Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Each Sunday, we're sharing one of our favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This. The show features conversations with some of the smartest and most well respected writers from Australia and around the world. Today, we're going to hear from acclaimed classicist and ancient Rome expert Mary Beard. Michael Williams is the host of Read This, and he's with me now. Hello again, Michael, Ruby Jones.
Hello, Hello, So.
Your guest this week is a bit of a departure for Read This because Mary Beard. She's a writer, but she's actually more well known for being the pre eminent scholar of ancient Rome. So tell me a bit about her career.
There is a reasonable chance, Ruby that Mary Beard might be, in some circles, the most famous person we've ever had on Read This. You know that meme that did the rounds a few years ago, asking particularly heterosexual men how often each day they thought about ancient Rome, and the answer was like staggering. It was like heaps and those men and the people who love those men have heard the name Mary Beard. She's the expert when it comes
to ancient Rome. She's written more than twenty books. She wrote a book in twenty fifteen called SPQR and that's probably the one that broke her through to commercial stardom, which has written Emperor of Rome, another book called Twelve Caesars, and in the UK she's a rock star. She's like parlayed this expertise into TV stardom. She's hosted shows on the BBC like Pompei, Life and Death in a Roman Town and Julius Caesar Revealed, which sounds sexy, but it is still more ancient Rome content.
And even though you do discuss her latest book this episode, it does explore through a discussion about Mary's life sentence, how her obsession with ancient Rome began.
Yeah, that's right. Life sentence is a format that we use occasionally in read This, where we ask writers to reflect on an influential It could be a piece of writing, it could be a piece of advice. But that earworm that they have when they're sitting at traffic lights where they can't stop thinking about this one sentence I've heard again and again and Mary Beard's, unsurprisingly is a Latin phrase.
It's a lot of fun and it does reveal for her why she sees a study of the ancient Romans as not being about a celebration of empire, but is something altogether more complicated. And it's really It makes for a great conversation.
Coming up in just a moment. Friends, Mary Beard fans countrymen, lend me your ears.
My partner's father, Warren, is a brilliant man, but he has the daunting habit of grilling guests and family alike with arcane points of trivia and pop quizzes. And Mary Beard is up there in his personal reading pantheon. Your knowledge of the Roman Empire gets a decent work Adam
Warren's company. And while I've been reading and loving Mary Beard for years, and I've been trying to keep my sandal and Toga knowledge fresh, I have to confess that the bulk of my reading on Rome comes from Asterix comics. I don't always know my Plenty the Elder from my Plenty the Younger. Luckily, Mary Beard is in the business
of making the ancient feel accessible without dumbing it down. Mary, do you meet people who automatically approach you with an intellectual inferiority complex, who are intimidated by your level of scholarship, your level of knowledge and reading the classics are imposing, aren't they?
They are?
And I used to notice that more when when I was younger.
The old kind of thing.
You get on a train and it's a long journey, and someone would say what do you do and you'd say I'm a classicist. It didn't start a good conversation. Usually. Well, I soon got to realize you said I'm an archaeologist, and if you said that, things open up. And now, actually, I think, you know, I've been quite lucky because because I've been on the telly, and because what I do on the telly doesn't look posh, it doesn't look kind of as if this is all I'm talking about things
that you don't know about, you know. I know I found my train journeys are much better, you know, And I can say, oh, yeah, you're Mary Beardy does the Romans, and I can say, yeah, I'm a classicist, and people think it's kind of cute rather than off putting.
One of the things I love in Twelve Casons is you make the case that the interchangeability of emperors is a feature, not a glitch, that we're the ways in which they blend into one in our minds is a very deliberate function of their period. Can you explain that for it?
Yeah, if you go to a museum where there's a lot of Roman sculpture, let's say, you see how slightly anxious people are because they can't I can't be certain that they can tell one emperor from another. And I used to be deeply afflicted by that. I used to think, I am just hopeless. You know, there are all these busts here and I can't tell Tiberius. And it wasn't really an until well, I've been teaching for a long time that I realized that's the point.
You know.
