![]() ![]() Which isn’t to say it’s inaccessible – Beard writes in a way most people will be able to follow – it’s just that a lot of the book focuses on the minutiae of how Roman society operated and that turned out to not be very enthralling. Beard is a scholar and her book tends to read like most academic texts: it’s dry, esoteric and dull, with a tendency to cram in vast amounts of detail that nobody could possibly retain. Oh my word, it becomes beyond tedious to read this same statement again and again as it gets run into the ground over the course of the entire book! Not that she’s much more interesting in other areas. I’m not enough of a Roman historian to argue its veracity but it sounds kosher to me.Įxcept Beard repeats this point ad infinitum. ![]() It was the great melting pot, the America, of its day. It sounds exhausting and I’m here to tell you that it’s even worse in the reading! I got through the whole mammoth affair but it wasn’t worth it.īeard’s core thesis essentially centres around this one question: how did the Romans become such a major player in the ancient world? And the answer is fairly simply: it conquered one group of people in one country after another, taking their land and rebranding the people as Roman citizens. Historian Mary Beard covers the first 1000 years of Roman history, from its humble beginnings when (supposedly) Romulus killed his brother Remus before founding what would become the city of Rome, to around the time when Christianity sunk its fangs into the empire to become its main religion, in SPQR. ![]()
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