Was Cicero right in ordering that Catiline and his associates be executed without trial? Beard underlines the difficulties of working out what actually happened, but she also highlights what was at stake, both in Cicero’s own time and later.

Catiline has served as a byword for subversion, but he has also been rehabilitated as a champion of the dispossessed – or at least as the symptom of a broken system rather than an incarnation of evil. Cicero’s speeches against Catiline have been a staple of classical education and a reference point for political orators. Mary Beard’s masterful study of Roman history begins with a dazzling account of one such man, Cicero, in the year he held the consulship (Rome’s most prestigious office) and the state faced a terrible political crisis, as a conspiracy led by a renegade Roman aristocrat was uncovered. Yet there are individual Romans who have long been familiar. While the lives of the vast majority remain inaccessible to us, the epitaphs of an African ex-slave who ended his days in northern Britain, or a musician from Asia who met a premature death in Rome, give tantalising glimpses of human mobility in the multicultural world of Roman imperial rule.

T hanks to the sophisticated work of archaeologists, we now know more than ever about the diets, health and housing of Roman-era communities from Syria to the German frontier zone.

Spqr by mary beard