This review of SPQR comes to us courtesy of Paul Garrett, guest reviewer and resident curmudgeon.

There is a hilarious scene in the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian where some Hebrews are planning to overthrow Pilate by kidnapping his wife and demanding he dismantle the entire Roman empire in two days. John Cleese attempts to rile up the crowd by asking, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” There follows a litany of a dozen or so Roman contributions to Palestinian society, from roads and aqueducts to sanitation and good cheap wine. Though not entirely accurate, the scene highlights the influence the Roman Empire had on its world.

Though the empire officially ended with the Ottoman invasion in the late 1400s, its actual demise occurred around 900 years earlier with the rejection of the political reforms put in place by Caesar Augustus in the first century CE.

At least that is the theory put forth by Mary Beard in her tome SPQR. Beard is proud to call herself an Oxford Don and even has a blog by that name. She also produced a series called “Meet the Romans for the BBC (now available on YouTube) where she tromps around roman ruins in her long gray windblown tresses and sneakers looking like somebody’s hipster grandma. She has spent the last fifty years studying the ancient Roman empire, of which a mountain of material remains, in the form of letters, contemporary histories, marble and bronze artifacts, and even an actual mountain, made solely of millions of discarded amphorae for transporting olive oil. The oil-soaked into the clay and turned rancid, which prevented the 60-liter (about 15 gallon) jars from being repurposed, an early version of single-use containers.

SPQR is the abbreviation for “The Senate and the People of Rome” (Senatus Populus Que Romanus). Youcan still find the letters stamped into things like manhole covers all over the city of Rome today, the same way we use “Made in America” or little decals of the American flag in the US.

Beard spares nothing in her description of ancient Roman society. It was a society rife with treachery and violence.  Civil wars, assassinations, backstabbing, and political intrigue were more the norm than the exception. The city had no active police force, and many politicians took advantage of this by using mobs and riots to achieve their political objectives. (Sound familiar?)

Babies were “exposed;” a euphemism for infanticide, where unwanted newborns were thrown into rubbish heaps to die. The lucky ones were rescued by families that could not produce children of their own, as having babies was Job One for married women. 

Perhaps we should expect this level of violence in a society whose founding myth included fratricide and rape. According to the story, two orphan brothers, Romulus and Remus, founded the city after being nursed by a wolf. Not long after the founding, Romulus killed his brother in a property dispute. Later, to increase the town’s population, Romulus invited the people from a nearby town, the Sabines, to a party during which the Romans kidnapped all the eligible daughters and subjected them to forced marriage.

Whether Roman civilization ended 500 or 1500 years ago, it still interests us. From the movies like Ben Hur and Gladiator to the various miniseries such as A.D., Britannia, and I, Claudius to books like Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, and Colleen McCullough’s Grass Crown series, there seems to be no end to our fascination with the life and times of the men and women of Ancient Rome, and SPQR deserves a respected place in the modern Roman historical pantheon.

Among the activities most unsafe to do in groups during this pandemic-spread-by-respiratory-contact is sing. That is a total bummer–not least because it gives an easy boogeyman to believers who want to frame the “hoax” virus or the “overblown” response to it as an excuse for attacking religion in the USA. (Checking in with friends in Asian, British and Canadian Christian communities, this conspiracy theory has uneven traction in other places.)

I love worship singing. Some great moments of renewed strength have come from group worship leading to either that quiet, peaceful blanket of love so many of us know descending in sweetness, or that wild happy vibe that brings a different kind of sweetness with silly fun. Both have been delights throughout my life.

My husband came to Christianity in his fifties. Before and after, he found singing a source of strength in social justice situations, and a relief from the drains of a demanding and sometimes pedantic day job in Academia.

So it’s easy to move the pandemic into feeling personal: we can’t SING together because it expels too much used air too forcefully to be safe? ICK! DOUBLE ICK!

Charismatic evangelicals in particular seem to be swallowing an astroturfed, baited hook with the line: YOUR GOVERNMENT FORBIDS! This is act two of the drama; act one starts with “the virus makes it unsafe,” but that doesn’t make people feel nearly so persecuted, and therefore important. Kinda weird, but there it is: do you want to be someone’s wind-up toy, while yelling you won’t be someone else’s wind-up toy? Be prayerful, not gullible.

No, we can’t sing together face to face, but that’s not the same thing as we can’t sing. We can in our “infection units” (with household and selected friends) and we can online; some Christian communities are doing that. (A word to the wise: mute the mics of all but the leaders, because Zoom has terrible delays that will do the same thing as a large group trying to carol a neighborhood at Christmas; the back 50 will be .5 seconds behind the front 50, and if you think that doesn’t matter, wait and see what happens to Away in a Manger when it starts off pitched for a choir of soprano mice anyway. We’ve all been there.)

Jack and I have done two different types of group singing since the pandemic started; we set chairs in a circle 15 feet wide on our back deck, and told people to face the empty spaces between chairs, and hold back a little on belting out choruses. No one got sick. Not everyone has a big back yard, either. We also participate from time to time in various online folkie events, usually doing featured singers rather than group sing: one camera, one singer, one song, in a meeting of 10-70 people. It works, so long as you mute the mics for choruses.

Christians: please sing. Please sing together in your families and record it for others to see. Please don’t go out on the streets of, oh, say, Seattle, and sing in a big non-masked group and then watch the rates spike two weeks later so all the non-Christians can find one more reason to call us stupid and mean. *waves* Yo, Sean Feucht!

The government is not the enemy in this global health threat; don’t pray against the guy in front of the curtain. We’d all be grateful if you would pray against the virus and then not consider spreading it “an act of faith.” That’s more “duped” than “bold.” Just sayin’.

If you are doing best practice sing-a-longs, we would love to see the links to them. Thanks!