SPQR — Mary Beard

Mary Beard's history of Rome is less interested in the emperors than in the question of how a city of a few hundred thousand people came to govern most of the known world. She traces the mechanisms — legal, military, cultural — by which Rome absorbed its conquests, and asks what it meant to be Roman at a time when Romanness was constantly being redefined. It is a book about power, but also about the stories a society tells itself to justify that power.