Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York, Liveright, 2015), 512 pp., $35.00.

THE INITIALS SPQR, the title of Mary Beard’s lively, engrossing and chatty new history of Rome, were part of the everyday language of our republican forebears, at least those engaged in the pamphlet wars around the new federal constitution. Senatus Populusque Romanus, “Senate and People of Rome,” suggested a balance between the wisdom of elders (the root sense of “senate”) and the rights of the people. The pamphleteers signed with Roman names, such as Cato and Caesar, the great opponents in Rome’s Civil War. That war spawned the dictatorship of Caesar which, after his assassination, made way for the principate of Augustus, who sought to restore the forms of the republic while retaining real power for himself and his heirs. For fledgling Americans, this was not antiquarian history. The failure of the Roman republic, as senators prostrated themselves before contemptuous emperors, and elections, hotly contested a few generations earlier, faded into insignificance, fed into cautionary lessons for Federalists and anti-Federalists alike. The Latin motto on the dollar bill, Novus ordo saeclorum, harked back to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, in which the poet, turning his back on the naysayers who saw decline everywhere, predicted arrival of a new era of peace and plenty. The devastation and bloodletting of civil war had given rise to millenarian expectations that found at least a rhetorical home in the new “empire of liberty.”

In ancient Rome, the revolutionary generation had found a usable past, rhetorically bypassing the British motherland against which it had rebelled. From the historians Sallust, Livy and Tacitus came the story of an empire won by civic spirit and disinterested virtue. Rome’s decline was variously dated; there was agreement that the bounty of imperial conquest had seduced the conquerors into paroxysms of greed and extravagance. Luxuria had sapped the moral fiber of hitherto sturdy, patriotic Roman youth. That neglected the obvious fact that precisely in the years of supposed decline, Roman arms conquered more territory around the Mediterranean than ever before. Still, the moralists continued to scold and call for a return to—what else?—traditional values. That is reflected in the pseudonym of Publius adopted by Madison, Hamilton and Jay for the Federalist Papers. They could be confident that readers would catch the allusion to a legendary founder of the Roman republic, Publius Publicola, whose very name signaled a zeal to place public interests ahead of private gain.

The Roman experience seemed to teach that a failure to curb the power of self-interest would bring about destructive factionalism. Yet to rely on the virtue espoused by a Cato would be an exercise in futility. Madison, as we know, sought to solve the problem in the tenth Federalist (his first contribution) by the Machiavellian expedient of inhibiting the effects of self-interested partisanship—tolerating a multiplicity of factions in a territorially extended republic.

BEARD TOO is attuned to the institutions and practices that account for the startling expansion of Rome to become the sole superpower of the Mediterranean world. Her approach is analytic; she waves aside the stories of battles and clashing personalities that are the stuff of conventional narratives. Hannibal’s tactics at Cannae are elementary, too simple to discuss; Actium, where Augustus, or his admiral Agrippa, vanquished Antony and Cleopatra to become sole ruler of the Roman world, was, we are informed, a “tawdry” affair. Its tawdriness is too obvious to merit discussion. What accounts for Roman military success, for the almost fanatical perseverance that enabled Rome to ride out initial catastrophic defeats, was its concept of citizenship. The realist historian Arthur Eckstein, in his study of anarchic international relations in the Hellenistic world, had identified this as a, if not the, key to Roman success. Beard appears to agree. What the Romans and nobody else did, she says, was to divorce citizenship from geographical location and heredity. Where the Athenians restricted citizenship to the offspring of citizens, and soon lost their empire, Rome granted the privileges and demanded the duties of citizenship from the populations it conquered. A nice example of the attraction of such inclusiveness is provided by the so-called Social War, in which Italians denied citizenship fought Rome in order to gain it. A critic might object that Romans had first to conquer a city or nation before using citizenship as an inducement to gain its loyalty, and that such loyalty explains better how the Romans managed to overcome invaders such as Pyrrhus and Hannibal than why and how they came aggressively to ingest the entire Mediterranean littoral. Here more conventional narratives of the intense competitiveness of the Roman elite, to be expressed in military exploits, would come into play. Again, it’s difficult to ignore an ethos, evident in the Hannibalic War, that doggedly refuses to concede to an enemy. Call it Catonian virtue if you like.

