SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

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I found this book while wandering through the history section of the library. I only knew a bit about ancient Rome before, from taking an Ancient Civilizations class in high school. It took a while to get through it, but I enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it. Below are some notes I made and passages I highlighted.

Chapter 1: Cicero’s finest hour

Chapter 2: In the beginning

[…] the Romans were rather like people who acquire all kinds of brand-new kitchen equipment but can’t ever bear to throw away their old gadgets, which continue to clutter up the place even though they are never used. p. 79

Chapter 3: The kings of Rome

This regal period is caught in that intriguing territory that straddles the boundary dividing myth from history. p. 95

Two central tenets of Republican government were that office holding should always be temporary and that, except in emergencies when one man might need to take control for a short while, power should always be shared. As we shall see, through the centuries that followed these tenets were increasingly reiterated, and became increasingly difficult to uphold. p. 127

Fifth-century BCE Athens bequeathed the idea of democracy to the modern world […]. Republican Rome bequeathed the equally important idea of liberty. p. 128

Chapter 4: Rome’s great leap forward

Ancient Roman historians were experts at turning historical chaos into a tidy narrative and always keen to imagine that their familiar institutions went back much farther than they really did. p. 131

Chapter 5: A wider world

Nothing underscores better the importance of Rome’s enormous reserves of citizens and allied manpower than the single fact that it continued to fight the war. p. 184

Predictably, modern historians have found it hard to know quite where to fix the boundary between Polybius the Roman hostage and critic of Roman rule and Polybius the Roman collaborator. p. 186

“Democracy” (demokratia) was rooted politically and linguistically in the Greek world. It was never a rallying cry at Rome […]. Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy. p. 189

The poor could never rise to the top of Roman politics […]. But this form of disequilibrium is familiar in many modern so-called democracies: at Rome too the wealthy and privileged competed for political office and political power that could only be granted by popular election and by the favour of ordinary people who would never have the financial means to stand themselves. p. 192

[…] the simple shorthand “Roman conquest” can obscure a wide range of perspectives, motivations and aspirations on every side of the encounter. p. 195

Cultural identity is always a slippery notion, and we have no idea how early Romans thought about their particular character and what distinguished them from their neighbours. […] “Greekness” and “Romanness” were as inseparably bound up as they were polar opposites. p. 205

Chapter 6: New politics

Whatever motivations lay behind the violence of 146 BCE, the events of that year were soon seen as a turning point. In one way, they marked the acme of Roman military success. p. 213

When the story is stripped down to its barest and brutal essentials, it consists of a series of key moments and conflicts that led to the dissolution of the free state, a sequence of tipping points that marked the stages in the progressive degeneration of the political process, and a succession of atrocities that lingered in the Roman imagination for centuries. p. 216

That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government? p. 226

Chapter 7: From empire to emperors

By the 70s BCE, with vast territories under Roman sway as the result of two centuries of fighting, negotiation, aggression and good luck, the nature of Roman power and the Romans’ assumptions about their relationship to the world they now dominated were changing. In the broadest terms, the rudimentary empire of obedience had at least partly transformed into an empire of annexation. p. 255

[…] the empire created the emperors – not the other way round. p. 257

Roman rule was for the most part fairly hands off by the standards of more recent imperial regimes: the locals kept their own calendars, their own coinages, their own gods, their own varied systems of law and civic government. p. 257

But Romans had a tendency to use bribery as a convenient excuse whenever war, elections or court verdicts did not go the way they hoped. p. 267

Pirates in the ancient world were both an endemic menace and a usefully unspecific figure of fear, not far different from the modern “terrorist” […]. p. 271

Pompey has a good claim to be called the first Roman emperor. p. 274

If the assassination of Julius Caesar became a model for the effective removal of a tyrant, it was also a powerful reminder that getting rid of a tyrant did not necessarily dispose of tyranny. p. 296

Chapter 8: The home front

But the idea that it was the norm, as the Romans insisted, to be a citizen of two places – to count two places as home – was fundamental to Roman success on the battlefield and elsewhere, and it has proved influential right up into the twenty-first century. This was a Roman revolution, and we are its heirs. p. 297

“My guest [Caesar] was not the sort to whom you would say, ‘Please drop by again when you are next around.’ Once is enough.” p. 302

Chapter 9: The transformations of Augustus

Octavian almost certainly did not return to Italy from Egypt with an autocratic master plan ready to apply. But through a long series of practical experiments, improvisations, false starts, a few failures and, very soon, a new name intended to consign the bloody associations of “Octavian” to the past, he eventually devised a template for how to be a Roman emperor which lasted in most of its significant details for the next 200 years or so, and in broad terms much longer. Some of his innovations are still taken for granted as part and parcel of our mechanisms of political power. pp. 353–354

