SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Mary Beard takes the reader through the first thousand years of Roman history, from the legendary founding of the city to the Caracalla edict of 212 CE that granted citizenship to free inhabitants of the empire. Beard rebuilds the Roman world from inscriptions, archaeology, and primary writing, with a clear-eyed approach to what the evidence supports and what later writers invented. The result is one of the most widely recommended modern single-volume histories of Rome.