For centuries, the historiography of ancient Rome was dominated by Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century narrative The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Published between 1776 and 1788, Gibbon’s 6-volume study covered the vast timespan of 1590-98 BCE, tracing the influence of Rome into the early modern period. Immensely influential, Gibbon’s work is widely seen as “a paradigmatic of civilizational decay,” reflecting the Enlightenment ideas of his time, which explored the concepts of social organization, power, liberty, and virtue. (Dowthwaite, James. “Revisiting the decadence of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” 2025).

Beard calls Gibbon’s approach to history—and that of his age—“magisterial” but also “misleading,” in its tendency to adopt false certainty in areas of distinct complexity, ambiguity, or, simply, lack of evidence. She asserts that modern historians approach the past with different priorities, explaining, “It is not that we are cleverer than our predecessors… but that we come to Roman history with different questions” (16). Thus, SPQR combines a multidisciplinary range of source evidence to support a focus on the lived experiences of those in Rome, including marginalized groups. This approach enables the critical review of Roman written sources, which present the perspective of their author rather than an objective “truth.”

Beard also challenges the Decline and Fall paradigm by aligning with a modern scholarly shift that emphasizes Rome’s structural resilience over its eventual collapse. This new perspective suggests that Rome’s ultimate success lay in its capacity for cultural and institutional replication and reinvention. In this perspective, the Roman characteristic of adaptation and inclusion was not a “consequence of violent transformation or political rupture, but as an outgrowth of Roman success in spreading its political culture and reduplicating its institutions across the expanse of empire” (Ando, Clifford. “The Rise and Rise of Rome.” New Rambler Review, 29 Feb. 2016). Beard adopts this framework by explicitly rejecting the teleology of decay. Her aim is not the “old question of what caused the fall of the Roman Empire,” but “to explain how and why it grew and sustained its power for so long” (17). This reorientation shapes the structure of SPQR, which deliberately concludes with the Edict of Caracalla in 212 CE, rather than the barbarian invasions of traditional historical narratives. By ending her narrative with this unprecedented act of mass assimilation—which granted citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire—Beard reframes Roman history as a story of triumphant integration and enduring influence. In defining Rome by its remarkable millennium of growth rather than its eventual fragmentation, Beard reminds the reader why Rome has remained so widely fascinating, as the largest and longest-lived empire in history.