The Ancients - How Greece Shaped Rome

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Professor Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins join Tristan in this episode all about Greece and Rome - the two greatest civilisations of classical antiquity.How did the Romans borrow, adapt, and sometimes rival Greek culture? What did they admire and what did they reject? From temples and theatre to politics and philosophy, join us as two of the UK’s most celebrated classicists explore the cultural dialogue at the heart of the ancient Mediterranean.MORERoman Emperors with Mary BeardHow to Survive in Ancient RomePresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.LIVE SHOW: Buy tickets for The Ancients at the London Podcast Festival here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey guys, Tristan here, and I have an exciting announcement. The Ancients will be returning to the London Podcast Festival. Now, last year tickets, they sold out at record speed. So this time, we've been upgraded. We've got a bigger room. And you, you can be there too on Friday the 5th of September at 7pm at King's Place. Now, I've invited Friend of the podcast, the fabulous Dr. Eve MacDonald, to join me on stage, where we will be exploring the gripping story.

of ancient Carthage. Carthage, the Phoenician city that became a superpower, an empire that rivaled Rome for control in the Western Mediterranean, and ultimately had a terrible traumatic demise. Of course, the ancients is nothing without you, so we want you to be there in the audience taking part and asking us your burning questions. Tickets for the festival are always so fast.

So book yourself a seat now at www. dot UK forward slash what's on. We'll click the link in the show notes of this episode. The team and I cannot wait to see you there. Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. I'm all right here as September begins, the end of summer holidays, back to school, back to work. And we have here for you today we've got a pretty big subject, if I might say so myself. It's all about Greece and Rome, the interactions between these two classical civilizations. with none other the Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins. It was a joy to listen to both of them talk about this massive topic.

Yes, we can't cover everything about Greece and Roman one interview. However, the quality of these guests of both of them, well, it's clear to see. They're here to promote their new podcast together, Instant Classics. We absolutely couldn't turn down the opportunity to interview them both on this subject, and I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go. Greece and Rome, the two classical civilizations that often dominate thinking about the ancient world here in the West. To this day, we can see influences from their art, their architecture, their mythology, language, and so on.

The stories from ancient Greece and Rome remain as popular and varied as ever. But how did the Greeks and Romans, how did they interact with each other? What did they think about each other and their cultures? This is an introduction to the interconnected world of Greece and Rome in the ancient Mediterranean with Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins. Mary, Charlotte, it is such a great. pleasure to have you both on the podcast today. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much. Is it fair to say when the Romans were looking at the Greeks, it's quite a complex relationship.

I mean, their admiration of the culture, but not so much the people in many cases. Well, I'm glad you said that, Tristan, because I think that we often imagine that it's quite simple, that, you know, the Romans were totally dependent on Greece for culture, but thought that they were smelly, perfumed, homerotic bastards. And that is really, that's a simple dichotomy, which they managed to hold in their heads at the same time. And that's not entirely wrong. If people have got that impression, I think it's not wrong.

It's just that, you know, these two cultures are just so intertwined with one another from the very beginning. I mean, you know, we always think of Greece is coming before Rome in some sort of nice, simple chronological development. But actually, the notional, mythical foundation of Rome in the 8th century is almost exactly at the same period as the mythical first celebration of the Olympic Games. And there are two cultures going through history hand in hand, jockeying for position in some way.

You can tell that from the myth. Well, I was going to say the mythology. Yes, Charlotte, is it really interesting looking at the Roman attitudes towards Greek? mythology, given how much they love of it and then they almost add on top of it as well. Yeah, and I think if you look at the very origin story of Rome, that in itself is really, really interesting. So in Virgil's Aenea, the great national epic, as you know, of Rome that tells the story of Aeneas, crossing the sea as a refugee from the flaming ruins of Troy, having been defeated by the Greeks at the siege of Troy, eventually making his way to Italy, eventually

making landfall, finding his way to the future site of Rome, which will be founded many generations later by Romulus and Remus, or by Romulus, but there's somebody already there. And the person who's already there on the site of the future Rome is someone from Arcadia in Greece, another refugee called Evander, and Evander actually gives, in a very sort of head-spinning, temporal, dissonance kind of a way gives Aeneas a sort of guide to what will be the future sites of Rome. And it's a kind of wonderful piece of poetic time machine travel because to Virgil's

readers, the places that are being described would have been urban and busy. But from the point of view of Avanda showing Aeneas what's going on, this is a kind of rural and craggy and mountainous and bushy and forested. And then the funny way, of course, now to the modern reader, it's somewhat reverted to that because some of these sites are now kind of grassy and relatively sort of pastoral again, lying in ruins once more.

