Last year I set myself two goals for the year.
- To only read books by women, more on which here.
- To blog about each one.
The first was a great success, and the latter an abysmal failure.
One of the unexpected oddities of my year of gendered reading was a surprisingly large volume of histories of Ancient Rome, ending when I got Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome for Christmas.
Beard herself seems quite the character. She has her own documentary, which opens with her pedaling down the Appian Way.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3I40hODQDbU
Her history starts with Romulus, Remus and their fateful encounter with a lactating she-wolf, and ends with the emperor Caracalla giving citizenship to everyone within the empire. It’s thematic, rather than narrative, and focuses on legacy rather than historical detail. As she writes:
To ignore the Romans is not just to turn a blind eye to the distant past. Rome still helps us to define the way we understand our world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy. After 2000 years, it continues to underpin Western culture and politics, what we write and how we see the world and our place in it.
I’ve been listening to the marathon narrative of the History of Rome podcast, and against which SPQR provided a context: the ‘What’ to it’s ‘When’. As Beard concludes:
…I am more and more convinced that we have an enormous amount to learn – as much about ourselves as about the past – by engaging with the history of the Romans, their poetry and pose, their controversies and their arguments.
This is an apt summary of the other books on Roman history I read last year, which circled less around Rome’s history and more around its trace. I thought I’d explore this through another sporadic foray into blogging; starting with Charlotte Higgin’s Under Another Sky, Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, then wandering back to the start of last year, with Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon.
You can read Mary Beard’s blog here or buy her book here.
Would My Mother Enjoy This Book?
No, it’s a bit too long, but she would enjoy the TV show.