HOW ON EARTH did they do it? The Greek historian Polybius, writing in the second century B.C., was the first to ask the question: "Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organization, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than 53 years?" It was not as if Rome was a promising spot: a swampy piece of ground up a barely navigable river surrounded by scrubby hills, its few thousand inhabitants alternately flooded out and ravaged by malaria. Even its founding myth suggested a bumpy ride ahead: Romulus and Remus, those twins born to a delinquent priestess, were abandoned on the banks of the Tiber, then rescued by an improbable she-wolf, who suckled them. This shared ordeal engendered no brotherly love. Romulus murdered Remus on the city's first day, and then with his gang abducted a bunch of women from the Sabine Hills to provide mothers for their children. So Rome began with a murder and a mass rape. From the start, its people were aggressive and acquisitive, and its narrow streets were a hide-out for the riffraff of Italy. Romans were like New Yorkers. They came from somewhere else, and they were proud of it. In "SPQR," her wonderful concise history, Mary Beard unpacks the secrets of the city's success with a crisp and merciless clarity that I have not seen equaled anywhere else. (The title comes from the Roman catchphrase Senatus Populusque Romanus - the Senate and People of Rome.) The openness to immigration was the first thing. The semimythical kings before the founding of the Republic boasted of their foreign origins. Long after the Republic had fallen, when some crusty senators were moaning about foreigners taking over the city, the emperor Claudius reminded them that Rome had always been open to immigrants and that if they had any sense, they should allow more of those rude and hairy Gauls into the Senate. By contrast, in Athens, even the great Pericles was obsessed by the need to tighten up the qualifications for citizenship to those who could boast of two Athenian parents. Rome prevailed, Athens did not. It was by making immigrants, and thousands of slaves too, into citizens and by conscripting the peoples they conquered into Rome's army that the city became a great metropolis with over a million inhabitants before the dawn of the Christian era. Beard ends her book with the concluding flourish of the emperor Caracalla in A.D. 212, when he declared that every free inhabitant of the Roman Empire would henceforth be a Roman citizen. We tend to think of the Romans as coarser successors to the Greeks. Yet Beard, who doubles as a Cambridge professor and a television lecturer of irresistible salty charm, shows us how the Roman Republic got underway at almost the same time as the Athenian democracy. And it evolved into just the kind of mixed system that sophisticated commentators like Aristotle and Polybius approved of: two consuls elected by popular vote for one year at a time, a Senate consisting mostly of former officials who had grown fat on the spoils of politics and a popular assembly elected by geographical constituencies rather than blood-related tribes. Not so different from the American Republic today, really. In both, money talks, but every now and then the people answer back. Beard suggests that many of the popular orators like Clodius, Catiline and the Gracchi brothers, reviled by Cicero as crooks and rogues, may have been genuine representatives of the plebs, who deserved a hearing. Both under the Republic and the Empire, the authorities were in fact quick to yield to the clamor to fix the price of corn as well as to lay on the wild beasts and the gladiators. A touch of melancholy descends on Beard's narrative when the Republic comes crashing down after a series of civil wars and Octavian becomes supreme ruler under the fancy title of the August One. For Beard, the autocracy of the emperors "represented, in a sense, an end of history." It certainly meant an erosion of public debate; politics migrated from the forum and the Senate to the emperor's private quarters. In the huggermugger courts of Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, rumor was king. In "Dynasty," his history of the first five emperors, another British historian, Tom Holland, admits quite candidly, citing Tacitus, that "even when it comes to notable events, we are in the dark." The Roman historians themselves were well aware of this. Tacitus begins his "Annals": "The histories of Tiberius and Caligula, of Claudius and Nero, were falsified, while they remained alive, out of dread - and then, after their deaths, were composed under the influence of still festering hatreds." Alas, Tacitus himself was not immune to similar prejudices, nor was our other prime source, the gossipy Suetonius. Holland, too, itches to get on to the juicy bits, quoting Suetonius: "But enough of the emperor; now to the monster." He always perks up when, as he puts it in his breathless way, "fresh and murderous novelties were brewing," and he does not always stop to catch his breath and assess just how true it all is. Did Nero really murder his mother and two of his wives, sodomize his stepbrother and deliberately set fire to Rome to make room for his new palace, putting in some lyre practice the while? Did the austere and high-minded Tiberius really spend his retirement in Capri cavorting with nymphets and toyboys in the most esoteric debaucheries? If we believe that for a century Rome was ruled by five of the most callous and disgusting tyrants in history, we have also to ask (as Polybius would certainly have asked, had he been around): How was it that the Empire not merely survived but also prospered and