So, yeah, it's like the Romans can't really place their origins as Roman. All the myths of Rome's foundation are myths of people coming from the outside, either they're Greeks, in the case of Avanda, or they are characters from Homer, the greatest Greek poet of them all. That really sets the scene for the rest of the negotiations you see between Greek culture and Roman culture, that you can't ever find a time when Roman Greece weren't intertwined. So we're going to explore various aspects of Greek culture and the influence on Rome that we have, but also, of course, Roman attitudes towards Greeks themselves and some really exciting,

examples to explore. With ancient Greece and ancient Rome, they are labelled the two classical civilizations. But why? Why do we define them as the classical civilizations? How long have you got, Tristan? And I think, you know, that's something which is very much up in the air right now, because when people look at how and what we study from the ancient world, they do say, Well, why do you read Homer and not the epic of Gilgamesh? Why do you bound off ancient Greece and ancient Rome, as if ancient Greece and ancient Rome was the peninsula of Italy and mainland Greece? You know, it isn't and never has been, you know.

And I think that the boundaries are bound to be fuzzy. One thing that classics as conventionally defined, the literature of Greece and Rome, One thing that that's got going for it is the sense that it's kind of, some of it has, but most of it has never been lost, and an awful lot of European culture has debated with those particular texts. I mean, you might say, I couldn't prove this, but I think it to be true, that there hasn't been a day since Virgil put his pen down and died in, what is it, 19 BC, when someone somewhere has not been reading. the Aeneid. Now that gives you a claim. I think what one's got to be clear about them is, well, first, the writers that we're talking about, Greek and Roman writers, being so central to later cultures, they're not just coming from Italy. You know, they're coming from North Africa,

they're coming from Spain, they're coming from Syria. This world is already a mixed cultural world. And I think one's always got to be very careful here, not to make it think that Greece and Rome or Greek and Latin were the only shows in town or are the only shows in town. And there is a real danger of thinking of European culture as a direct descendant of Greek and Roman culture. Well, in part it is, but that's not all there is to it. And I think people have rightly been questioning a bit of that. Though, you know, I still think there's the idea that people have been reading the Aeneid for 2,000 years continuously, you know, makes it, gives it something special to me.

Do you think it also, when exploring kind of Greek influences on Rome, maybe is that too streamlines? Because does that give inalmost to this idea that there weren't other cultures there at the same time, like the Phoenician culture and the Etruscans and so on? so forth. They're all influencing each other in the world at that time. We just focus on the Greek and Roman influences. Yeah, I'd absolutely agree. There's much more of a melange than you would first want to think. And also, the Greek-speaking world was so much bigger, right, than the little bit of the Balkans sticking out. Greek-speaking culture was in Syria.

Greek-speaking culture was in Egypt. And it's not as if Greece stops and Rome takes over. you know, when Greece becomes absorbed into the Roman imperial world, Greek literature doesn't stop in its tracks, you know, the vast wealth of Greek thought and Greek literature that's being produced under the Roman Empire. And, you know, looking east, I think, is really profitable at that point, you know, that a lot of that is happening well east of Greece and Rome. And, you know, that kind of shifting focus, I think,

also helps us try and just avoid the rather limiting, idea that, yeah, these two geographical places, Italy and Greece, were where it was at. That's not how it was. And we are to a large extension. I've just fallen victim to that. The literary tradition has tended to dominate. That's to say, you're absolutely right to mention Etruria. And it's absolutely clear.

And, you know, archaeologists and historians have been working for centuries, actually, on what Etruria stood for, what the Etruscan debt to Rome. Rome was and what the Roman debt to Etruria was. The fact is, we don't have Etruscan literature that we can read. No, we've just got very fascinating inscriptions that we haven't got enough vocabulary. I really love what I love about the battle to decipher the Etruscan languages, it can't be done because we can know the grammar, but we can't know the vocab because we don't have enough of it. So there are all these nice funerary epitaphs and things that you can kind of more or less read, but there are just bits of vocabulary that are indecifurable.