The point about the Roman emperor, you know, when he's recreated in marble, is that he looks like the other ones, or occasionally there are ruptures. But the other thing that I really like about them, and I think it would hugely help in our own culture wars and statue wars, is that they were very adept. At one rain comes to an end, they've just got a new statue, just made of Nero, let's say, and they think, oh gosh,
we've got a new dynasty, no Vespasian. They just get their hand on chisel and they turn the features of Nero into the features of Vespasian, and I think if only we'd thought of that.
You know that you don't need.
Necessary to pull statues down. You can leave them up, but you can adjust.
Them, chip away a different chin line, chip.
Away, make it a different give him a different airstart, give him a different label underneath. And they see quite unlike us. I think they see statues as works in progress. You know, you can take the head off if you like, put another one on. You know, you can add something to you know, give him something to hold.
In the hand. And that seems to me to be a whole level of.
Imagination that we just haven't recreated. We're a bit over serious about statues.
I think one of the things that I so love about your work is this internal ambivalence between a deep moration for certain vests of ancient Roman society on the one hand, and on the other deep skepticism. You know, you're at pains to stress. You're not studying this because you love engine.
I mean, people always come up when they say, oh, you must love the Romans, what you know.
I think that you.
Can find people interesting, you know, for decades without liking the bastards. I think what you know, what is so interesting about the Romans is that kind of ambivalence between them being we can barely begin to make sense of in our horror, what would it be like to sit and watch people being put to death in the gladiatorial arena? And people say we shouldn't judge the past, Well maybe we should sometimes and say that that is really awful,
and wonder what enabled them to do it? And yet you can put that together with finding them just so smart about things in a way that surprises you. You know, they can talk about themselves.
In a way that is jaw dropping.
Sometimes we have already touched on the way people perceive the Classics in a particular way, and it can sometimes be seen a synonymous with a glorification of empire.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of things are all mixed up into one. I think in people's assumptions about people who study the ancient world.
And part of that, I.
Think in any Western culture is that Classics was used as a gatekeeper for the elite. You know, how better to define an elite kadra of little boys than teach them a language no one speaks. It is absolutely classic gatekeeping practice and people of color were kept out, women
were kept out. But I think that that then goes together with the idea that that culture legitimated empire ever after, and that what the British Empire was doing was providing a justification for itself by looking back to the stories of the Roman Empire. That all those guys who were busy exploiting the empire, all the stories that they had learned at school, and so there was a neat circle and a join up between class privilege and the exploitation of the empire.
And I think some of that is right.
What it ignores, I think is that when there were debates in the nineteenth century in England, as there were, we forget this and we think of them all as jingoistic imperialists.
No they weren't.
They were busy talking about what the imperial project was, whether it was justifiable. And you look and you see the people involved in both sides are coming from the
ancient world. You can see these guys on the Manchester Guardian, you know, in the eighteen seventies and eighties, and they're actually an anti imperial newspaper straight down the line, and they're kind of trying to recruit from people in red Classics at Oxford and Cambridge, because in some ways, I mean, the point about classics is that it's never quite as easy to pin down as that simple characterization of it would suggest.
To what extent is the study of classics almost entirely about the art of reading and rereading the same fixed points, the same fixed texts, again and again for reinterpretation to better understand, because surely the core material is more or less unchanging.
One of the real pleasures about it for me is not just, let's say, reading Virgil. It's reading a text that I know people have been reading ever after. I mean, Virgils are near it. I could not prove what I'm going to say, but I'm sure it's true, Virgilson, there is a text that has been read by somebody every day since Virgil almost finished it. And okay, they've mostly
been men, and they've been privileged people. But it is a text which actually joins up, literally joins up in the experience of reading us and people in the eighteenth century, in medieval monasteries, and in the ancient world itself. And I find that hugely pleasurable to think that I'm sharing something. It's very hard to share an experience with people in the past, but you can share the experience of reading in a way that you can't share the experience of medicine.
