Rasmus Bertilsson’s Reviews > SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome > Status Update

What I like about Mary Beard is her profound focus on the people who lived in the empire, and not just the empire itself; for an empire without it’s people is just an endless placid desert: grand and beautiful on the outside, but a narrow lie on the inside. The glory of the antiquity is built on all manners of ugly, and yet its beauty shines through the cracks.