But yeah, and the Etruscans with their use of Greek mythology and how that kind of works in the end with the Roman world, all of that is very tantalising and very fascinating. They seem to have favourite myths, don't they? The Etruscans, Mary, you know, they really like, you know, you see the sort of recurring carvings of particular stories on tombstones. And they clearly somehow using these to serve their own. symbolic purposes, but it's quite hard to figure out what they might be. It's a fascinating connection, both to Greece and to Rome. I mean, I think it's in some ways quite important to

resist the caricature that people who are interested in the classics are only interested in mainland Greece, peninsula, Italy. Because actually, as I said before, Latin literature is and Greek literature is produced all around and outside the Mediterranean basin. And I think one of the things is very interesting is that if you look at the kind of the classic Latin authors, very few of them come from Rome itself. And you know, you get huge traditions of literature in Latin from North Africa. Now, we've somehow tended to bundle it together and to call it Roman, which is in part, you know, there's no doubt that in part it sees itself as Roman, it's working within a Roman tradition.

It's coming from the continent of Africa. And because it's so tended, I think, to forget that they're shorthand, and it is a shorthand of saying, oh, Greek and Latin, Greece and Rome, that comes across as if we're not even, interested in Syria. Well, some of the most interesting ancient literature comes in Greek from Syria. And I think we've been our own worst enemies, partly because we have used that as a shorthand, and people have thought, oh, what do classicists study? They study Greece and Rome. Well, yes, but that's from Britain to the Sahara, mate, you know. And I hope you don't mind as a bit of context, how far back can we go with interactions between the Romans and

Greek culture. I'm not asking for a specific date. I know that's not going to be possible, but do we have any rough idea when it begins? Well, I think forever, you know, honestly. I mean, that's what Charlotte's, the story of Avanda saying, that's what they thought. And you look, where does the, where does some of the earliest written records of Greece come from, and what we call Greece? I mean, I, in Greek, it comes from the peninsula of Italy, right? Yeah, and go to the museum on Esquia. Yeah. Isn't that right? Is that what you're thinking of, Mary? Yeah, absolutely. You know, Greeks colonized.

That colonized is a euphemism, really. I don't know what the people who were there before would have said about these Greek colonization. But Sicily and southern Italy are Greek areas. We now think of particularly the peninsula of Italy. Pompeii, we think it was a Roman town. Well, it is in 79 CE when it's destroyed. It's kind of Roman. But its story goes through Oscar, it goes, there's Greek, these are mixed cultural worlds.

Do we not say founded trading emporia for those Greek colonies? They're not like proper colonies, are they? No, sorry, when I say colonies, it kind of, you know, it wreaks British Empire. It isn't like that. But still, having a trading emporium on your back doorstep might not always have been fun. But at the same time, if you go to a place like Pestum today, in southern Italy, and you see those magnificent Greek temples, or the beautiful wall paintings that they've got, doesn't that emphasize the prominence of Greek culture and how the Greeks

were interacting with many other Italian cultures, including the Romans, you know, for centuries before the rise of the Roman Empire, that contact is there. One of the main areas is in southern Italy itself. Yeah. Yeah, and if you go to the museum at Pestam, you get a sense of all the other non-Roman but Italian communities and peoples there were knocking around at that time. You know, Most of which are a complete, you know, well, I remember going to the museum at Pistam for the first time, most of them were a complete surprise to me. And who were these people, the Samartians and the Licanian?

Licanians, yes, yes. Isn't that a branch of psychotherapy? But, yes. I mean, it's kind of fascinating with wonderful frescoes and art and tomb paintings. Yeah. But very sort of Greek-looking and yet, not Greek-looking. But this is all going into the Italian and feature Roman pot. Yeah.

And one of the things you might say is that, leaving aside what I've already said about the sort of general Mediterranean melting port, you could say that one of the effects of Roman success in Italy is it makes it much harder to see the other Italian cultures that were bubbling around as Rome was rising to power. Rome has, in a sense, blotted out, certainly the written languages, the other italic written languages. Etruria is a bit different because Rome had a kind of a wonderfully fantasy relationship with Etruria. I mean, but it certainly had a military power relationship with Etruria. But you can see when you read Roman writers puzzling about where their culture comes from. One of their go-to points is always, oh, comes from Etruria. Where do the gladiators come from? Comes from Etruria, right? And so there's a sense that Rome is projecting, in part, its own origins onto the Etruscans. True or not? Yeah, I love that it's obviously very stylish

to claim Etruscan ancestry like Mycena's Virgil Vecan, which is, chamed to be for Etruscan stock. Cool, really cool, you know. Do we get any sense as to why, over time, if the Romans and Greeks have this relationship in Italy and these other Italian cultures as well, why Rome does ultimately keep expanding and feel a need, finally, to take control of so much of what was the Greek world? Well, if we could answer that question succinctly, you know, we'd have made a mint, right?

