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Elite Roman writers were mostly disdainful of those less fortunate, and less rich, than themselves. Apart from their nostalgic admiration of a simple peasant way of life – a fantasy of country picnics, and lazy afternoons under shady trees – they found little virtue in poverty or in the poor or even in earning an honest day’s wages. Juvenal is not the only one to write off the priorities of the Roman people as ‘bread and circuses’. Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, makes exactly the same point when he writes of the emperor Trajan that ‘he understood that the Roman people are kept in line by two things beyond all else: the corn dole and entertainments’. Cicero turned his scorn on those who worked for a living: ‘The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.’ It became a cliché of Roman moralising that a true gentleman was supported by the profits of his estates, not by wage labour, which was inherently dishonourable. Latin vocabulary itself captured the idea: the desired state of humanity was otium (not so much ‘leisure’, as it is usually translated, but the state of being in control of one’s own time); ‘business’ of any kind was its undesirable opposite, negotium (‘not otium’).

Those who became wealthy from nothing were equally the objects of snobbish derision, as jumped-up arrivistes. The character of Trimalchio, the nouveau riche ex-slave in Petronius’ Satyricon who has made his fortune trading everything from bacon and perfume to slaves, is a simultaneously engaging and ghastly fictional parody of a man with more cash than good taste, who repeatedly gets proper elite behaviour slightly wrong. He keeps his own slaves in rather too vulgar designer uniforms (the porter at Trimalchio’s front door is dressed in green with a red belt and spends his time shelling peas into a silver bowl); the walls of his house are boastfully decorated with paintings that tell the story of his career, from the slave market to his current splendour, under the protection of Mercury, the god of moneymaking; and the dinner party he hosts is an impossible combination of every Roman fancy food, from dormice, prepared in honey and poppyseeds, to wine that was well over a hundred years old, vintage 121 BCE, ‘when Opimius was consul’. The ignorant Trimalchio presumably does not realise that the name of the diehard conservative who in 121 BCE had 3,000 supporters of Gaius Gracchus put to death is hardly an auspicious name for a vintage, even if wine lasted that long anyway.

— SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (71%)

Despite his rare appearances in Rome, Caesar initiated a vast programme of reforms going beyond even the scale of Sulla’s. One of them governs life even now. For – with some help from the specialist scientists he met in Alexandria – Caesar introduced into Rome what has become the modern Western system of timekeeping. The traditional Roman year was only 355 days long, and it had for centuries been the job of Roman priests to add in an extra month from time to time to keep the civic calendar in step with the natural seasons. For whatever reason – probably a combination of lack of expertise and lack of will – they had signally failed to get their calculations correct. The result was that the calendar year and the natural year were sometimes many weeks apart, with the Roman equivalent of harvest festivals falling when the crops were still growing and the climate in what was called April feeling more like February (which it was). The truth is that it is always dangerous in Republican history to assume that any given date is an accurate indication of the weather. Using Alexandrian know-how, Caesar corrected the error and, for the future, established a year with 365 days, with an extra day inserted at the end of February every four years. This was a far more significant outcome of his visit to Egypt than any dalliance with Cleopatra.

— SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (46% - 47%)

In 73 BCE, under the leadership of Spartacus, fifty or so slave gladiators, improvising weapons out of kitchen equipment, escaped from a gladiatorial training school at Capua in southern Italy and went on the run. They spent the next two years gathering support and withstanding several Roman armies until they were eventually crushed in 71 BCE, the survivors crucified in a grisly parade along the Appian Way.

It is hard now to see through the hype, both ancient and modern, to what was really going on. Roman writers, for whom slave uprisings were probably the most alarming sign of a world turned upside down, wildly exaggerate the number of supporters Spartacus attracted; estimates go as high as 120,000 insurgents. Modern accounts have often wanted to make Spartacus an ideological hero, even one who was fighting the very institution of slavery. That is next to impossible. Many slaves wanted freedom for themselves, but all the evidence from ancient Rome suggests that slavery as an institution was taken for granted, even by slaves. If they had a clearly formulated aim, the best guess is that Spartacus and his fellow escapees wanted to return to their various homes – in Spartacus’ case probably Thrace in northern Greece; for others, Gaul. One thing is certain, though: they managed to hold out against Roman forces for an embarrassingly long time.

— SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (39%)