A CURIOUS feature of Beard’s otherwise accomplished writing—her knowledge is encyclopedic—is her almost total effacement of Cato, at points that would seem to cry out for his inclusion. One such point is the conspiracy of Catiline in 63 BC, the year of Cicero’s consulship. Cicero uncovered the plot, had the plotters seized and brought them before the senate to have their fate decided. Here Cato enters with a decisive intervention whose consequences would bring Cicero to the lowest point of his career. Why drop Cato from the story? That she finds him repugnant is clear. Many people have. Wearing his Stoic rectitude on the sleeve of his toga, giving day-long speeches, he got on people’s nerves. True to his principles, he committed suicide rather than accept clemency from Caesar and live under his rule. Before cutting his veins, he read Plato’s Phaedo on the immortality of the soul, though Socrates in the dialogue expressly forbids suicide. When Beard does mention him in order to comment on his disfiguring himself, he is catalogued as one of a “motley group of those who, for various reasons, did not like what Caesar was up to or the powers he seemed to be seeking.” But what makes this group, which must include Brutus and Cassius, motley? Does Beard truly believe that Caesar only “seemed” to be seeking the powers he ended up wielding, and that these republicans simply did not “like” what he was doing? For Cicero, at least, Caesar was making himself into a deified king.

Cato’s opposition to Caesar in the civil war that the dictator in waiting admitted, or boasted, that he launched in order to defend his dignitas, rank and reputation, against encroachment by Pompey and assorted senatorial diehards, capped a career of principled struggle against the misgovernment and corruption endemic in the late republic. Cicero quipped that he acted as though he were living in Plato’s ideal city rather than in the scummy one of Romulus. His intransigence may have triggered the formation of the so-called First Triumvirate, the alliance between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus that a keen observer, Pollio, thought ushered in the era of civil wars. Granted, Cato’s moralism is off-putting, but it remains a crucial piece of evidence for Rome’s violent transition from republic to empire. Moreover, for once at least Cato came out on top in the senate debate on the Catilinarians.

IN FACT, Beard begins her history with reflections on the Catilinarian conspiracy, only turning to the origins of Rome in the following chapter. The episode is well documented, she points out, in contrast to the veil of ignorance settling on Rome’s early days, about which the Romans themselves could only concoct edifying and sometimes unedifying legends, such as the rape of the Sabine women. “Catiline,” moreover, is the stuff of melodrama: a charismatic, unscrupulous swaggerer who, like so many others, looted the province he governed, using the pelf in electoral contests; unable to win elections to Rome’s highest office, the consulate, he turned to rebellion. Sallust and Cicero make much of his magnetic attraction for bankrupt youths who had misspent their patrimonies; hopelessly in debt, they were easily convinced that the Roman equivalent of “the Man” was to blame for their plight. Catiline held out revenge and easy pickings. Rumors of incest and murders he was said to have committed made him all the more fearsome and alluring.

There were good reasons for disaffection. Italy was in the grip of an economic crisis; Beard usefully describes the evidence for a credit crunch in 63 BC, and Cicero himself in an oration to the people acknowledges the economic squeeze that led many into Catiline’s camp. Catiline may have believed that only a violent uprising could break the back of the senatorial aristocracy responsible for the crisis that had twice denied him the consulate and placed Cicero in office. Cicero, with close ties to the Knights (the wealthy property owners who held the debt) and the publicans (the tax farmers) could be depended on to squelch any movement to cancel debts and relieve the little people. Catiline could never have patched together a halfway effective army composed solely of wayward youths reveling in the capital’s fleshpots. He was able to recruit veterans of Sulla’s armies who had mismanaged or otherwise not made a go of the farms that the dictator had allotted them as payment for their service.

Cicero himself was the target of social snobbery. He was a self-made man whose family tree lacked the noble ancestors who would make for a comfortable fit into the aristocratic ranks. He had worked his way up to the consulate by dint of sheer intelligence and rhetorical finesse. Romans had a word for his type: he was a novus homo, a new man. The phrase hinted at an upstart; newness was no recommendation for Romans oriented towards tradition. By defending and gaining acquittals for aristocrats in the dock, he had built up a network of supporters who owed him one; his prosecution of Verres, the venal ex-governor of Sicily in the face of a defense by Hortensius, the most prominent advocate in Rome, brought him notoriety and the prospect of advancement. Though Cicero might win elections and be useful in blocking Catiline, old-line aristocrats would not accept him as one of their own. Cicero resented the disdain; this resentment may help explain the vainglorious bragging that mars his speeches. Catiline, on the other hand, like Caesar, boasted a pedigree that stretched back to the legendary origins of Rome. In the Aeneid, Virgil celebrates a Sergius (Catiline’s family name), having him take part in a boat race during the Trojans’ voyage to Italy to found Rome—though later in the poem Catiline himself is consigned to eternal suffering in Hades! As Catiline, pummeled by Cicero’s rhetorical salvos, rushed out of the Senate, he was heard to mutter “inquilinus civis urbis Romae,” an immigrant citizen who has clawed his way into the city of Rome. The insult was remembered; in its concise nastiness it could not have been bettered as a riposte to Cicero’s fulsome periods.

