’s most famous ruler, Julius Caesar (before jumping back to the very beginning with the early Roman kings - gah!). Duuuuh! As a history student myself, that seemed blindingly obvious, and, even if someone reading this isn’t, does it bear mentioning over and over and over and… ? A good historian will only believe something if there’s evidence to back it up. And that’s another thing that really annoyed me: the repetition that a lot of what was written shouldn’t be trusted outright as the Romans had a habit of self-mythologizing. It’s ambitious and I don’t think anyone can condense a millennia’s worth of history into 600 pages, particularly given the huge number of surviving documents from this era. I do appreciate the difficulty of her task. She jumps about constantly, going off on tangents, skipping over entire periods - the book is mostly a lethal combination of boring and confusing. She’s also writing narrative history but completely fails to create a compelling, clear or easy-to-follow overall picture of the first 1000 years of Roman history.

Which isn’t to say it’s inaccessible – Beard writes in a way most people will be able to follow – it’s just that a lot of the book focuses on the minutiae of how Roman society operated and that turned out to not be very enthralling. Beard is a scholar and her book tends to read like most academic texts: it’s dry, esoteric and dull, with a tendency to cram in vast amounts of detail that nobody could possibly retain. Oh my word, it becomes beyond tedious to read this same statement again and again as it gets run into the ground over the course of the entire book! Not that she’s much more interesting in other areas. I’m not enough of a Roman historian to argue its veracity but it sounds kosher to me.Įxcept Beard repeats this point ad infinitum.

It was the great melting pot, the America, of its day. It sounds exhausting and I’m here to tell you that it’s even worse in the reading! I got through the whole mammoth affair but it wasn’t worth it.īeard’s core thesis essentially centres around this one question: how did the Romans become such a major player in the ancient world? And the answer is fairly simply: it conquered one group of people in one country after another, taking their land and rebranding the people as Roman citizens. Historian Mary Beard covers the first 1000 years of Roman history, from its humble beginnings when (supposedly) Romulus killed his brother Remus before founding what would become the city of Rome, to around the time when Christianity sunk its fangs into the empire to become its main religion, in SPQR.

A history of ancient rome mary beard