Some Greeks liked this attention, at least at first, because having Rome on your side was always a trump card in local rivalries.

Three generations later, Rome was the only power that mattered in the Italian peninsula, so it picked a fight with Carthage, the other imperial power of the western Mediterranean, and began to interfere in the Greek world, by this time a motley assortment of ancient cities and Hellenistic kings. But it doesn’t, the annual punch-ups get bloodier, they take the citizen army further and further from home, and suddenly, somewhere in the middle of the fourth century BC, Rome, hitherto indistinguishable from its neighbours, starts to swallow up everything it sees. The statelet is captured and put to the sack by mercenary freebooters from the north, and the government seriously considers abandoning the site. For six hundred years, it continues to look pretty much like the neighbours with whom it has annual inconclusive punch-ups, as they all become rudimentary city-states with a taste for Greek luxury imports. An ordinary village is founded at a propitious ford on a river with good access to the sea.

The material matters, of course, and it doesn’t get better than Beard’s. Beard gives us a sweeping Roman history that’s both reassuringly familiar and abidingly strange. After A Don’s Life blog and its printed spin-offs, after the misogyny she faced for daring to present a BBC2 series without the looks of a film star, and after the OBE, comes the doorstop SPQR to charm the charts and critics both. We are now in Mary Beard’s imperial phase, and she’s entered it with wit and charm and insight rather than the intellectual thuggery of Niall Ferguson. N eil Tennant described his run of hits between ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘Heart’ as the Pet Shop Boys’ imperial phase, when they owned the charts and charmed the critics by setting Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat.

Spqr beard review