No togas today please. Natalie celebrates the mid-winter festival of Ancient Rome, Saturnalia. According to Catullus, it's the 'best of days'. Expect cross-dressing, sweets, drinking games and the wearing of special pyjamas. Oh and anarchy and jokes. Sounds a bit like a Christmas pantomime? Not surprising, according to veteran pantomime dame André Vincent, who traces the origins of panto back to the fifth century. Early in that same century - late antiquity - a Roman Christian named Macrobius wr...
Dec 27, 2024•28 min
Tacitus is the great historian of imperial Rome. His writing is beautiful, unsettling, extraordinarily persuasive. We know many of his likes and dislikes about people and politics, but facts about his personal life? Not so much. His memoir of Agricola tells us much fascinating detail about Roman Britain: that it's an island (the Roman fleet sailed all the way round, just to check), that it's very close to Spain (with only Ireland in between); that invading Anglesey was a great victory for the Ro...
Aug 12, 2024•28 min
Aesop is probably the most famous author from antiquity, judging by the ongoing sales of his fables about animals. It should be easy to do a show about him, thinks Natalie. But it turns out that everything we know, or think we know about Aesop, is contradicted somewhere. He may have been Thracian, Phrygian or Ethiopian; mute - or talkative; clever, provoking and possibly blasphemous. It's a complicated story, and fables aren't even a Greek invention. With guests Edith Hall and Adam Rutherford, N...
Aug 05, 2024•28 min
Natalie stands up for the goddess Artemis. She's a predator, a hunter, an archer. Goddess of wild creatures, the moon to her brother Apollo's sun, she's not averse to the odd human sacrifice. And if you forget her in your prayers, she's liable to send a really big pig to dig up your orchards. 'Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. Here she explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be bio...
Jul 29, 2024•28 min
The Greek goddess of love, sex, desire and beauty, Aphrodite is mostly depicted naked and/or wet. And depending on your age and taste, that could be by Botticelli, Bananarama or Lady Gaga. Born from the sea foam, you can still visit her rock in Cyprus, where there's always a crowd of tourists. No one is immune to her charms, says Hesiod. In fact we can all learn from Aphrodite's stress-busting strategy: when something annoying or stressful happens, she goes to Cyprus - for a bath. 'Rock star myt...
Jul 22, 2024•28 min
Natalie stands up for the prize-winning Greek poet, cataloguer of gods and author of a flatpack wagon manual, Hesiod. She's joined by Professor Edith Hall and poet Alicia Stallings. Hesiod is highly regarded by the ancients for his sublime poetry, and he won a prize for his Theogony, a detailed account of the origins of the gods. He also wrote a farming manual, including the wagon-building instructions, and an epic on how to pickle fish. Hesiod rails at the hardship of the farming life in autobi...
Jul 15, 2024•28 min
Natalie Haynes returns with a new series of sparkling stories from the ancient world which shed light on the world today. Cleopatra was a brilliant politician, a ruthless leader and a massive brain-box, who spoke nine languages. The Queen of Egypt had charisma to burn, but she probably didn't look like Elizabeth Taylor. Her intelligence and magnetism were more than enough to attract the attentions of the world's most powerful men, and to keep her in power - in a notoriously lethal dynasty - for ...
Jul 08, 2024•28 min
Livia was the first Empress of Rome, a faithful wife, excellent friend and trusted advisor. So why is she still best known as a serial killer? Natalie is joined by guests Dr Emma Southon and Professor Llewelyn Morgan to discuss the life of Livia. Her marriage to the Emperor Augustus (Octavian) was a love-match. They were both married to other people when they first met, but that didn't last long, despite the added complication of her pregnancy and existing child. Before he became Emperor, Octavi...
Dec 20, 2023•28 min
Athene is charismatic and bloodthirsty, goddess of wisdom, war and...handicrafts. Owl-eyed Athene is not interested in love, although she is very fond of the hero Odysseus and gives him a leg-up whenever she can. War is Athene's thing, the bloodier the better. She's perfectly happy to humiliate and degrade her enemies, including the feisty and talented weaver Arachne, who challenges Athene to a weaving competition. Athene loves a scrap so it's game on: looms at dawn. She weaves a depiction of he...