This took place at a senate session on November 8, 63 BC, where Cicero’s aim was to isolate Catiline and drive him out of the city. He began his oration, in the published version at least, with a rhetorical question. Beard quotes the Latin: quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, nostra patientia?—how long will you keep on trying our patience? She spends pages in tracing the resonance of the phrase down to recent times without, however, explaining about what exactly Cicero is exercising patience. It is not, as you might expect, that he has not arrested Catiline. No, he has forborne to put him to death! He cites, in lawyerly fashion, a number of precedents in which patriots, without further ado, put men they deemed traitors to death. Cicero is in effect lauding lynch justice. He betrays a temper ready to cast aside legal restraint whenever reasons seem compelling. Cicero’s precedents strike today’s reader not as justificatory, but as huge rents in the Roman legal fabric.

A similar rationale underlies another phrase from the speech, quoted by Beard: “the snappy, and still much repeated, slogan ‘O tempora, O mores’”—our times, our way of life. It’s an all-purpose slogan, useful whenever somebody wants to lament the passing of the good old days.” But as Cicero uses the words, they are no vague bellyaching. Beard fails to explain that, as with quo usque, he is lamenting the passing of a virtuous age when a consul, especially one armed with senatorial decree, could have had such a miscreant executed out of hand, even, he adds pathetically, as the commonwealth faces dissolution. Yet Roman citizens were entitled to trials and, in capital cases, an appeal to a popular assembly. This was known as provocatio and was a bedrock of libertas, their concept of freedom. Cicero dispenses with it by the simple expedient of declaring that Catiline has forfeited citizenship.

Was this simply rhetorical overstatement? Cicero, after all, had no intention of killing Catiline; he wanted to shame him into leaving the city. But this neglects the influence that overheated rhetoric can have in fraying the bonds of civility that a society requires, even in times of crisis. In addition, Cicero’s indifference to elementary citizen rights would come to haunt him in the aftermath of the conspiracy; it had consequences he could not imagine during what Beard calls, perhaps ironically, his “finest hour.”

Cicero had reason to be impatient. Owing to Romans’ fear of executive overreach, the tenure of magistrates was limited to a year. Cicero’s was almost up. This was also the age of military dynasts at the head of virtually private armies. Pompey, leading a seemingly invincible armament in the East while mopping up the remnants of Mithridates’s forces, would have liked nothing better than to swoop in and take the credit for finishing off Catiline. Senatorial bigwigs, fearing the power that would accrue to him, and Cicero, aiming for a glorious victory as savior of Rome, were to head him off. Might Pompey not turn into another Sulla, whose protégé he had been? Pompey, it seems, did not take well to Cicero’s activism. It was the custom for retiring consuls to deliver a valedictory on their accomplishments on January 1. When Cicero rose to do so, a tribune loyal to Pompey interposed his veto. What might Cicero have said? Perhaps he would have repeated an earlier boast that he was the first consul togatus, that is, one wearing the toga of peacetime rather than a military cloak to have put down an armed rebellion. He was, in effect, challenging Pompey’s authority to regulate the affairs of Rome.

BEARD, AUTHOR of an exceptionally fine work on Roman humor, might have found material in the ham-handed behavior of the conspirators whom Catiline left behind in Rome. Cicero had informants who kept him apprised of their every move. He had to put up with mockery of his repeated claims of comperi, “I have found out.” Whether on instructions from Catiline or, more likely, brainstorming on their own, they tried to recruit a Gallic tribe that was nursing grievances against Rome into joining the uprising. To gain the confidence of the Gauls, they signed letters to them, promptly seized by Cicero’s agents. One spoke of an appeal to “the meanest,” namely slaves, to join up—the ultimate horror for a slave-owning society. Another revealed that one of Catiline’s confederates, the high-born Lentulus, was certain of a victorious outcome from deciphering an entry in the Sibylline books—a Roman version of Nostradamus—to signify that he would be the third ruler of Rome. Hauled up by Cicero before the senate, Catiline’s nine lieutenants were forced to acknowledge that the signatures on the letters were theirs. With guilt established beyond a doubt, the only question was: what is the penalty going to be?

