I was pretty unimpressed with _SQPR_. It's a nice survey, but she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts, the domes that people could figure out how to replicate until the 1600s, etc. This was the book where I realized that I am fed up with the modern hermeneutic of skepticism, or put another way, the modern historian's smug sense of superiority. They weren't stupid, and they wrote what they did for a reason (which might not be the reason you wished they had), and in any case they are all the evidence there is.

I mean.. we suspect there's a level of fabrication by early Roman historians. In your specific quote - it's more that record keeping (to that detail) happened after-the-fact and based on oral traditions. Just take a look at Suetonius and how he describes his sources of information, things along the lines of "well, this is hearsay but I heard it from my relative who knew XYZ and therefor I think it's credible".

Framing the uncertainty around early record keeping is a good. Similarly, the second Servile war in historic documents matches the first Servile war almost like Star Wars ep7 matches ep4. That _hints_ at fabrication. So if they fabricate data in one place.. :)

> she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts

Did she,in the book, give a reason why the list can't possibly be right?

The same sense of muddled analysis (which I also found to be extremely off-putting) comes through in this interview:

> There's a lot of myths that you need to bust about the gladiatorial games, particularly in the center of Rome in the Colosseum. I think everyone's image of that is in some way based on modern movies on "Gladiator I," "Gladiator II." In some ways, I think those were rather impressive, but they got some things terribly wrong. And I think the thing that, for me, the biggest mistake they made is to imagine how the audience behaved. We do tend to think that somehow the audience must have gone wild, they were there because they wanted blood lust, they were erupting in passion, in anger, saying "Kill him," or "Save him," or whatever. Everything that we can tell about the audience from Roman sources themselves suggests that actually it was much more controlled than anything you see are in the movies. For start, it was completely sex-segregated, the women sat separately from the men. But more than that, everybody came dressed quite posh, you had to wear a toga to go. Now a toga is the official Roman dress for Roman men, but it's worn when you are doing something official, you don't wear it to the local bar in the evening. To go to the gladiatorial games, that was kind of official, and you had to wear your toga. Everybody sat not just segregated by sex, but they sat in rank order. Senators by law, the top rank of Roman society, on the front rows, and then the next rank down just above them, until you got to the very back where you found the slaves and the women. Now I think that we somehow have to just overturn our sense that it was kind of mad, "losing control" going on. I think it was probably more like an evening at the opera than an evening at a football match.

If you're going to make an assertion that seems absurd on its face ("The large crowds of wine-drunk plebs were subdued and mild mannered whilst observing blood sport!"), you should offer up evidence that actually supports your assertion. Her reasoning appears to have been: Men and women sat separately. The rich got preferred seating. You had to dress up (in a toga). QED, the atmosphere was like an evening at the opera. Huh?