Dec 12, 2023•28 min
Natalie tells the powerful and painful story of Demeter's fight to get justice for her daughter Persephone. Hades conspires with his siblings Zeus and Gaia to abduct Persephone and force her to live with him in the underworld as his wife. Many versions of this story are sanitized for children but the original is not. It is clear that Persephone is tricked and trafficked, that she hates and fears Hades and never becomes accustomed to life among the dead. And that her mother Demeter is furious and...
Dec 05, 2023•28 min
Epigrams, jokes, highly-polished poems in praise of the Emperor. Oh, and absolute filth. These are what made the name of the first-century Roman poet Martial. It has taken nearly two thousand years for Martial's work to be considered a fit subject for study by classicists. His poems to the Emperor may have been as highly crafted as a Fabergé egg, but nestled beside these jewels, in the same volume, were works of 'incomprehensible obscenity'. The Romans loved both, apparently. His work is still f...
Nov 28, 2023•27 min
Natalie retells Homer's epic story in an extraordinary tour-de-force performance recorded in the BBC's Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House. The ancient original would most probably have been performed from memory, and Natalie does the same: twenty-four books in twenty-seven minutes. It's a story of homecoming. Odysseus returns from the Trojan War, loses all his men in the course of his adventures, pauses for some pleasurable interludes of infidelity and some less pleasurable interludes of kidnap...
Sep 04, 2022•35 min
The poet Lucretius's major work is a six-book poem on epicurean philosophy and physics. Doesn’t sound exactly promising? But his contemporaries and poetic descendants RAVED about it, even Cicero, who is mean about everyone. Ovid says that ‘the verses of sublime Lucretius will die only on the day the world ends’. But the world nearly did end for his work because only one manuscript survived, lost for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. ‘Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand...
Aug 28, 2022•29 min
Uniquely in the ancient world, women from Sparta had extraordinary rights and freedom. Relatively speaking. They were educated: they learnt to dance, sing, recite poetry and to keep fit, in a regime where physical beauty and feminine strength were prized. They were not expected to marry until they reached maturity, which meant fewer of them died in childbirth. Their gods were female and so was the company they kept, since boys were separated from their families at age seven, and raised to be sol...
Aug 21, 2022•29 min
It seems that classical scholars are wrong about the date of the volcanic eruption that destroyed the ancient city of Pompeii almost two thousand years ago. It's taken a few ripe pomegranates and some squashed grapes, carbonised by pyroclastic flow, to change our minds about this UNESCO World Heritage Site. The eruption was definitely in the year 79, but the month? Most written sources mistakenly suggest it was August but if you know your fruit, you will know that pomegranates and grapes ripen i...
Aug 14, 2022•29 min
Join Natalie Haynes and guests for half an hour of comedy and the Classics from the BBC Radio Theatre in London. Natalie is a reformed comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greece and Rome. Now she's standing up in the name of the Roman lawyer, politician and orator Cicero. Maybe we'd all love him a bit more if Shakespeare had had a nicer Latin teacher. Expect a lot of gossip from a thousand years ago. With special guests: Lawyer Mark Stephens Professor Llewelyn Morgan Producer: M...
Jun 27, 2022•28 min
"Rock star classicist" and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. In these series she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago. Today Natalie stands up for Clytemnestra, who has been characterised as the worst wife in Greek mythology...
Jun 09, 2021•27 min
"Rock star classicist" and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. In these series she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago. Today Natalie stands up for Jocasta, whose second marriage was to Oedipus. Now for some spoilers if you'r...
May 18, 2021•28 min
"Rock star classicist" and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. In these series she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago. Today Natalie stands up for Pandora, she of the box. Which turns out to have been a jar, and not a box, o...
May 18, 2021•28 min
"Rock star classicist" and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. In these series she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago. Today Natalie tells of Medusa, she of the snaky locks and stony glare. Medusa is truly terrifying, but sh...
May 18, 2021•28 min
Natalie Haynes tells stories of Penelope, the clever woman and perfect wife behind The Odyssey. Penelope fends off a hundred idiot would-be suitors with an exhausting programme of weaving and un-weaving; is the ideal single mother for most of her marriage and devises a cunning trick to make sure her husband is really who he says he is. Also she must have been a looker because Odysseus preferred her over her cousin Helen, who was objectively the most beautiful woman in the world. Natalie finds ne...