So I found that very challenging and simultaneously challenging and reassuring, I think. But it also I like the idea that those texts, some of them at least, are so hard. And I mean people they do find it, to start with, I think puzzling that they can't read it like they can. You know, you learn French, and after you've done a bit of French, you can pick up a French novel and you can read it pretty much like you can read an English novel.
Yep.
I've never been able to do that with Latin, or certainly not with Greek. And to some extent you think, and this might be right, that I'm just not good enough, But I think that really it is the text that we are constantly returning to are very very hard. If you look at something like Tacitus is Annals, the history of the early emperors, that would have seemed as weird to them as we find reading James Joyce. Reading James Joyce is really hard. We're kind of confronted by language
doing something that we didn't think language ought to do. Right, And that's the same with certainly tests, it's annals. You go back to the Greek fifth century, Thucydides is history of the Peloponnesian War. We still can't translate it because it's anymore than you know, imagine translating Finnigan's Wake into French. I mean something no doubt has tried, but it will be an issue that was right at the very limits
of what language can do. And in part I think both thecidities and these are two historians, of course, but both Thucydides and Tacitus, they're not just kind of using language in a difficult way perversely, anymore than Joyce was being perverse in Finnigan's work. They're using a kind of confrontation with language behaving badly.
Really, She's what it is.
To start to think about, how do you write about a system that is corrupt?
Yeah, and I mean, I know, I know. Tacitus for you is a really important part of your own reading. He was a kind of crucial moment for you as a working glass girl coming up through the classics, to say, wait a minute. They weren't all triumphal ust. They weren't all telling a history of success.
And that's actually where my life sentence comes from.
Oh go and give it to us.
Because it was the kind of light bulb moment when I understood that the Romans weren't quite as imperialistic and jingoistic as i'd thought. You know that I was at school, and I must have been about fourteen, and I was at an academic girls' school, and you know, yeah, I was fourteen, and I was reading testas I was reading Taestus's biography of his father in law, Agricola, one of his easier works.
Actually not what a sloucher were married.
And towards the end of this account of Agricola's life story, there's an account of a battle between Agricola's Roman forces and the forces of the Brits, and as in many Roman or Greek histories, that the battle starts almost entirely fictionally, with the pep up talk to the troops on both sides, and Calcucus is scripted by Tastas, and Tustas had no idea what this guy in North Britain said in eighty three.
Absolutely certainly he had no idea. He's giving him a version of what it is like to be a barbarian enemy under room. And at one point he's saying, look, what do the Romans do? You know, they're robbers, they're thieves. Huge denunciation of empire. And then he says, and they make a desert and they call it peace, it'll be solitudin them vacuunt paken appellant.
And I remember reading this this.
You know, they make a kind of they make destitution, they make a scorched earth, and then they give it the name of peace when they've done it. And it was the first time, although I was sort of good at Latin, it was the first time only bit of Latin had ever spoken to me.
You know.
It actually said there's a point here, and it's not just a point about Colgagus under a curricula, and the barbarians in the end, of course are going to get thrashed. I'm afraid, so what about us? You know, this was the time of the viet no more. And so they make a desert and call it peace. You do it in five words, And you're speaking about now as much
as about eighty three CEE. And I think it was those few words which convinced me that I could go on with these guys because they were so smart about their own faults.
When we return, Miry reveals the true lessons that we can learn from the ancient Roman Empire. We'll be right back. Part of the project of Emperor of Roman seems to me is explicitly to suggest the ways in which we've misunderstood the nature and the role of emperor as a position.
Yeah, I mean, I think that we've thought about them as individual characters, mostly bad, you know, somewhere on the spectrum from psychopath to just a bit dotty, occasionally interspersed with someone trying to do his best. And we have been very one down down the road which the ancient writers, I think encourage us to go down in a way, and thinking that what you need to do is you've
got to get their biographers straight. You've got to see these as individuals with a story, and the only way to understand them.
Is to know the story.
And you've got to know why this one has a different story from that one. I mean, one of the things I wanted to say is, look, most emperors are very similar. Sure they have their different characteristics, but they're much more similar than they are different.
And if we think about them as.
