№ 641. The Roman Empire

Most ancient societies assumed that being a citizen of a particular place meant not just living in that place, but also speaking the language and sharing in the common culture. Romans, by contrast, could be people who might well not even speak Latin. As Beard notes, in the later periods of the Roman empire, Greek was the lingua franca (or rather, the koine glossa—“common tongue”) in its eastern half. In contrast to many slave-owning societies, both ancient and modern, the Romans allowed large numbers of their slaves to become free, and to acquire at least limited forms of citizenship.
 

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The flexible vision of Romanitas also meant that Roman women, at least in the elite classes, had access to far greater freedom and more legal rights than women in many other ancient societies. In ancient Athens, women were legally under the control of their fathers and husbands, whereas elite Roman women were allowed property rights, albeit with certain restrictions. But Beard takes care not to extrapolate too rosy a view of the lives of the Romans who left no literature behind, and calls attention to how little we can reconstruct about them from the surviving evidence. She warns, for example, against taking at face value the image of the “liberated woman” that became a stereotype in the literature of the first century b.c. The elite adulteress featured in the poems of Catullus and Propertius, who sleeps around and throws wild parties, says more about patriarchal anxiety than about women’s liberty.

Beard’s title hints at her central interest in a familiar but compelling historical question: How did the various classes interact in the radically inclusive society that was Rome? How, in particular, did the elite men of the Senate navigate power-sharing with the people (represented by the tribunes) during the time of the republic? And what power—if any—did the Senate or the people retain once Rome was under the command of a single emperor, who had control over the army? Beard’s well-balanced answers, in step with the most up-to-date scholarship, reflect a turn away from a top-down or “great man” approach. Reconciling the various social interests at stake in the Roman Republic, she argues, was ultimately impossible—beyond the capabilities of even the most impressive leader—given the new demands and opportunities of empire. She sums up the situation in a characteristically brilliant one-liner: “The empire created the emperors.”