The point was that Augustus was cleverly adapting the traditional idioms to serve a new politics, justifying and making comprehensible a new axis of power by systematically reconfiguring an old language. p. 369

Among his final words to his assembled friends, before a lingering kiss with Livia, was a characteristically shifty quotation from a Greek comedy: “If I have played my part well, then give me applause.” […] How Augustus managed to recast so much of the political landscape of Rome, how he managed to get his own way for more than forty years, and with what support, is still puzzling. p. 384

Every later emperor we shall meet was or at least impersonated Augustus. […] Whatever their idiosyncrasies, virtues, vices or backgrounds, whatever the different names we know them by, they were all better or worse reincarnations of Augustus, operating within the model of autocracy he established and dealing with the problems he left unresolved. pp. 384–385

Chapter 10: Fourteen emperors

To put it another way, Gaius may have been assassinated because he was a monster, but it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated. p. 397

Augustus was trying to invent from scratch a system of dynastic succession, against the background of a fluid set of Roman rules about the inheritance of status and property. p. 415

Adoption in Rome had never been principally a means for a childless couple to create a family. If anyone just wanted a baby, they could easily find one on a rubbish heap. p. 418

Succession always came down to some combination of luck, improvisation, plotting, violence and secret deals. The moment when Roman power was handed on was always the moment when it was the most vulnerable. p. 420

Hadrian began with fine words about having no senator put to death without trial, though it was not long before four ex-consuls were executed after no more than a rumour of a plot against the new ruler. p. 422

Most Roman senators chose a mixture of collaboration and dissidence, which the first Augustus’ awkward compromise between senatorial power and senatorial service made almost inevitable. p. 428

Chapter 11: The haves and the have-nots

Vociferous Roman disapproval of “luxury” and admiration of simple, old-fashioned peasant life coexisted, as they often do, with massive expenditure and luxurious habits. p. 435

Elite Roman writers were mostly disdainful of those less fortunate, and less rich, than themselves. Apart from their nostalgic admiration of a simple peasant way of life […] they found little virtue in poverty or in the poor or even in earning an honest day’s wages. p. 440

Most victims of crime would have relied on their own strong arms or friends, family or local vigilantes to get even with the person they believed responsible. p. 463

Chapter 12: Rome outside Rome

Pre-existing local hierarchies were transformed into hierarchies that served Rome, and the power of local leaders was harnessed to the needs of the imperial ruler. p. 493

In fact, the interaction between Roman and other cultures in the empire is striking for the variety of forms it took and for the very diverse hybrid versions of Roman (and sometimes “not-Roman”) culture that were the result. p. 497

The Romans, he [Calgacus, according to Tacitus] insists, are the robbers of the world, insatiable for domination and profit. And in a much-quoted phrase that still hits home, he sums up the Roman imperial project: “they create desolation and call it peace,” “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appelant.” p. 516

But to a remarkable and in some ways unexpected degree, the Jews managed to operate within Roman culture. For the Romans, Christianity was far worse. First, it had no ancestral home. In their ordered religious geography, Romans expected deities to be from somewhere […]. But Christianity was defined entirely by a process of spiritual conversion that was utterly new. p. 519

At the same time, the success of Christianity was rooted in the Roman Empire, in its territorial extent, in the mobility that it promoted, in its towns and its cultural mix. […] The irony is that the only religion that the Romans ever attempted to eradicate was the one whose success their empire made possible and which grew up entirely within the Roman world. p. 520

Epilogue: The first Roman millennium

After a thousand years, Rome’s “citizenship project” had been completed and a new era had begun. It was not an era of peaceful, multicultural equality, though. For no sooner had one barrier of privilege been removed than another was put up in its place, on very different terms. Citizenship, once granted to all, became irrelevant. Over the third century CE, it was the distinction between the honestiores (literally “the more honourable,” the rich elite, including veteran soldiers) and the humiliores (literally “the lower sort”) that came to matter and to divide Romans again into two groups, with unequal rights formally written into Roman law. p. 529

Rome in its second millennium was effectively a new state masquerading under an old name. Whether this millennium was one long, slow period of decline; a series of patchy cultural and political changes which eventually transformed the ancient world into the medieval; or an extraordinarily dynamic era of art, architecture and cultural reflection depends on your point of view. p. 530

We do the Romans a disservice if we heroise them, as much as if we demonise them. But we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to take them seriously – and if we close our long conversation with them. p. 536