I have just finished Mary Beard’s SPQR. I have just
started Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. The connection? Susan Sontag’s
essay deals momentarily with the relation, if any, between form and content.
She seems wary of the concept of form, seeing it often subservient to content.
Perhaps the confusion is mine, since it may be the argument, rather than form,
that stands out. More on this later.
SPQR is, put simply, an overview of the origins and
the rise of Rome, from fabled Trojan settlement to Empire. It charts the growth
of the state, from a probably mythical wattle and daub hut to an empire built
of marble, from its assumed foundation in the middle of the eighth century BCE,
as far as Caracalla’s offer of Roman citizenship in 212 CE. This is roughly, as
the author labels it, Rome’s first millennium.
Remembering my first paragraph, it’s the form that
Mary Beard imposes upon her work that makes the book’s argument. A less
inventive mind would have started at the city’s foundation and progressed
chronologically. Mary Beard profitably avoids this approach by beginning with
the confrontation between Scipio and Catiline in the first century BCE,
conveniently just over half-way through the author’s chosen era.
Catiline had led a revolt, not the first, or last, or
most bloody, or most successful, against the established authority of the
republic. The kings were already long gone, and the emperors has yet to assume
their status. But the confrontation between the brilliant but rather
condescending Scipio and the brash, brutal aristocratic chancer that was
Catiline provides a starting point for an author who wants to stress what she
defines as the essential cultural and political characteristics that can frame
the reader’s understanding of this vast imperial achievement. For Mary Beard,
this trial before the Senate symbolizes a couple of basic ideas that she uses
as a cement to bind the various courses of the city’s history. These are the
continual struggle for power alongside the surprising, for the uninitiated, but
consistent, tendency for the Roman state to accommodate new ideas, new values,
new religions and new citizens from those peoples it conquered.
The struggle for power was perpetual and ruthless.
There were no rules apart from the winner took all, and then suffered the
continual neurosis of how to hold on to it. Starting with the perhaps mythical
fratricide that founded the city when Romulus killed Remus, ruling families or
elites internally turned on themselves and one another to secure a hold on power.
This is nothing special. Any visitor to Istanbul will vividly recall the rows
of miniature coffins that were displayed when newly enthroned sultans disposed
of their siblings to reduce potential competition. But Rome was, at least in
extent, rather different, since it morphed from local warlords, perhaps,
through kings, to republican presidents, in all but name, and then finally to
emperors. Each manifestation of power brought its own kinds of struggle, but
eventually struggles they all were, and usually involved eliminating the
competition. The names and roles may have changed, but the methodology did not.
You killed your way into power and killed to maintain it. There were, of
course, exceptions.
The second characteristic that Mary Beard uses to
create the form and thereby the content of this history is the Roman propensity
for assimilation. This began with the rape of the Sabine women. Myth, perhaps,
cites a shortage of breeding-age females amongst the early settlers, so what
better way to obviate the problem than embark on the cattle raid? The logic, if
that be the word, is quite simple. I do not have cows. My neighbour has cows,
so I will steal them. It’s the same with women, it seems, and the booty seems
to share the same status as the booty from a cattle raid.
But what ensues is change. There is inevitably a clash
of culture that leads to accommodation and assimilation, resulting in
complications of culture via marriage, albeit a marriage in chains. This
process, argues the author, became a characteristic of Rome, in that kingdoms
and peoples subjugated by force were culturally assimilated by Rome, and not
necessarily destroyed by it. Indeed, some aspects of the defeated culture, such
as their religions, were transported back to the centre, where they gained
pragmatic adherents eager to try anything that might offer a competitive leg
up. And it is this constant ability to change via assimilation that forms the
second strand that gives form to this wonderful work.
But why finish with Caracalla, when the Roman empire
endured for more than another century after his demise? Mary Beard is clear
about this. It was Caracalla’s granting of Roman citizenship to all free men in
the empire that change things. Until then the differences in status between men
and women, between citizens and classes, between free men and slaves, between
military and civilian that had set the boundaries on Roman life, boundaries
that were admittedly fluid by virtue of people’s ability to be on either side
and to change their relative status, gender apart. Mary Beard thus makes the
case for the later years of the empire representing a different historical reality
and thus warranting a different treatment. This change became even more
apparent when the state adopted Christianity, which would brook no alternative
and led to the conscious exclusion of further assimilation.
Mary Beard does offer the reader much detail. But her
insistence on setting events in their wider political and cultural context
really does clarify a bigger picture which then starts to reveal inter-related
detail. By the end of SPQR, we fell we have been there.
In conclusion, Mary Beard warns against importing
perceived values or solutions across the centuries in the belief that they
might have relevance to contemporary society. Not only do we not really
understand the values of this ancient age, nor do we really have sufficient
material to be certain about anything. Rome did exist and is therefore worthy
of study, but its example is relevant only to the furtherance of that specific study.
Form and content thus come together to create, in Mary
Beard’s hands, a stunning, brilliant book that provides context, observation
and profound insight into Roman history. It’s a book that only could have been
written by someone who has both brilliant communication skills and perhaps
unsurpassed in knowledge of her subject. This book is not recommended reading:
it is nothing less than essential.