Mike Duncan vs Mary Beard: Different Approaches to History

A couple of months ago I wrote a post talking about how much I was enjoying Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, and how it was sticking with me more than previous attempts to learn about Roman history, including Mary Beard's SPQR. Now that I've finished Duncan's series (as of yesterday) and had a chance in Italy to review some of Beard's book, I thought it would be a good time to look at the two different approaches to history and why I responded better to one than the other.

Part of it is clearly the way my brain retains information. Over the course of several months, I listened to Duncan narrate various points in Roman history, and I think the repetition helped facts to stick in my mind. He also helpfully pointed out when an important figured entered the historical record, so that my mind was primed to learn more about this person I'd been told to expect.

By contrast, when I read SPQR it was in my lunch breaks at work, and in the evenings, and at times I've found that I focus too much on getting through pages to really take in what I'm reading. I have this romantic idea of how many books I should be reading each month or year (4 and 50, respectively), and sometimes find myself chasing page counts rather than luxuriating in the prose or the facts for which I'm ostensibly reading a book. It seems likely that SPQR fell victim to that, as other books have before it.

Ironically, I'm finding that in certain circumstances the antidote to that forgetting is to read multiple books at the same time, a few pages at a time. Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of several books I'm reading (or rather rereading) at the moment, and I feel I'm retaining more than I did the first time I read it, back in 2003 or so.

The other difference between SPQR and the History of Rome is how they're organized. SPQR is clearly a work of erudition, drawing on Beard's expertise in Roman and Classical history, but looking at it again last month it didn't seem organized in the way I'd have preferred (I'm tying myself into knots to avoid saying that it's poorly organized, because I don't think it necessarily is - it's just poorly organized for me).

I suppose this is how my brain organizes information, but I need that spine of who was in charge, and in what sequence, to take in the sweep of history. This is why I've retained more of John Keay's China: A History, than of his India: A History. The book on China is given shape by explaining how each of the major dynasties arose, while India's history is a little more messy and so I have more trouble understanding the significance of the Maurya Empire, among others. All I know is that it came long before the Mughals, but I have precious little understanding of what happened between them - hence why I'm also rereading that book.

Another example is British history, or English history, if you prefer. A couple of years ago I picked up Simon Schama's History of Britain, thinking that it would be good to finally have a grounding in the history of the nation in which I've spent most of my life, apart from the US. His books are well-written, don't get me wrong, and I did get some understanding of that sweep of history, but for whatever reason his middle volume, on the English Civil War and the various religious wars, escaped me.

Subsequent to that, I picked up a copy of Rebecca Fraser's Story of Britain, which in the UK is (possibly cheekily) titled A People's History of Britain, and which I christened in my head A Tory History of Britain. It's defiantly old-fashioned, hanging its structure off the doings of kings and queens and nobles, and Oliver Cromwell; a review I read praised its focus, saying that it was superior to the current vogue for relating the daily life in "Boringshire".

Having read Fraser's book, though, I can say that the approach helps, conservative revisionism aside (and besides, Robert Tombs's The English and Their History made Fraser's Tory History look positively Blairite). Don't ask me to distinguish between the Angevins and the Plantagenets, or to put the Poitevins into that historical context [never mind, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Ed.], but between one thing and another I have a better sense of how the Stuart dynasty failed and gave way to the Hanoverians, who led to Queen Victoria and the current British royals.

By the way, this isn't to say that history should never deviate from talking about what nobles and royals were doing. The History of Rome took a couple of episodes to talk about what daily life was actually like in different points of the empire, and did so in a way that made it come alive better than any source I'd seen before. That said, his series misses out on what women were doing during those centuries of Rome. This is in part because the sources we have available don't say anything about women, although he has a lot more to say about various empresses at the end of the Western Empire.

Looking at SPQR again, Beard organized her book to touch on various topics, and only devoted one chapter to the emperors, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius. Her overall scope ends in the early 200s, when Caracalla gave citizenship to all residents of the empire, as opposed to just Romans or Italians. There are certainly good reasons to foreground the historical currents rather than the emperors, who weren't always in control of events, but I can't help feeling I'd have gotten more out of her book if she'd used the sequence of emperors (roughly speaking; you don't have to go into too much detail on Otho, Galba or Vitellius, as she doesn't) as a starting point to talk about what life was like in the empire.

To put it another way, not much may have happened during the reign of Antoninus Pius, fourth of the so-called Five Good Emperors, but that's because Rome was enjoying an unprecedented period of stability since the accession of Nerva through the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. Antoninus Pius isn't too interesting on his own, but he's worth mentioning when considering that stability, since it would end with the death of his successor Marcus Aurlius, and would never be attained again. SPQR didn't leave me with that understanding, and the History of Rome podcast did.