People doing the same job from the same place, with the same staff, the same resources, we then start to see something much more clearly about I think the terror in part of the Roman Empire, but also the mundane working life of these guys. Now, what is interesting is that they spent their time in their filing cabinets going through their introy but they were written about as if they were having sex in the swimming pool and showering people with rose battles.
That's where you get to the problem.
It is one of my favorite things about your approach is that you kind of take us by the hen and you say, if you're asking are these stories true, you're asking the wrong question. These stories have survived, and so the fact that they've survived, the fact that they were the ones that were told is what makes them interesting.
That's exactly right, I think.
You know, I was brought up when I was a student, and then actually my early academic career, I thought the most important thing was to kind of try and work out which of these were true, which of these were flagrantly untrue, and which were a kind of bit exaggerated, and that once I'd done that, I would then have a story of the Roman Empire that I could tell. And it took me decades to realize, first of all, that we can't know. It's not that I can go through and say that's true and that can't be.
We don't know whether it is true.
My hunches that most of them are somewhere on the spectrum between untrue and exaggerated, but I couldn't prove that.
But what I can say is that the important thing about them is they.
Get told and retold by Romans, and actually the same stories about different emperors. You know, they get exactly the same treatment, and that what you're seeing there is not literal truth, but you's seeing truth at a kind of higher level. That what these stories are trying to capture is what imperial power is like.
Share with our listeners that you've mentioned the rose pedants and being showered with rose petals, and it really did jump out of me as an acute example of something that doesn't have the ring of gospel truth about it.
No, it doesn't.
It's a story told about the emperor Elagabalus, about whom most people quite understandably have not heard. He's a teenage emperor from Syria, originally at the beginning of the third century CE, and an awful lot of what we know about the Roman Empire in popular culture comes much earlier than that in I Claudius, you know, whether it's the movie or the novels or whatever. First century Cean, the usual cast of characters. Actually this very interesting stories from
much later, and this is one of them. The whole reign of this kid is treated as if it is an example of about the worst thing that could ever happen to the Roman Empire to be ruled by this kid. What you see is a whole series of anecdotes which
try in different ways to capture his villainy. And the one I think that has got kind of currency and as appealed to writers and artists for since, is he invites people to dinner and at the end of the evening in a traditional Roman way, and Nero had done this before the ceiling opens, and most battles fall out
on top of the guests. You know, that's what an imperial dinner party, That's what it looks like, except in Eligabalus's case, there are so many rose battles that the guests smother and I now it doesn't take much to say us sitting here now saying I wonder if that was true, isn't really getting to the point of this. And what I've tried to do in the book is to say, what is that storytelling us?
What does it hit.
Home when we're thinking about Ella Gabalus or about the emperor in general. And I think it hits home because it's saying, when the emperor is really generous to you, that's when he's his most deadly.
Right.
Imperial cruelty is not just about knives in the back in dark corridors. The Emperor can kill you literally.
By being kind.
Now, at that point you start to begin to get a glimpse of the sort of way that the morality that governs the Imperial Palace, the morality that governs the autocrat and those who surround him, Just how perverted it could be. These guys they try to be kind, but it's deadly.
That does really nicely bring us back to that idea of classical studies. Wagan active rereading an act of looking at it and interrogating, are there stories that endure that you think create a kind of damaging understanding of the Roman Empire, or at the very least are not useful one. You know, ancient Roman seems to me to have lots of bad fans who've learned the wrong lesson from it.
And we I suppose we saw that a few months ago, didn't we?
With the that.
TikTok meme of the woman and then many times replicated the woman asking her bloke how many times you thought about the Roman Empire? And you know you said, oh, about fifteen times a day or something.
Yeah, that is wild, And he thought, he, I don't believe that.
But b he thought, in what way is that big a bad fan? And it did seem to me there and I think this up what you're asking that the Roman.
Empire has become.
Partly because it is sort of officially classical, it's become kind of safe space where you can you can have matro fantasis. You know that what you're doing is you're thinking about a world in which it's okay to imagine invading people in your little skirts with your shield and your spear. And you're going to build roads, and you're going to build bridges and aqueducts, and you're going to be really male. That is part of what the Roman Empire is about.