Jun 07, 2020•27 min
Natalie Haynes tells stories of Eurydice, whose rescue from the Underworld was bungled by her lover Orpheus. How has her story been uncovered from sources that no longer exist? Eurydice is chased by a sex-pest at her wedding, trips on a snake and is killed by its venom. Orpheus charms Persephone with his music into allowing him to attempt a rescue from Hades, but on the journey back he must promise not to look behind him, to check Eurydice is following. Just as they are about to step into the li...
May 31, 2020•27 min
Natalie Haynes tells of Penthesilea, Amazon warrior queen, in charge of ‘a bunch of golden-shielded, silver-axed, man-loving, boy-killing women,’ with a natty line in ankle boots, and even trousers, a scandalous item of clothing at the time. These fighting women were respected as exceptional warriors and Penthesilea was given a hero's burial when she died in battle. Unusually for women in antiquity, many Amazon's names are recorded (on vases) and they are excellent: 'She Who Lets the Dogs Out'; ...
May 24, 2020•28 min
Natalie Haynes tells stories of the most beautiful woman in the world, who hatched from an egg and was the daughter of Zeus: Helen of Troy. Men fought over her from an early age, but was she really to blame for all those wars on epic scale? Helen's face may have launched a thousand ships but it didn't make her happy: being kidnapped repeatedly does not make for contented relationships. How have her life and beauty been exploited by writers and artists across the centuries, to justify their own w...
May 17, 2020•28 min
Natalie tells the story of Suetonius, biographer of the Caesars and friend of Pliny the Younger. She's joined by guests Professor Llewelyn Morgan and biographer and journalist Anita Anand. Classical knowledge is fragile: so much is lost. We don't know, for example, when Julius Caesar was born. What we do know about the Caesars is largely because of Suetonius. And some of it is quite strange. Who knew that experts in Latin grammar were once the coolest of the cool? That Domitian wrote a treatise ...
Feb 28, 2020•29 min
Natalie Haynes stands up for Homer's Iliad, in an extraordinary tour-de-force performance recorded in the BBC's Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House. The original epic story would most probably have been performed from memory, and Natalie does the same: her only prompt is the voice of Dr Adam Rutherford to number the twenty-four books. It's a vivid, cinematic tapestry of extraordinary stories: of gods, Greeks and Trojans, men and women, mothers and fathers and lovers. There's fighting and tricker...
Feb 24, 2020•27 min
Natalie Haynes tells the stories of the handful of Roman-British women whose traces stay with us: a fierce queen, a slave woman freed for love, the so-called 'Ivory Bangle Lady' and Claudia Severa, whose invitation to her friend to her birthday party some two thousand years ago is one of the greatest historical treasures of Roman Britain. Wooden tablets, ivory (and jet) bangles and a romantic gravestone inscription from South Shields. Natalie is joined by guests Professor Llewelyn Morgan and arc...
Feb 24, 2020•28 min
Natalie Haynes stands up for Greek philosopher-scientist Aristotle, with Dr Adam Rutherford and Professor Edith Hall. This week Natalie explores why it's so easy to fall in love with Aristotle, have fun with his Nicomachean ethics and how we know he had 20:20 vision. It seems he hated being tutor to Alexander the Great, although he did manage to stay alive in the lethal court of Philip of Macedon, where the usual toll of suspicious deaths was fourteen a week. But how much did he really know abou...
Feb 24, 2020•27 min
Join Natalie Haynes and guests for half an hour of comedy and the Classics from the BBC Radio Theatre in London. Natalie is a recovering comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greece and Rome. Each week she takes a different figure from the Ancient World and tells their story through a mix of stand-up comedy and conversation. Today she stands up in the name of Roman historian Livy, who gave us Hannibal crossing the Alps and the inspiration for Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Meticulously...
Feb 18, 2020•28 min
Join Natalie Haynes and guests for half an hour of comedy and the Classics from the BBC Radio Theatre in London. Natalie is a recovering comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greece and Rome. Each week she takes a different figure from the Ancient World and tells their story through a mix of stand-up comedy and conversation. Today she stands up in the name of playwright Euripides. Feminist, anti-war, ironic, full of subtext: his work displays strikingly modern sensibilities and hi...
Feb 18, 2020•27 min