Because I think people have been particularly fascinated by why the Roman Empire fell in the end. But the real $64,000 question is why did Rome, which was actually a kind of okay, bogst, standard culture in the middle of a bog in central Italy, why was it that it became, in its terms, so successful? I mean, we might want to put it differently from that, that's seeing it very much from a Roman point of view. And that is really, you know, that is a huge and unsolved question. And I think it's, it is very easy to fall back on the ideas of the Romans being uniquely militaristic? Well, they're pretty militaristic, that's for sure. But one thing we can tell from the archaeology of these other cultures in what becomes Roman Italy, is everybody in the

ancient world is militaristic. There isn't some kind of nice, asterisk, magic potion, calm, peaceful, charming civilization that somehow gets toppled and slashed by Roman violence, it's a question not so much of why Rome expands, but why Rome wins? Because we're in a world in which

the only way of solving a dispute is by violence. Now, when you're in that kind of world, if you keep on winning, you keep on getting bigger. Now, it's certainly pretty clear that as that goes on, sure, Romans see an economic advantage in that. They can see that they benefit from being the biggest imperial show in town. And it's certainly the case that retrospectively, they begin to justify that with a kind of sense of mission

that you can see reflected in the Aeneid. But how it starts is really one of, I think, the big problems of ancient history. And Mary, I'm fascinated by what you just said because I was thinking about the sort of the rhetoric, the sense of mission, the kind of feeling that this is our, this is our destiny, imperium sine feene, you know, empire without end. And I'm interested that you're sort of implying that that ideology is bolted onto the fact of having already effectively done it. I was thinking maybe it ought to have come first in some way, or is that just one of those, again, you cannot. You can't sort of det untangle those two things. You can't untangle it. I think, I mean, I can't prove that what I've said is correct,

that essentially you get the sense of destiny follows the fact, partly because we don't have any literature from Rome before 300 or so. And it is entirely possible. I think it's implausible, but it's entirely possible. But somehow at a certain point, the Romans set out to say, right, okay, guys, it's world conquest for us, right? That isn't likely, but I think that once they have been, in a complicated way, drawn into these conflicts that they're determined to win and they do,

that they then, they retrospectively see a world-dominating mission, which drives them on. And I don't think it's nice, but I think that you see, and I mean, you can, see in the aneared, all the complexities of that. There we have some of the biggest, most straightforward claims to Roman power, you know, imperium sinate, empire, whatever, or command or control without end. And yet it's also an epic poem which repeatedly challenges the very nature of Roman imperialism. So in the end, well, you know, the final scenes of the Aeneid, we see the great hero Aeneas basically committing a war crime in pursuit of Roman victory.

So I think it's always on the balance. There they are saying the whole thing's gone downhill in 146 BC because we've just conquered the Mediterranean. Now, we think the Roman Empire becomes worried and fragile, you know, centuries after that, you know, the idea of Romans worrying about the very nature of what empire is, something that we don't like to think, because we do like the Romans to be cardboard cutout villains. And they do some pretty cardboard cutout villainous things. You know, that's absolutely, you know, Julius Caesar is a genocidal maniac, right? But the structure of this is much more complicated. Yeah, I think. There's other moralistic aspects of Greece and Rome into time that I think you're edging

towards there, Mary, were Rome was incredibly anxious about its own moral decline. And this moral decline was so closely linked to the idea that it had acquired a huge amount of wealth and a large amount of that wealth. And Tristan, I think you were probably about to make this exact same point. So forgive me for having it. I'm very happy for you to say it, Charlotte. Absolutely. This is great.

It's to do with emptying out the great. wealth of Greece and acquiring wagon loads of art. And what, you know, the Romans are, they've become incredibly anxious about what that means for their supposedly rugged, militaristic, farmer-like, you know, humble psyche. Now they've become sort of billionaires. And just so people know, so one four, six, that's when they brutally sack Corinth, isn't it? Corinth, like Carthage. Same year.

Same year. they're so brilliantly timed, you know, the same year. And it's when Polybius, the historian of the rise of, the Greek historian of the rise of Rome, is there at the sack of Carthid. And he sees, Skipio Amelianus, the conqueror, the extremely brutal conqueror, crying. And we have a slightly fragmentary, but we have that eyewitness account. And Polybius rather dimly says to Skipio, why are you crying? You know, you just won.

