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beccah6 's review for:
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
by Mary Beard
informative
slow-paced
“…the idea that it was the norm, as the Romans insisted, to be a citizen of two places - to count two places as home - was fundamental to Roman success on the battlefield and elsewhere, and it has provided influential right up into the twenty-first century. This was a Roman revolution, and we are its heirs.”
from her decades of study, beard has a tremendous wealth of knowledge about rome - its leaders, its culture(s), its politics, and even the processes by which we’ve learned what we now know. there’s so much of that knowledge packed into this book, scattered across timelines and with varying levels of importance, that i often found it hard to follow. it was clearly written by someone with a great love for this period of history and i did learn a number of things, but this was definitely a struggle at times.
“…since the Renaissance at least, many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty have been formed, and tested in dialogue with the Romans and their writing.
from her decades of study, beard has a tremendous wealth of knowledge about rome - its leaders, its culture(s), its politics, and even the processes by which we’ve learned what we now know. there’s so much of that knowledge packed into this book, scattered across timelines and with varying levels of importance, that i often found it hard to follow. it was clearly written by someone with a great love for this period of history and i did learn a number of things, but this was definitely a struggle at times.
“…since the Renaissance at least, many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty have been formed, and tested in dialogue with the Romans and their writing.