The nine were remanded to the custody of prominent senators until the senate could debate and vote on punishment. An attempt to free Lentulus and Cethegus made a decision urgent. The senate met on December 5. Sallust provides an invaluable account of the meeting; he could consult stenographic records. He simplified by isolating the opposing speeches of Caesar and Cato in the manner of Thucydides, whose Roman counterpart he aimed to become. Indeed, he took as his model one of the highlights of Thucydides’s work, the debate between Cleon and Diodotus in 427 BC on the fate of the Mytileneans, Athenian “allies” who had conspired with Sparta to throw off Athenian rule. Sallust has Caesar slip into the role of Diodotus, arguing on pragmatic grounds that in sparing the rebels, the Athenians would be looking to their self-interest, as other allies would be less tempted to defect from the alliance. He also rolls out an intricate, almost sophistic argument that the death penalty has never been effective in controlling crimes. Caesar’s corresponding contention is that—as Epicurus maintained—there is no afterlife, hence no post mortem punishment for crimes; accordingly, the death sentence is no deterrence to crime. Like Diodotus, he concedes that as a matter of justice the men deserve to die. However, there looms a slippery slope from punishing the guilty to persecuting the innocent.

This is simply grist for Cato’s mill. Sallust casts him as a Roman Cleon who is strong on righteous indignation. Just as Cleon had urged his Athenians to indulge their appetites for vengeance, Cato—in the o tempora, o mores strain—lashes out at his Romans for abandoning the rigor and virtue of their forbears. Where Cleon had taunted his audience for the pleasure they got from listening to fancy intellectual arguments rather than taking immediate action, Cato lambastes the senatorial majority for wallowing in luxury and avarice, in contrast to the virtuous ancestors who acquired the empire they are frittering away. The senators appear to have lapped up Cato’s tongue lashing, for after first rallying to Caesar’s recommendation that the guilty men be imprisoned, under the impact of Cato’s denunciation of their flabbiness they overwhelmingly endorsed the death penalty. A few hours later, Cicero had the group led into an underground chamber, the Tullianum, where they were strangled.

Beard mentions Caesar’s “daring suggestion that the captured conspirators should be imprisoned” in country districts and have their properties confiscated. Why daring? In ancient times, she notes “prisons were little more than places where criminals were held before execution.” Then, instead of commenting on Cato’s harangue as the reason that the senate rejected Caesar’s proposal, she writes “relying on the ‘emergency powers’ decree . . . Cicero had the men summarily executed.” But this makes a hash of Sallust’s account which Beard has relied on for Caesar’s motion. Cicero knew full well what a thin reed the emergency decree was to lean on, and he was relying on decisive senatorial endorsement to avoid the odium in wait for him for executing citizens without submitting them to a trial. In fact, as Beard points out elsewhere, the Senate could advise and consent but neither make laws nor issue binding orders. Its power rested on the authority and reverence it could command, qualities in short supply in the late Republic. Cicero would soon discover that senatorial cover could not shield him from odium and worse.

We have scant account of what might have transpired in a session of the Senate apart from Sallust’s. What we learn from it is how important, even crucial, speeches were in shaping the views and votes of the backbenchers. They do not enter the curia, the senate house, with fixed opinions or as members of a party committed to preordained positions. Rather, the senate, on this occasion at least, strikes one as a smaller version of a popular assembly. That may have been an impression Sallust wanted to leave by invoking the parallel with Thucydides. No doubt he also wanted his readers to see the confrontation between Caesar and Cato in the preview of the later struggle on the much larger canvas of the Mediterranean world between Caesar, whose policy was one of extending clemency to defeated foes, and Pompey; once Pompey was out of the way, Cato became titular head of the old-line, rigorist Republicans. In death, he became a hero of the Stoic opposition to imperial autocracy. Beard, however, is so allergic to him that when she cites a remark Cicero made about the city of Romulus, “he was poking fun at one of his contemporaries.” It seems unlikely that many readers will be aware that the contemporary was Cato.