It's been the most ghastly victory, really brutal. You know, and Scipio basically says it's going to happen to us one day. Now, actually, I think there's something slightly nap about Scipio's tears, right? I think, you know, this is... Eye roll. Sorry. Yeah, you know, there is an eye roll moment there. I'm sure people are getting the impression listening to this, that I'm trying to defend the Romans.

I'm not trying to defend the Romans. I say, I think the genesis. maniacs, some of them. And I think that, you know, an awful lot of people, you know, let's try with Alexander the Great for another genocidal maniac, if we will. There's lots of them about in the ancient world. I think what I'm objecting to is the idea that Romans aren't making this a problem. They aren't thinking about it. Because we have, and I think this is where I thought Charlotte was leading. We have also grown up from, you know, what I, certainly I would, I learned at school. was, you know, somehow the Greeks were goodies and they were nice, and they did things like philosophy and the theatre. And the Romans were bullies, didn't think and built bridges and conquered people. Well, you know, that kind of binary division between Greece and Rome is something which really gets in the way of our understanding either the Greeks or the Romans. Look at what the Athenian Empire did, guys. You know, if you want massacres, you have a few there.

I was guessing towards more was that we think of that another received opinion about the Romans is that they were decadent, right, and that they were too rich for their own good. But that was a Roman idea about themselves. And that owning a lot of stuff and being very wealthy, affecting the course of history and affecting the kind of moral fibre of the people, kind of relates to this period of immense conquest of East and the kind of acquisition. of all things Greek. So I do think that's a really interesting intervention

in the Romans thinking about themselves. It's very tied up with their relationship with the wealthy East, the kind of great art of Greece, the corrupting, the horrifically corrupting nature of these people that they have, these blameless people who they've conquered. Yeah, well, semi-blameless. Do we know much about how the Greeks viewed the Romans?

Did they just see them as barbarians who ultimately, you know, came from the West and took over, as you say, Imperium Senephine at the end. But it's like, do you get that sense that the Greeks, from their perspective, see the Romans as these outsiders coming in and being inferior to themselves? Some certainly do. And if you look at Porsenias's guide to Greece, it's a complicated work, but you could compare it to a modern tourist guidebook. He goes around from place to place, describing what you see in the history of these terms.

He's writing the second century C.E. One of the things is really striking about it is that he doesn't mention Roman things. Interesting. He kind of gives you, I mean, there are a few exceptions, but basically he is giving you this extraordinary view of Greece as if the Romans weren't there. And that I think is, you know,

there's a very strong ideology of kind of whiting out the Romans in that respect. But I think that for all the, you know, the number of people who are like Posenius, Greece and under Roman role is full of Roman collaborators. But, and people say things like, or I hear them say. Go to Greek sides. The Romans like gladiators, but the Greeks would have nothing. to do with gladiators. You don't find amphitheaters where you could have gladiatorial spectacle in the Greek East because the Greeks were still kind of committed to culture, not to bloodthirstiness.

No, what you find is that they convert their theatres so you can have gladiatorial displays in them and you can still see the places in quite a lot of traditional Greek theatres where they put up railings to help the crowd be safe from the wild beasts that they're now displaying in the theatre. So, you know, it's like every conquering colonial power. There are some rebels, there are some resistors, there are some people who don't mind, and there are some people who are very happy to go along with this, and they become senators and consuls in Rome, their friends of Roman emperors. And Roman emperors are coming from this part. art of the world. So it's not a kind of Greeks versus Romans culture, I don't think, even though

it's convenient for us to sometimes think of it like that. If you don't mind, I'm going to ask about mythology now. Having been to a place like Pompeii so many times and the beautiful paintings that adorned so many walls of the villas and so on, Charlotte, do we know much about that Roman obsession and why they were so fascinated and how they incorporated it into their lives. Well, the most wonderful and famous and rightly celebrated compendium of Greek myth was Bia Roman, as Obed's Metamorphosis, which is one of the great epic poems of antiquity, absolutely extraordinary poem. Yeah, I mean, it's a wholesale, I'm no expert in this, I have to say, I haven't really thought about the way, you know, the different function that myths imported

from Greece play for Rome. Mary, you'll back me up or tell me, I'm wrong, but there certainly is a different function, right? I mean, if you're talking about origin myths of Thebes, in Thebes, you know, the story of, I don't know, Casmas or something, you know, you're in a sort of mythological world where place is as important as character and, you know, the whole kind of intertwining of Greek civic life with their stories about where their individual founders came from, the stories that relate to very, very specific places

and very, very specific rituals and religious rites. If you think about, I don't know, the myth of Demisa as it relates to elusis or whatever, in the hands of Ovid, actually that, to me, it's performing a much more literary function, which isn't to say that it doesn't have some kind of religious impact, and I am going to hand over here before I get myself into deep water to one of the great experts in Roman religion who luckily we have with us, Mary.

