The pattern of absorption was set in the aftermath of the battle of Veii, a settlement 10 miles from Rome, in 396 B.C. Subsequent Roman legend played up the heroic action of the leading general, Camillus, who supposedly razed the town. The story was useful for a people eager to emulate the heroes of the Iliad, who sacked Troy. But Beard draws on existing scholarship to note that archaeological evidence suggests no wholesale destruction. Instead, the Romans seem to have allowed the town to operate more or less as before, but under their authority—thus increasing the size of their territory by 60 percent and expanding the pool of potential army recruits. This approach was repeated in the series of skirmishes through the next century that established Roman dominance over the Italian peninsula. Those who were, in Beard’s nicely cynical language, “forced, or welcomed, into some form of ‘alliance’ ” had one essential obligation to their new friends, the Romans: to provide soldiers for the army. By the end of the fourth century B.C., Rome could call on half a million troops. Its power was founded on people power.

Some readers may feel that Beard overemphasizes the gentler aspects of imperial rule. The newly subjugated were allies in name but not entirely in legal and political fact. But she is right to stress that the Romans pioneered a revolutionary understanding of citizenship, and in making the concept more central to the whole story of Rome than previous historians have, she highlights its truly distinctive facets. The idea that one could be a citizen, even a partial citizen, of a place where one did not live, and had perhaps never been, was virtually unprecedented. So was the idea that one could have a dual identity, as both Roman and Mantuan, Roman and Sicilian, or Roman and Oscan (when the Romans conquered the peninsula), or—later—Roman and Greek, Hispanic, Gallic, or British.

Most ancient societies assumed that being a citizen of a particular place meant not just living in that place, but also speaking the language and sharing in the common culture. Romans, by contrast, could be people who might well not even speak Latin. As Beard notes, in the later periods of the Roman empire, Greek was the lingua franca (or rather, the koine glossa—“common tongue”) in its eastern half. In contrast to many slave-owning societies, both ancient and modern, the Romans allowed large numbers of their slaves to become free, and to acquire at least limited forms of citizenship.

The flexible vision of Romanitas also meant that Roman women, at least in the elite classes, had access to far greater freedom and more legal rights than women in many other ancient societies. In ancient Athens, women were legally under the control of their fathers and husbands, whereas elite Roman women were allowed property rights, albeit with certain restrictions. But Beard takes care not to extrapolate too rosy a view of the lives of the Romans who left no literature behind, and calls attention to how little we can reconstruct about them from the surviving evidence. She warns, for example, against taking at face value the image of the “liberated woman” that became a stereotype in the literature of the first century B.C. The elite adulteress featured in the poems of Catullus and Propertius, who sleeps around and throws wild parties, says more about patriarchal anxiety than about women’s liberty.