The book’s opening structure introduces Beard’s methodological argument, beginning in medias res with the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BCE rather than Rome’s mythological origins. This passage immerses the reader in a famous historical scene of action, and also in the controversy of its reception and interpretation through history. By centering the conflict between Cicero and Catiline, Beard foregrounds her ongoing concern with historiography, demonstrating how historical narratives are constructed from competing interpretations. The conspiracy is used by Beard as a case study in source criticism, juxtaposing Cicero’s speeches against Sallust’s moralizing analysis and the material evidence of numismatics, which suggests that a credit crunch drove popular support for Catiline, potentially changing the “true” meaning of his actions. Through this, Beard immediately establishes that her book’s major purpose is to explore how our knowledge about the Roman past is formed, contested, and transmitted.

Beard’s analysis of Cataline’s “conspiracy” and Rome’s foundation myths in this section establish the theme of The Normalization of Political and Social Violence as a constitutive element of Roman society and self-perception. Cicero’s decision to execute the captured conspirators, justified through an emergency decree, illustrates the fragility of legal protections in the face of perceived threats. His dismissive announcement of their deaths— “they have lived” (35)—is a euphemism that underscores the routine nature of state violence by 63 BCE. Beard shows how Cicero’s attitude has foundations in the mythical story of Romulus and Remus. The murder of one brother by the other at the city’s founding embeds fratricide within Rome’s cultural DNA. Beard argues that later Roman writers, including Cicero, read this act as a foundational crime, a curse of civil strife inherited by subsequent generations. By placing a documented political crisis alongside a national myth, Beard exemplifies the connection between the internal conflicts of late Republican politics and the culturally expressive story of Rome’s foundation.

The explicit purpose of Beard’s examination of Rome’s origin stories is to illuminate the ways mythology shapes and reflects collective identity, not to prove or disprove the myths themselves. To this end, she analyzes the legends of Romulus and Aeneas as complex cultural artifacts that articulated later Roman values and anxieties. The tradition of Romulus establishing an “asylum” for runaways, criminals, and exiles provides the mythological charter for the theme of Integrating Conquered Peoples into Roman Identity. Beard argues that this foundational openness to outsiders established an ideological basis for Rome’s later extension of citizenship to conquered peoples and even to formerly enslaved individuals. The complementary myth of Aeneas, a Trojan refugee, reinforces this identity by framing the Roman people as foreign from their inception. This analysis reveals a central paradox of Roman self-perception: a people whose imperial identity was built on a principle of radical, often coercive, assimilation. In centering her discussion of pre-history and myth around the perceptions of Romans themselves, Beard demonstrates her book’s interest in understanding past human experiences, and a focus on the dynamic between human connection and difference across time.

Throughout these opening chapters, Beard demonstrates a commitment to methodological transparency, making the process of historical inquiry a subject of the work itself. The Prologue explicitly rejects the traditional “decline and fall” logic of Gibbons and his successors, proposing instead a history focused on Rome’s remarkable mechanisms of growth and endurance. This framework is applied in Chapter 2, where the literary tradition of Romulus is contrasted with the archaeological evidence of scattered Iron Age settlements. Beard’s multidisciplinary approach reveals the gap between Rome’s material past, its foundational myths, and subsequent interpretations, showing that history is “a work in progress” (16) constantly reshaped by new discoveries. This methodological transparency and humility demystifies the historian’s role, presenting historical understanding as a dynamic and inclusive process of interpreting fragmentary evidence.