A few months ago, there was a meme going around asking folks how much they thought about the Roman Empire.
Rome has been kind of a curiosity to a whole subset of men this generation. As sea levels rise, fascism marches, and prices gouge, men tend to be more conservative and look to the “old ways.” They conveniently leave out the fact that homosexuality was widely practiced, as well as a fact that their odds of being a slave were substantively higher than being a centurion or member of the nobility. But sure, the Roman Empire.
Rome has always been more of a curiosity than a hobby for me. I’ve been interested in it, perhaps not outrageously so. Nevertheless, I’ve been on a kick the last few weeks to learn more about its emperors.
Which makes the delivery of Mary Beard’s new book so perfectly timed. Beard is, if not the best chronicler of Rome, than at least one of them. Her book SPQR is invaluable for getting a sense of how Romans lived their daily lives and how their empire grew.
This is in the same vein. It’s not a historical document of the lives and deeds of Rome’s emperors, rather it’s a portrait of what their daily existence looked like, both in glamorous ways and not. It cuts through the myths, the exaggerations with the deftness of a top rate scholar at the peak of her game to give us a clear view of what actually happened on the throne…at least as clear as we can get when we shift through dubious historical scholarship and conclusion.
Beard does such a great job making this history readable that I feel like it should cause a falling out for those who venerate Rome so much because there’s more to life than this. The job of a Roman Emperor was a dangerous one, very few died of natural causes. There were perks but it wasn’t the lavish life of, say, Cleopatra or Louis XIV. Rome was what it was usually in spite of an emperor and mostly because of military might and an ingenious trade system.
I’ve been thinking about the Roman Empire a lot lately. And fortunately, I have found great writers to satiate my curiosity. It just doesn’t get much better than Mary Beard