I came across Mary Beard in YouTube and always enjoyed her videos on Ancient Rome. I then learned she had written a few books and this one in particular was especially popular. It took me a while to finish as it is a long one and renting it through the library app Libby I had to borrow multiple times.
I’ve become fascinated with ancient Rome as it really is the foundation of all of the western world today. It is the birthplace of many languages, is the reason the western world is Christian, and had a tremendous impact on society overall even today. In school I never realized how much Rome changed a great part of the world and by learning about it can better understand our world today.
With that, here are my highlights and thoughts:
ANCIENT ROME IS important. To ignore the Romans is not just to turn a blind eye to the distant past. Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy. After 2,000 years, it continues to underpin Western culture and politics, what we write and how we see the world, and our place in it.
Our world would be immeasurably the poorer if we did not continue to interact with theirs. But admiration is a different thing. Happily a child of my times, I bridle when I hear people talking of ‘great’ Roman conquerors, or even of Rome’s ‘great’ empire. I have tried to learn to see things from the other side too.
The winners always write the history books don’t they. Entire civilizations such as the Gauls, Celts and Britons were conquered and therefore we don’t have too much information on them. Even early Rome was sacked by the Gauls and thus the information we do have is sparse and often legend akin to King Arthur.
Rome was not simply the thuggish younger sibling of classical Greece, committed to engineering, military efficiency and absolutism, whereas the Greeks preferred intellectual inquiry, theatre and democracy.
One aspect that was interesting to me is that much of Rome’s success was due to their engineering efficiency just as much as it was to their army. Romans built roads, fortifications, and entire towns in the places they conquered absorbing those people into the empire.
‘They create desolation and call it peace’ is a slogan that has often summed up the consequences of military conquest. It was written in the second century CE by the Roman historian Tacitus, referring to Roman power in Britain.
That means not just the slavery, the filth (there was hardly any such thing as refuse collection in ancient Rome), the human slaughter in the arena and the death from illnesses whose cure we now take for granted; but also the newborn babies thrown away on rubbish heaps, the child brides and the flamboyant eunuch priests.
Imagine a city without refuse collection. Rome must have smelled horrible and I think the reality of the city would be quite a shock since most of us learn about the grand temples and palaces, but not the hard truths of what life was probably like. Just imagine walking past a rubbish heap with a newborn on it. I’d like to think any modern person would be aghast and save the child. Not so in the rough Roman world where this seems to be common. I’ve learned that this practice of killing newborns was quiet common everywhere given the inability to feed more mouths and the lack of birth control.
It can hardly be a coincidence that Maccari’s painting of the events of 8 November was commissioned, along with other scenes of Roman history, for the room in the Palazzo Madama that had just become the home of the modern Italian senate; presumably a lesson was intended for the modern senators. And over the centuries the rights and wrongs of the ‘conspiracy’, the respective faults and virtues of Catiline and Cicero, and the conflicts between homeland security and civil liberties have been fiercely debated, and not only among historians.
Edgy in a different way was the idea of the asylum, and the welcome, that Romulus gave to all comers – foreigners, criminals and runaways – in finding citizens for his new town.
There is often a fuzzy boundary between myth and history (think of King Arthur or Pocahontas), and, as we shall see, Rome is one of those cultures where that boundary is particularly blurred.
Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder.
The message is clear: however far back you go, the inhabitants of Rome were always already from somewhere else.
Kind of like the United States if we go back just 100 years. I think a good portion of Republicans would do well to remember that immigrants are the lifeblood of a country, especially in a population that is declining. I’ve seen too many instances of foreigners, especially Mexican and Filipino, who integrate to the USA then want to close the door behind them.
Some were so outlandish that they undermine better than anything else the modern stereotype of the Romans as stuffy and sedate: at the festival of Lupercalia in February, for example, naked young men ran round the city whipping any women they met (this is the festival that the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar re-creates).
A historical tidbit that illustrates if we could time travel, Rome isn’t just Emperors, palaces, armies and togas. It must seem like a very strange place!
By the end of the fourth century BCE, the Romans had probably not far short of half a million troops available (compare the 50,000 or so soldiers under Alexander in his eastern campaigns, or perhaps 100,000 when the Persians invaded Greece in 481 BCE). This made them close to invincible in Italy: they might lose a battle, but not a war.
In 171 BCE, for example, the senate was confronted with a deputation from Spain representing more than 4,000 men who were the sons of Roman soldiers and Spanish women. As there was no formal right of marriage between Romans and native Spaniards, these men were, in our terms, stateless. They cannot have been the only ones with this problem. When Aemilianus later came as a new groom to take over the army command in Spain, he is said to have thrown 2,000 ‘prostitutes’ out of the Roman camp (I suspect that the women might have defined themselves rather differently).
I have a deep connection with Spain and any information about Rome there is of great interest to me. I studied in Toledo which was founded by the Romans so am always curious to learn more as the majority of history centers around the Moorish invasion. I’m always on the lookout for any history pertaining to the Romans and Visigoths especially.
Some of the Gracchan supporters were put on trial in a special court established by the senate (on what charge is not clear), and at least one was put to death by being tied up in a sack with poisonous snakes – most likely an ingenious piece of invented tradition masquerading as a horrible, archaic Roman punishment.
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? This was the first time, so far as we know, that this question had been explicitly raised in Rome, and it was no more easily answered then than it is now.
Rome was the only place in the ancient Mediterranean where the state took responsibility for the regular basic food supplies of its citizens.
In modern times Republicans learning of this would denigrate even mighty Rome of being socialist! I believe any wealthy society should take care of the basic needs of their citizens including food, basic healthcare and a small universal income. It need not be much and I feel is not too much to ask. However, beginning with Raegan we’ve moved away from a more communal mindset and are now starting to see severe cracks between the ultra wealthy and poor. The middle class has been gutted and this has opened the door for a demagogue like Trump. People are angry and rightly so as many of their jobs were sent to China. Yes, the forms of national unity are still there with the National Anthem, the Pledge of Allegiance and the 4th of July, but the reality is that profits, greed and individual gain have now become the major characteristics of this country. It is ironic that those hurt the most by this change are the ones who complain the loudest about free healthcare, tax breaks for the ultra wealthy and free school lunches.
The allies seem to have gone some way towards establishing a rival state, under the name ‘Italia’, with a capital at a town renamed ‘Italica’ and even the word Itali (‘Italians’) stamped on their lead shots. They minted coins displaying a memorable image of a bull, the symbol of Italy, goring a wolf, the symbol of Rome.
It would be wrong to imagine that the Gauls were peace-loving innocents brutally trampled by Caesar’s forces. One Greek visitor in the early first century BCE had been shocked to find enemy heads casually pinned up at the entrance to Gallic houses, though he conceded that, after a while, one got used to the sight; and Gallic mercenaries had done good business in Italy until the power of Rome had closed their market.
Sometime around 10 January 49 BCE, Julius Caesar, with just one of his legions from Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, the river that marked the northern boundary of Italy. The exact date is not known, nor even the location of this most historically significant of rivers. It was more likely a small brook than the raging torrent of popular imagination, and – despite the efforts of ancient writers to embellish them with dramatic appearances of the gods, uncanny omens and prophetic dreams – the reality of the surroundings was probably mundane. For us, ‘to cross the Rubicon’ has come to mean ‘to pass the point of no return’. It did not mean that to Caesar.
The eloquent discussion of the folly of fearing death by Titus Lucretius Carus, in his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), is one of the highlights of classical literature and a beacon of good sense even now (those who do not exist cannot regret their non-existence, as part of the argument runs).
Roman marriage was, in essence, a simple and private business. Unlike in the modern world, the state played little part in it. In most cases a man and a woman were assumed to be married if they claimed that they were married, and they ceased to be married if they (or if one of them) claimed they no longer were. That, plus a party or two to celebrate the union, was probably all there was to it for the majority of ordinary Roman citizens.
Interesting how the state plays such a major role in our lives now. I think a good part of is to ensure they tax us properly. If they are going to be intrusive in ways such as marriage and tax us accordingly then I’d say that free healthcare and free student lunches isn’t too much of an ask.
