Description
In SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" (Wall Street Journal). Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" (Economist) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" (Christian Science Monitor) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" (Dallas Morning News) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, SPQR will to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.
Reviews
"Beard tells this story precisely and clearly, with passion and without technical jargon…SPQR is a grim success story, but one told with wonderful flair." — Greg Woolf, Wall Street Journal
"Though she here claims that 50 years of training and study have led up to SPQR, Beard wears her learning lightly. As she takes us through the brothels, bars, and back alleys where the populus Romanus left their imprint, one senses, above all, that she is having fun." — James Romm, New Republic
"By the time Beard has finished, she has explored not only archaic, republican, and imperial Rome, but the eastern and western provinces over which it eventually won control…She moves with ease and mastery though archaeology, numismatics, and philology, as well as a mass of written documents on stone and papyrus." — G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books
"In SPQR, her wonderful concise history, Mary Beard unpacks the secrets of the city's success with a crisp and merciless clarity that I have not seen equaled anywhere else." — Ferdinand Mount, New York Times Book Review
"Beard does precisely what few popularizers dare to try and plenty of dons can’t pull off: She conveys the thrill of puzzling over texts and events that are bound to be ambiguous, and she complicates received wisdom in the process. Her magisterial new history of Rome, SPQR…is no exception…. The ancient Romans, Beard shows, are relevant to people many centuries later who struggle with questions of power, citizenship, empire, and identity." — Emily Wilson, The Atlantic
"A masterful new chronicle…. Beard is a sure-footed guide through arcane material that, in other hands, would grow tedious. Sifting myth from fact in dealing with the early history of the city, she enlivens—and deepens—scholarly debates by demonstrating how the Romans themselves shaped their legendary beginnings to short-term political ends…. Exemplary popular history, engaging but never dumbed down, providing both the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life." — The Economist
Also By: Mary Beard 
Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World
Hardback, 2023
Women & Power: A Manifesto
Hardback, 2018
New York Times Bestseller
One of the Guardian's "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" — "A modern feminist classic."From the internationally acclaimed classicist and New York Times best-selling...
The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives
Paperback, 2018
An outstanding new edition of Plutarch, the inventor of biography, focused on five lives that remade the Roman world.
The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives
Hardback, 2017
An outstanding new edition of Plutarch, the inventor of biography, focused on five lives that remade the Roman world.The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives
E Book, 2017
An outstanding new edition of Plutarch, the inventor of biography, focused on five lives that remade the Roman world.