Got to deny that.
But I thought if somebody said on TikTok, I think about the Third Reich every day, you think this is work, This.
Is not good.
But you can say I think about the Roman Empire and you're allowed.
Now.
Of course, you're only thinking about one bit of the Roman Empire. You know, you're never imagining yourself as poor, you're never imagining yourself as a slave. They imagine themselves as generals and emperors, of course, and so you know, I found it quite cheering because I thought, well, there's work to be done here, because there are people who are kind of interested, but maybe you could show them that it was actually even more interesting if they took
a wider view. But you're right, you know, the Romans have been and Classics in general have been good alibis. You know, go back to the seventeen eighteenth century and you want to have a really launchy painting with the kind of sex shown that you would never be allowed to actually show. You dress them up as nymphs and gods, and you can do anything, you know, So classics has been an alibi for being able to think about things that we perhaps shouldn't be thinking about in quite that way.
It is true in pop culture it's often a shorthand for a kind of idea about the bauchery, or an idea about the kind of respectable face of that.
Yes, and I don't know, And you never quite know whether you're looking at these same painting, these creations of the Roman orgy.
You know, are you looking at it to enjoy it?
Or are you looking at it to say, God, worn't those Romans dreadful? And of course you're doing a bit of both. You know, nobody ever says weren't those Romans dreadful? Without having a slight sort of lurid fascination. I like it.
Mary Beard is onto you for Roman students, she says, right through this, I have to ask you are well and truly on the record as being no great fan of Marcus Aurelius.
This will now get me into trouble, as he always does. But you know I'm already in trouble, so there's no.
Point in trying to escape lean into it.
I have to say I admire him. I admire him for being two thousand years on a best seller. And you know, when I look at the Amazon charts in Roman culture, he almost always outsells me, and you know, fair cop, I'm both impressed and slightly jealous.
I think he's interesting in all kinds of ways, but I can't stand.
Is the best seller, which is the Meditations. You know, his jottings to himself are vaguely based onto philosophy that he put in his little notebook, and somehow we don't know how they got published, copied and circulated. And I can't stand them because they're such dreadful cliches, and yet they have this aura of almost kind of legitimate sexiness because.
They're maram an emperor, you know.
And if he's said that President Clinton used to have a copy of Marcus really is his meditations on his bedside table, Heaven knows what he learned from them. I mean, I'm going to parody slightly, but you know, they say things like, when you get up in the morning, always think what you're going to do that day, have a plan, and you think, really.
You know, So now it is it's the Little Book of Karma at stage just it happens to be written by a Roman emperor.
Yeah, and it shows you that the Roman Empire in different ways, and Roman emperors in particular still have something going for them because it's because it's written by a Roman emperor. You know that people think this is interesting. And there's Clinton, head of the Western world, is it? You might say, once he got by his bed, the self help cliches of a two thousand year old head of.
The Western world.
I think it's all a bit more commercial though. I think that, you know, why does Marcus Aurelia still selling great quantities? Partly because publishers can absolutely marketing without ever having to pay him any royalties.
That's true.
I think it would be a very lovely author for publisher to work with, but you'd still be higher maintenance than Marcus Aurelis.
I think I would. There's nothing better than a dead bestseller of bread.
It's a pretty good thing to embrace. I just wonder whether those countless heterosexual men on TikTok who are thinking about ancient Rome fifteen times a day, I wonder if you offer the therapy to men who otherwise are uncomfortable to go to therapy through the lens of the advice of ancient Rome. I think I think you're on to a winner.
And I think possibly that's the market to which Marcus Aurelius is already playing.
I think that's possibly right. I have no doubt of the therapeutic player of the work that you do, and I'm so grateful to thank you. Mary Beard's many wonderful books can be found at your favorite independ bookstores. Marcus Aurelius probably can too, but focus on Mary beards Fire.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with Michael Wondacci and Charlotte Wood. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday to dive into Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts.