Czarny Pies's Reviews > SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Although this book is unquestionably fun to read, it is truly dreadful. In a highly engaging style, Ms. Beard reviews most of what I learned forty years ago when I took an undergraduate course on Roman history. The new items however are considerably less than her distressing omissions.
Ms. Beard repeats the same points about the historical sources that were explained to me in the mid 1970s. First, no new contemporary histories or written documents have appeared in over 1000 years. Second, Polybius (264–146 BC) was the first true historian of Rome. Third, most of the written sources for the period prior to the 3rd century BCE belong to the category of literature or legend. The 1st Century BC was the first time period in which sufficient contemporary historys and other documents to allow conventional historical analysis. Finally, the significant advances in archeology of the last fifty years do not provide any information on Rome's political history.
Thus for the two-thirds of SPQR Ms. Beard simply does what every historian since Edward Gibbon (1737-1794 CE) has done. She reviews the writings of Tacitus, Suetonius, Polybius, Titus Livy, Pliny the Yonger, Jospehsus and a handful of lesser authors from the period accepting what seems most plausible to her. The dustjacket of SPQR informs us that Ms. Beard debunks. In fact she is simply exchanging the bunk of one generation of historians for her own twaddle. However one must concede that as she states in her prologue and final chapter, she has every right to do so. My deepest concern is that she ignores Sir Ronald Syme's masterful Roman Revolution which still stands as the best analysis of the families and political factions that supported Augustus when he created the Roman empire. Next to Gibbon and Syme, Beard is a miserable second rater.
In the last third of the book, Beard finally decides to make use of the writings based on new archeological work that has been performed at sites in the Empire outside of the walls of Rome. Drawing on archeological field work most notably at Pompei and at various sites in Britain, Ms. Beard paints a very interesting picture of Roman society. I certainly found these sections more interesting than her lamentable political history.
Ms. Beard's verve and passion for the subject make SPQR great pleasure to read. On balance, however, it is a rather dimwitted work. Hopefully, some new synthesis historian will appear who will be able to truly integrate the findings from the archeological work of the last fifty years with the older school of history based on the analysis of contemporary historians and essayists.