not just for that century but for centuries to come? Beard asks that question, and Holland does not, at least not here (he has more to say in his earlier book, "Rubicon," which covers the Republican years). Rome began as an aggressive military state, and the army never lost its primacy. Augustus cemented the loyalty of his troops by lavish grants of land and secure pensions. He centralized the command structure around a praetorian guard that stayed very close to him, to ward off both the stab in the back and the rogue general out on the frontier. Beard also points out how the Roman religion was a strictly this-worldly cult dedicated to the salvation of the city, not of individual Roman souls. Except for the Vestal Virgins, the priests were not a separate caste but civic dignitaries like Cicero, who thought this was one of the secrets of Rome's success. The arrival on the scene of Christianity, with its jealous God and its dedicated priesthood, was a disruption that even the conversion of the Emperor Constantine failed to resolve entirely. What's more, several of the Caesars, notably Augustus and Tiberius, were seriously good administrators and military strategists. The soaring aqueducts that brought water to the parched throats of the poor, the enormous baths as big as cathedrals that were open to all, the new roads, and the deepwater port that conveyed the goods of the world to Rome from the mouth of the Tiber - all these made the poorest Roman citizens feel like lords of the universe. The sour old philosopher-playwright Seneca, who was also Nero's tutor, bemoaned that "so globalized has everything become that nothing is left in its accustomed place" - this, a free rendering by Holland, who is also a brilliant translator (don't miss his version of Herodotus' "Histories"). Some of Holland's set pieces are terrific: the ambush of the Roman legions in the German forests by the renegade Arminius, a.k.a. Herman the German; the doomed rebellion of the British queen Boudicca; the terrible fire (in fact, Nero seems to have been more active in fighting the blaze than in starting it); and most lurid of all, the poisonous family life of podgy little Nero. It is an unforgettable story, even if, as with many unforgettable stories, you don't have to believe every word of it. Did Nero really murder his mother, sodomize his stepbrother and burn Rome? FERDINAND MOUNT is the author of "Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us" and, most recently, "The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905."

The acclaimed classicist delivers a massive history of ancient Rome, which "continues to underpin Western culture and politics, what we write and how we see the world, and our place it in." Beard (Classics/Cambridge Univ.; Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up, 2014, etc.) writes fascinatingly about how Rome grew and sustained its position. More importantly, she sorts the many myths from history. As in her previous illuminating works, she is no myth builder; she is a scholar who reaches down-to-earth conclusions based on her years of dedication to her subject. This is no simple chronological biography of rulers. The author provides a broad overview of how events from the rape of Lucretia to Caracalla's granting of citizenship to everyone (except slaves) strengthened and eventually weakened the empire. The rulers of Rome never planned a land grab to build an empire. As the author points out, they didn't even have maps. However, they continued to conquer peoples, took slaves and bounty, and made their men part of the army and, eventually, citizens. Beard writes of the reformers who fed the people and instituted laws of compensation for abuse. What they failed to do was establish a policy of succession, instead leaving it to luck, improvisation, plots, and, usually, violence. Because the author is such an expert linguist who is exceedingly comfortable in her field, she is able to step back to see the entire Roman world. Throughout the narrative, Beard refers to works by Polybius, Livy, Suetonius, and Tacitus, as well as the prodigious correspondence of Cicero and Pliny the Younger. She shows us how to engage with the history, culture, and controversies that made Romeand why it still matters. Beard's enthusiasm for her subject is infectious and is well-reflected in her clever, thoroughly enjoyable style of writing. Lovers of Roman history will revel in this work, and new students will quickly become devotees. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The first millennium of Rome is Beard's (classics, Cambridge Univ.; The Parthenon) topic in this delightful and extensive examination of what made Rome, and why we should care. Since the author is a well-known popularizer of classical studies, it is no surprise that this is a humorous and accessible work, but it is also extremely rigorous in its questioning of standard conclusions and methods. For instance, Beard avoids the normal recitation of the first Roman emperors by framing them within a larger discussion of a shift to one-man rule and its actual effect on Romans. At all points, her approaches are easy to follow. Readers don't have to be familiar with the now-extinct Oscan language, but Beard introduces it so skillfully it seems only natural. Throughout, the author also uses the scanty but extant evidence to attempt some understanding of the lives of women, slaves, and the poor that are limited in the historical record but critical to how Rome operated. VERDICT A must-read for fans of classical studies and strongly recommended for anyone with an interest in history.-Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.