What you see in Roman and in the use of what we call Greek myth in Rome is a kind of cosmopolitanism. I mean, I think Charlotte's absolutely right, that the sense of the locality of stories in the classical Greek world is very strong. This is the Phoebeon story. This is the Athenian story. Oh, you find a bit of that in Rome.

Of course you do. You know, Romulus and Remus are a Roman story. But I think that, I mean, you can see the kind of Ovidian term in using in Latin Greek mythology in two ways. You can say, on the one hand, and I think this is what I was taught when I was an undergraduate, Rome was just very impoverished when it came to its own myth. So what they had to do was they had to borrow the Greek ones. Or you can say, look, what Rome is doing is seeing what it is to use a mythical language outside place as a cosmopolitan language with which and in which we can talk to each other.

Now, I think there's a huge amount of doubt about how far you have underlying this in Italy. You have similar stories that then kind of get attached onto their Greek equivalents. But I think we're living here in a world in which it would make no sense to most Romans to say, we shouldn't talk about that, that's Greek. We're living in a world in which this is part of a kind of common currency. Now, they can also, because I think this is, you know, they've got some fast footwork. here. They can talk about the communality in a way of a Greco-Roman imperial mixed culture. They can also do what you referred to a bit ago, Tristan, by saying, well, look, we're rugged Romans, right?

We're told, we don't have any of that nambi-pambi stuff. We are kind of rugged and we have battlefield songs and whatever. Now, to some extent, I can't prove this either. But it's It seems to me that the myth of the rugged Roman is actually a consequence of their further integration with the Greek world. How do you say, people are asking, how do you say, are we different? And so you get people like Cato the Elder in the third century saying, yes, because, you know, we don't, you know, and then you can, you know, we don't have luxury, we are very simple and plain and rugged and, you know, and we don't shave under our arms or whatever.

you know, all the kind of awful things that Greeks are supposed to do. So all this cultural embeddedness goes together with, it's part of the same process. That symbiosis is part of the same process of being able to say, no, but we're different. And I'm sure that's going on in the Greek world too. You mentioned earlier Virgil's Aeneid, that epic tale. Is the creation of that almost in competition to the epics of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad? And once again, yes, the Roman alignment with Greek you can see there, but also to show that they are different and they've got something even more extraordinary, if I might say.

In competition with, in homage to topping off, surpassing, talking to loving, hate it, all of those things. I mean, the first line of Virgil's Aeneid is very telling. Armour, Wyrumque Cano, I sing of arms and a man, which if you know your Iliad and Odyssey, as Virgil's audience almost certainly would have done, that is like a mashup of the first line of the Iliad and the first line of the Odyssey. So the first, the Iliad begins men in Aeida Thea sing to me of rage goddess. And then the odyssey starts, Andromoi Anapamusa, sing to me about a man. So the Virgil's kind of doing, I'm going to tell you,

or my muse, you're going to tell me about a man and a load of battles. It's not one or the other, it's both. We're going to do the Iliad and the Odyssey in one poem, which it then, of course, proceeds to do in a curious way because Aeneas drifts over the sea, has encounters with sexy women, who he's behaved very badly towards much worse than Odysseus, I would say, leading to, you know, poor Diado taking her own life. And then lands up in Italy, where he fights a rather brutal war against the people who were already there, not Evander, but the Ritulian. So it's an Iliad and Odyssey combination and it says so much that I suppose on the one hand that your origin epic has to relate to Homer because Homer's there like Mount Everest and it has to be spoken to. But on the other hand, that you have the sheer audacity, guts and confidence to go, well, we're going to do the Roman version of this, and it's going to be both poems in one, and it's going to be a national epic in the way, of course, that the Iliad and the Odyssey just aren't pursuing any kind of national ideology.

But the aeneid absolutely is. It's the most extraordinary statement of Romanness. but the reason it's good and not a kind of dreadful piece of national propaganda is that it's also simultaneously undercutting itself at various points, you know, making it, you know, on the surface level, a great statement of Roman imperial expansion, but sort of denying itself that status all the time as well. I mean, it's the most brilliant poem. So yes, well done, Virgil. You did manage to stand alongside the Iliad and the audience. In some ways, I think of him as being, well, this is what you said, Charlotte, isn't it? He's both offering a tribute to Hobart. This is impossible without seeing it as a tribute to him. He's also saying, oh, yours, Homer.

