In SPQR, Beard argues that Rome’s strength rested as much on its ability to absorb defeated communities as on its military victories. The book explores how this pattern of coerced inclusion, which turned outsiders into Roman citizens and encouraged aspiration to Roman-ness, created a multicultural empire, often run by people who were from conquered communities, including immigrants, enslaved and formerly enslaved people, and their descendants. Arguing that Rome’s expanding approach to citizenship shaped this transformation and allowed the state to turn former enemies into a reliable source of support, SPQR considers this integration as central to Rome’s success and longevity.

Beard explores how the myths that Romans repeated about their beginnings offered a means to explore and rationalize this openness as being inherently “Roman.” In Rome’s foundation story, Romulus establishes his city as an “asylum” for “runaway slaves, convicted criminals, exiles and refugees” (60), presenting early Rome as a gathering place for outsiders rather than a citizenry defined by ethnicity or birthright. SPQR stresses that this approach was unusual and innovative, comparing Rome to similar city-states in the ancient world: Beard shows that, while Greek city-states often cherished the idea of unbroken descent, Roman tales stressed mixed origins. Her analysis of the story of Aeneas, a Trojan refugee who plants the seeds of the Roman people in Italy, with the creation of a shared Roman-Sabine community after the abduction of the Sabine women, reinforces this point. Beard contends that these repeated mythic images of foreignness and merger offered Romans a mythic context that encouraged their own incorporation of conquered groups as an expression of Roman identity, rather than a threat to it.

This theme also explores the ways in which Roman leaders turned these ideas into concrete policy, such as when Rome defeated Veii in 396 BCE, it took the city’s land and soon welcomed many of its inhabitants as citizens. Following from this precedent, the early 1st-century BCE Senate granted full citizenship to rebellious Italian allies, broadening the citizen body on a scale never seen before. Beard notes that this expansion of the citizen base strengthened Rome’s forces by turning its “defeated enemies into part of its growing military machine” (164). In the process, the idea of being a “Roman citizen” shifted from a geographical-ethnic marker of attachment to the city itself to a recognition of legal status.

Imperial rule pushed this integration even further. Manumission granted citizenship to the freed enslaved people of Roman citizens, which meant many new Romans came from outside Italy. By the second century CE, Beard explains that “more than 50 per cent of the senators were from the provinces” (522). Emperors such as Trajan from Spain and Septimius Severus from Africa showed how far this shift had reached. The trend culminated in 212 CE, when Caracalla “made every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered” (17). This decree completed the trajectory first suggested by the myths about Romulus and created an empire ruled by the descendants of peoples once defeated by Rome.