SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Mary Beard does not start in 753 BC, with the founding of Rome. She opens the book in 63 BC, inside the Senate, with the consul Cicero on his feet, accusing the senator Catiline of plotting a coup against the republic. The scene shows Rome at the height of its own political machinery, with rules, rivalries, and a system of power that had already been running for five hundred years before that day.

The choice is almost a provocation: telling the story backward, starting from the moment when Rome was already the Rome we recognize, and only then going back to explain how it got there. It's like opening someone's biography on the day of their retirement, before their birth: the reader already knows the outcome, and every chapter that follows takes on a different weight.

Catiline loses, flees, dies in battle, and Cicero is hailed as father of the fatherland. But this conspiracy plants a doubt that runs through the entire book: almost everything we know about that crisis comes from the rhetoric of Cicero himself, the man who had every interest in looking like the hero of the story.

Rome's best-known legend isn't pretty: twin brothers, raised by a she-wolf after being abandoned in a river, argue over where to build the city, and one kills the other. Romulus founds Rome over the body of his own brother Remus, and becomes its first king.

Beard doesn't treat this as historical fact, but as a founding myth that says a lot about how the Romans saw themselves. A people born out of a family fight who don't hide it is, in a way, warning that power there will always come at a high price, even among relatives.

It's like a family that tells, without embarrassment, the ugly story of the grandparents' split: it isn't pride in the violence, it's acknowledging that it's part of who they are. The Romans repeated this myth on coins, statues, and in school, never trying to soften the ending.

Another founding legend: without enough women to form families, the first Romans invite their Sabine neighbors to a festival and abduct their daughters. It's a story of violence against women, treated for centuries as an almost heroic episode in the founding of the city.

Beard calls attention to how this myth was used: less to celebrate the abduction itself, and more to show the Sabine women later throwing themselves between the two armies, begging for peace between fathers and husbands. In other words, the role of women in Rome's official story is born tied to reconciling men at war, not to deciding for themselves.

Telling this myth without cutting the uncomfortable part is an editorial choice: the book doesn't treat ancient legend as cute stuff for kids, but as a clue to how that society saw violence, gender, and power from the first chapter of its own history.