SPQR

Rome begins as a small village in central Italy and grows over roughly a thousand years into an empire reaching from Spain to Syria. Mary Beard, a Cambridge classicist, tells that history in one narrative. The title is SPQR, short for Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Romans' own shorthand for "the Senate and People of Rome".

The account opens in 63 BCE, when the consul Cicero faces the aristocrat Catiline, accused of plotting to overthrow the state. Beard uses the episode to show how historians piece the Roman past together from biased and partial sources.

From there the book moves in order through the legends of Rome's foundation and its kings. Next come the Republic and its spread around the Mediterranean, then the Republic's collapse, then the first two centuries under emperors.

Politics and war share the pages with questions about how the Romans saw themselves and their achievements. Beard also turns to slavery, citizenship, migration, religion and social mobility, along with the lives of women and of ordinary Romans.

The narrative stops in 212 CE, when the emperor Caracalla grants Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire. It is a work of popular history that treats the evidence itself as part of the story.