SPQR is a deeply researched, very readable popular history of Roman citizenship, focusing on how a unremarkable Iron Age village became the center of a world-straddling empire. Beard begins with the career of Cicero at the end of the Republic, before diving into the murky world of myth and archeology in the repeatedly built over Rome. She reads the key characteristic of Romanness as a kind of open citizenship. While the boundaries between classes and especially free and slave were stark, freed slaves automatically became Roman citizens (without any of the bureaucratic fuss of modern states). Roman myth cast their founders as exiles and outsiders, a far cry from divine descent to a particular place that is the most common origin myth.

Evidence for the Roman kings and earliest days of the Republic is scarce, but by the time of Cicero, we have a body of literature that has no peer until Renaissance Florence. Cicero's career and letters detail rhetoric ploys and political debates we still have. Yet his Republic was a fragile place, teetering towards autocratic rule by army commanders. Roman Republican traditions, which had been strong centuries earlier, had been reduced to tattered fragments by a tumultuous century of constant warfare, including brutal internal purges against the Grachii brothers, and the bloody 'Social War' against Rome's Italian allies and tributary cities, which saw the metropole grant citizenship to all Italians.

Beard skillful moves between the well-documented lives of elites like Cicero and Pliny the Younger to more ordinary lives based on archeological evidence and what text survives. Roman life could be brutal for the lower orders, especially women and slaves, but there was a flourishing urban middle class between the Senatorial and Imperial elite and the masses.

The book trails off in the Imperial period, with relatively little analysis of the Augustine emperors, and almost nothing after the Crisis of the Third Century. I can think of fewer better single volume overviews of Roman history.