Look, I can do better than this. You know, two poems in one, you know, 12 books. Issyliad and the Odyssey, how about that? No one's done that before. And do you always get, it sounds like kind of Roman one-upping, isn't it, on the ancient Greek versions. And do you see that seeping through in other fields as well?

My mind keeps taking me back to, let's say, ancient drama and maybe the comedies of Aristophanes, which presumably were still in circulation in the time of the Romans, but would there be someone like a Plautus, a Roman, a playwright, or someone who would see those works and then think, right,

we'll do a bit similar, but almost one-up it, show how Roman comedy is a bit different, but in our opinion it's slightly better. And yet you can still see the echoes of an ancient Greek equivalent in Aristophanes and so on? We're kind of woefully underserved in terms of what survives of centuries

of Roman comic production. But Plotters and Terrence are looking back, sometimes explicitly and sometimes close to translations, of the new comedy, post-Arestophanic comedy in Athens of people like Menander, par excellence menander. But one of the things that I find so extraordinary about them is the way that what they are doing, it is a bit like Virgil, it is a bit like postmodernism, they're a post-culture.

They're using very directly some of the earlier Athenian models. But they're kind of seeing it through a Roman language. And, you know, one of the particular ways you can see in the comedies of Plotus and Terrence is the way they're looking at slavery is very interesting. Now, Athens was a slave society as much as, in a sense, in the same way that Rome was. But Terence, it is very likely that one of our major comedians that survived from the second century in Rome had himself been a slave. And so you're using the kind of basic building blocks of some of this Athenian culture to tell a different story. And there's, you know, one of the most famous plays is daughter's is Amfitrio, where what he's doing is he's thinking about how to turn the absolutely classic ceremony of the Roman militaristic triumphal procession into a comedy. So there are kind of complicated and wry comments on their own culture, as well as being looking back.

I think if you look at Latin lyric poetry as well, there's such an interesting relationship between people like Horace and Ovid in their lyric mode with Greek precursors, let's say, Sappho, in whose metre, the sapphic meter, they were terribly fond of writing. And in that sort of wonderful sort of family of Roman lyric love poetry that one might think of, you know, Catullus, Propercius, Horace, Ovid, when Ovid gets to writing love lyric, he sort of sets himself up as almost an anti, but love, as exemplified by this inheritance of Greek lyric, love poetry, is almost kind of ideological. opposed to the militaristic virtues that are so, so characteristically Roman. So he talks about, I can't remember the quote, because it is probably about 30 years since I've never some detail, but militant omnisimans. Thank you. Every love is a soldier in the warfare of love. Turning all those Roman virtues on their head and situating them, perhaps,

in this sort of much more Greekish tradition. I'm sure people will be clamouring talking about, well, what about their temple architecture? What about their statues? Is there a clear kind of post-146 bringing it over and then the Romans deciding, oh, this is really nice, but I'm going to make my own Roman sculptors and Roman architects will make their own additions, tweaks, improvements to it over time? Do you get that sense again? Well, Roman temple architecture goes back in a form that is very similar to what you see later, long before they have. had conquered or come into very close touch with the Greek world. You look at the early capitaline temple in Rome going back to the era of the Roman kings

before even the Roman Republic. And you see something which is a bit different from Greece, but essentially that sense of temple architecture is already part of the Roman repertoire. Yes, it changes. And it changes in all kinds of ways. It changes in terms of material. I mean, one of the things that where the Greek world kickstarts a big change in Rome is in the use of marble. I mean, if we went back to Rome in 100 BC, you know, it's all in local stone.