Caesarian sections, which despite the modern myth had no connection with Julius Caesar, were used simply to cut a live foetus out of a dead or dying woman.
I didn’t know this. I had bought into that myth.
Those babies that were safely delivered had an even riskier time than their mothers. The ones that appeared weak or disabled would have been ‘exposed’, which may often have meant being thrown away on a local rubbish tip. Those that were unwanted met the same fate. There are hints that baby girls may generally have been less wanted than boys, partly because of the expense of their dowries, which would have been a significant element in the budget of relatively modest families too.
Those babies that were reared were still in danger. The best estimate – based largely on figures from comparable later populations – is that half the children born would have died by the age of ten, from all kinds of sickness and infection, including the common childhood diseases that are no longer fatal. What this means is that, although average life expectancy at birth was probably as low as the mid twenties, a child who survived to the age of ten could expect a lifespan not wildly at variance from our own.
Another gruesome aspect of ancient civilizations. I imagine this is still a problem in the poorer third world countries although some medical advancements and medicines would be available. I was shocked to learn that in some third world countries I visited people without means and terrible diseases are sent to camps they cannot leave and are never mentioned in any media. Ever wonder why international events in third world countries suddenly seem to no longer have beggers and homeless? This occurred even here in San Francisco a few months ago for some international event which I cannot remember the name.
Yet in another way, the connection between family and house was surprisingly loose. Quite unlike, for example, the British aristocracy, whose traditions put great store by the continuity of ownership of their country houses, the Roman elite were always buying, selling and moving.
certainly look nothing like the real Augustus at all. Not only do they fail to match up with the one surviving written description of his features, which – trustworthy or not – prefers to stress his unkempt hair, his bad teeth and the platform shoes which, like many autocrats since, he used to disguise his short stature; they also look almost exactly the same throughout his life, so that at the age of seventy-plus he was still being portrayed as a perfect young man. This was at best an official image – to put it less flatteringly,
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.
As a senator under Commodus, he was an eyewitness to some of the emperor’s extravagant gladiatorial spectacles, but he also tells of one of the strangest exercises in imperial menace, dreamt up by Domitian in 89 CE. The story was that the emperor invited a group of senators and knights to a dinner party, where to their horror they found on arrival that the whole decor was black, from the couches to the crockery and the serving boys. Each guest’s name was inscribed on a slab like a tombstone, and all evening the emperor’s conversation never strayed from the topic of death. They were all convinced that they would not live to see the next day. But they were wrong. When they had returned home and the expected knock on the door came, instead of a killer they found one of the emperor’s staff laden with gifts from the party, including their own name slab and their own personal serving boy.
Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die’ was a favourite theme in Roman moralising).
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 – a fantasy of country picnics, and lazy afternoons under shady trees – they found little virtue in poverty or in the poor or even in earning an honest day’s wages. Juvenal is not the only one to write off the priorities of the Roman people as ‘bread and circuses’. Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, makes exactly the same point when he writes of the emperor Trajan that ‘he understood that the Roman people are kept in line by two things beyond all else: the corn dole and entertainments’. Cicero turned his scorn on those who worked for a living: ‘The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.’ It became a cliché of Roman moralising that a true gentleman was supported by the profits of his estates, not by wage labour, which was inherently dishonourable. Latin vocabulary itself captured the idea: the desired state of humanity was otium (not so much ‘leisure’, as it is usually translated, but the state of being in control of one’s own time); ‘business’ of any kind was its undesirable opposite, negotium (‘not otium’).
It would probably have surprised both Pliny and Trajan to discover that 2,000 years later the most famous of their exchanges is to do with an apparently insignificant, but awkward and time-consuming, new religious group: the Christians.
But the closest Pliny comes to remarking on cultural variety is when he deems Christianity ‘a perverse and unruly superstition’ and tries to get to the bottom of its rituals and ceremonies.
I’m fascinated given the influence Christianity has had on the world, how it actually spread. I’ve learned a lot and will not write it all down here. What I will say is it did not happen as we are taught and Jesus was just another preacher among many. His message got spread but it could have just as easily been from another. Christians will say it is the truth of it that it spread but no, it is just the one that happened to spread given events at the time. I don’t speak English because it is the best language, I speak it because Britain spread it around the world due to military might. Christianity offered a unique message and spread through conquering civilizations. The word is a big place and no armies have conquered the whole world thus we have different religions and speak different languages.
