“In some ways, to explore ancient Rome from the 21st century is rather like walking on a tightrope, a very careful balancing act,” she writes. In “SPQR” she pulls off the difficult feat of deliberating at length on the largest intellectual and moral issues her subject presents (liberty, beauty, citizenship, power) while maintaining an intimate tone. You push past this book’s occasional unventilated corner, however, because Ms. She is so subtle, hedging every bet, that the ceiling fans sometimes cease to circulate the air. Beard seems more eager to tell us what historians don’t know than what they do. Beard comments that he “lived in an age when historians made judgments” without hesitation. She refers to the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., for example, as “a rather low-key, slightly tawdry affair” and then adds, in a very Beardian aside, “Perhaps more decisive military engagements are low-key and tawdry than we tend to imagine.”Ībout Edward Gibbon, whose multivolume “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” began to be published in 1776, Ms. Do not come to this book for grand vistas, magisterial certainty or pinpoint war strategy.
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