BY EXCISING CATO and the debate in which he figured, Beard passes up a golden opportunity to examine a Roman response to the already classic literature—dramatic, philosophical and historical—of the Greeks. Romans respected and admired it, but were not overwhelmed. Educated Romans were bilingual, but not frozen into mute admiration of the great literary artifacts of Hellas; rather, these opened up imaginative spaces for them. The Catilinarian debate only gains in pungency through its echoes of Thucydides. This is not to say that Romans of Cicero’s and earlier generations could not be utterly dismissive of the living Greeks they encountered on their path to empire. Plautus’s comedies are adaptations of Greek originals, yet Greeks are consistently referred to as Graeculi, or Greeklings, a term of disparagement.

For his part, Cicero, who worshipped Plato and knew Greek literature inside out, could employ vicious ethnic stereotypes to discredit Greek witnesses testifying to the corrupt practices of their Roman governor; he was not above playing to the prejudices of jurors who saw in every Greek a wily con man out to fleece them. In the Aeneid, which imitates and Romanizes the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil portrays a cunning Greek, Sinon (the name means “harm”), as bamboozling upright and naïve Trojans, the legendary ancestors of the Romans, into dismantling their city walls and dragging the wooden horse, crammed with warriors, into Troy. The horse itself, of course, was a product of Greek treachery. The episode is introduced by the line: “Learn now of Greek treachery, and from the offense of one, get to know them all.” Sinon represents the nation. But things are a bit more complicated. This calumny of Greeks comes not from Virgil himself, but in a speech of his character Aeneas, broken-hearted and grieving over the fall of his city and his own flight.

In her treatment of Virgil, Beard once more stumbles into Cato trouble. She observes that the poet gave Catiline a “cameo role” in the Aeneid, when he portrays the villain “tortured in the underworld, trembling at the face[s] of the Furies,” the divine avengers of crime. The torture is psychological, like that of Tantalus; Catiline dangles forever at the edge of a cliff, waiting and waiting for the Furies to nudge him over the precipice. Virgil next introduces Cato as his virtuous counterpart. While Catiline trembles, Cato is vouchsafed the posh office of rule over the pii, the souls of the devout and righteous. But Beard does not mention it.

This is peculiar. Whatever other meanings and submeanings that gimlet-eyed critics have detected in it, the Aeneid is a celebration of Augustus, adopted son and heir of Caesar who in fact took on the name “Caesar” as soon as he arrived in Rome after the Ides of March. Julius Caesar despised Cato and wrote an Anticato, slinging mud at the paragon of virtue. The younger Caesar launched the career that would culminate in his becoming Augustus by avenging the murder of his father as an act of piety owed to an ancestor. How then to deal with the heroization of this uncompromising enemy of Caesar, and his association with the pii, in an epic so emphatically pro-Augustan? The explanation is likely to be that time heals wounds and also shifts political priorities.

By the mid-twenties BC, when Virgil was working on his epic, Augustus, intent on restoring the semblance of the old republic and trying indeed to foster an ideology of Catonian virtue, found memories of his father, slain for making himself dictator, less than useful. Augustus studiously practiced deference to a senate for which his father displayed open contempt. He lived modestly. He had his wife Livia act as a virtuous matron of a predecadent Rome by having her spend evenings spinning wool. In light of this, it should come as no surprise that a depoliticized Cato would be recruited in behalf of a restoration of traditional values.

Beard likes to tease staid traditionalists with such observations as that “to all intents and purposes . . . Virgil and Horace [were] on [the] payroll of Augustus.” First, their patron was Maecenas, not Augustus, though he was of course an indispensable adjutant of Augustus. Second, how, in the absence of the cultural institutions to which we are accustomed, were literary men to practice their craft without subsidies from the wealthy? Beard never considers the possibility that Virgil and Horace might have for good reasons welcomed the peace created by the new regime. John Stuart Mill knew better. In his Considerations on Representative Government, Mill observed,

“the establishment of the despotism of the Caesars was a great benefit to the entire generation in which it took place. It put a stop to civil war, abated a vast amount of malversation and tyranny by praetors and proconsuls; it fostered many of the graces of life, and intellectual cultivation in all departments not political; it produced monuments of literary genius . . .”

Beard continues her history through the first fourteen emperors, closing with Caracalla, who in 212 AD granted citizenship to all inhabitants of the empire. By this time, however, SPQR had long ceased to exist. It was replaced, as Tacitus mordantly observed, by senatus milesque et populus. The soldier now bestrode the stage, with senate and people as supernumeraries.

Gunther Heilbrunn is a retired classicist living in Pittsburgh, PA.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Thomas Cole