After reviewing the characteristics of the Britons (tall, bandy-legged and weird)
The British are a bit different aren’t they! A strange island folk that do things differently from their European neighbors. Now we know they’ve always been that way.
In Britain, a native ruler by the name of Togidubnus was a classic case of this. He had been on the Roman side when the Claudian forces invaded in 43 CE and was likely some sort of ally before that, for remote and rural as Britain was, there had been links between its aristocracy and mainland Europe since at least the time of Caesar’s invasions in the 50s BCE.
It is rather more surprising to discover that he had a local education policy too: he made sure that the sons of the leading provincials were educated in the ‘liberal arts’ (literally ‘the intellectual pursuits suited to the free’) and in the Latin language. And soon, as Tacitus put it, the Britons were dressing up in togas and taking their first steps on the path to vice, thanks to porticoes, baths and banquets. He sums this up in a pithy sentence: ‘They called it, in their ignorance, “civilisation”, but it was really part of their enslavement’ (‘Humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset’).
And later on the British did the same to a great part of the world minus the baths. Local dress was discarded and everyone had to wear suits, neckties and top hats.
What Boudicca’s aims were we can only guess. Her true story is clouded by ancient and modern mythmaking. For Roman writers, she was a figure simultaneously of horror and of fascination. A warrior queen, intersex, barbarian Cleopatra: ‘very tall in stature, with a manly physique, piercing eyes and harsh voice, and a mass of red hair falling to her hips’, as she was described centuries later by someone who could not possibly have known what she looked like. In Britain over the past few centuries she has not only been turned into a national heroine, on the optimistic assumption that her more unsavoury aspects were Roman propaganda; she has also been reinvented as the ancestor of the British Empire that one day outstripped ancient Rome.
The victory of Christianity, which in the fourth century CE became the ‘official’ religion of the Roman Empire, ensured that there is an enormous amount of surviving evidence, argument and self-justification from Christian Roman writers and almost nothing from their traditional, ‘pagan’ Roman opponents outlining their objections to the new religion.
Again, the winners write the history.
The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners. They construct a triumphalist history of Christianity as victorious both against its pagan rivals, despite cruel persecution by the Roman state, and against all the internal variants (‘heresies’, as later Christians defined them), which challenged what came to be Christian orthodoxy.
I imagine Jesus would be aghast at what Christianity has become. I believe the current version looks nothing like what his real message must have been. Again, too heavy of a subject to get into here but Jesus probably didn’t want to start a new religion at all.
The right answer to the question of how many ‘Romans’ lived in ‘Roman Britain’ could well be ‘about five’, if we mean only those born and bred in Rome. It could equally well be ‘around 50,000’, if every single soldier plus the small staff of the imperial administration, including slaves, are all deemed to count. It would be more like ‘3 million’ if we reckon that all the inhabitants of the Roman province were now in a way Roman, even though most of them, outside the towns, would probably not have known where in the world Rome was and would have had no more direct contact with Roman power than the occasional bit of loose change in their pockets.
I no longer think, as I once naively did, that we have much to learn directly from the Romans – or, for that matter, from the ancient Greeks, or from any other ancient civilisation.
But I am more and more convinced that we have an enormous amount to learn – as much about ourselves as about the past – by engaging with the history of the Romans, their poetry and prose, their controversies and arguments.
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.
I’ve spend a lot of time learning about Rome. My next interest is to learn more about the “Dark Ages.” The enormous influence of Rome has fallen and so what really happened afterwards? Are they called the “Dark Ages,” because we really don’t have much to go on? I think this is where Christianity really took root since without a stable, strong, central power people leaned on the church for learning and for how to organize their lives. Without a central power regions would have become isolated and thus instead of everyone speaking Latin the language evolved into French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian and all the others with Latin as a base. One could no longer travel from one end of the empire to another as different kings, warlords and so on would have control of the territories splintered from the empire. The only constant would have been Christianity. I have much to learn about the Dark Ages so will leave it at that.