And it might have been brightly painted, but it is not. There's no, even underneath the paint, there's no gleaming marble. Now, Roman moralists like the elder Pliny, the one who foolishly died in the eruption of Suvius, he sees this immoralistic terms, you know, the use of marble columns. But it's, in some ways, that material changes Rome's architectural style. And they start by using Greek marble. But by the reign of Augustus, the end of the first century BC, they're massively exploiting marble quarries at Carrara in the peninsula of Italy. So, you know, if you say, no, I don't think you can say Romans only used marble because they borrowed it from Greece. But it is part of their

conversation with the Greek world, or it's certainly something that changes what Rome looks like. And certain bits of Roman, certain bits of Greek civic planning, in a sense, give the city of Rome the kind of conventional image we have of it. And whether they get that from the mainland of Greece or whether they get it from further down the Italian peninsula is quite another matter. I think similarly, it is a bit like you think about sculpture. Most of our quote Greek sculpture is discovered in what we call Roman coppice. It's like an awful lot of Athenian pottery. Real Athenian pottery was discovered in Etruscan tunes. Right? So another example of that backwards and forwards. But I think that it's a bit the same as what we were talking about

with Ovid and myth. That one thing that Rome does is cosmopolitanise the Greek artistic heritage. Now, they do that, you know, a bit like Homer, a bit like Virgil and Homer by kind of saying, but by genuflecting to the great wonders of Greek will, by stealing quite a lot of it, buying up of the bits. It's not, you know, this isn't a number. process. But what they're doing is they change it into a new international cosmopolitan artistic vocabulary for good or it, for good or ill. You know, so you can go and find loads of statues that all look much the same. Well, I quite like that. It absolutely is. We haven't got too much time, but I have a couple more big questions to ask you, as I've got you both here, and once our audience

have been clamouring for, one of them is sorting fact from fiction when it comes to Greek gods and goddesses versus Roman gods and goddesses, which comes up again and again. You're sighing at that, Mary, I know, but is it much more than a simple case of the Romans just borrowing the Greek gods? Yes, it is more than that. Why I sighed is because you have to kind of, there's a lot of layers to unpick, and part of the problem with that view that the Romans just borrowed the Greek gods is that we think the Greek gods are like we think the Greek gods are, and that the Romans got them, and there was Athena, their goddess of wisdom, and there was Zeus, the king of the gods, and there was Aphrodite, the goddess of love. And as Charlotte kind of was

gesturing to before, I think, you know, the idea that every temple in the Greek, world that was dedicated to Aphrodite, had a different Aphrodite, you know, that the gods and goddesses of the Greek world were essentially local, right? You know, so it's Athena Pathanus or whatever. They have specific identities and they're a complex system of power relations and representation which we've completely sort of undercut by saying, oh, what's Athena the goddess of? wisdom, right? Well, also handicraft and sailing and being clever and, you know, all those kind of other things. Now, sorry to heart on the same theme, but I think in some ways what Rome does is actually give them a more transferable image, but it's not that Romans didn't have gods and

goddesses before, you know, and one of the things they invested a lot of effort in was saying, well, we've got this God, how does that work in relation to what the Greeks have? And that's part of the terribly complicated system of Roman polytheism, where you can have more gods and more goddesses and you can marry them up and you can put them together in what becomes a huge intellectual challenge, but is fantastically interesting. That's why people like Barrow in the first century sit down and try and sort it out and they can't. Because the Romans are just, it's too complicated.

And lastly, I must also ask about the prominence of ancient Greek in the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic, thinking of all the works are survived and prominent Romans sometimes sending off their kids to places like roads and other places in the Greek world to learn philosophy and so on. Do we know why and just how important learning Greek becomes for the Romans, or at least for the Roman elite, I guess? elite Romans live in a bilingual culture. You get a few kind of mad boys who'll say, well, I'm not good to learn Greek because it goes along with all that sort of, that feeble, perfumed, depilated kind of culture that we have over there. So you can get a few kind of extremist outliers. But the culture of the elite in the Roman world from the second century at least is essentially.

bilingual. The culture of the Greek world is less bilingual, actually, that by and large, the Eastern Mediterranean remains a pretty, not entirely, because I think the same would go for the elite, if not quite to the same extent. But the Greek world essentially goes on speaking Greek. And people imagine that when the Romans come along, the Greeks have to give up speaking Greek and have to start speaking Latin. Well, that might be the case for some of the Western provinces where, as in Britain, for example, the elite in Britain might see that learning Latin, Tacitus, the historian of the early empire and the biographer of the Agricula, the governor of Roman Britain, is very clear about how the elite latch onto Latin.

Dinner parties. And dinner parties. You know, you go to the great world now and you look at a Greek site. There are a few Latin documents. But mostly, look at the inscriptions all around you. They're all written in Greek. So it really differs from place to place. But Cicero and Co are reading Greek.

Now, they also see that there's a reason for translating things into Latin, quite whoever the audience might be. They don't think that everybody is going to read Plato in Greek. And you get the Odyssey translated into Latin. So it's not as if everybody sitting in Rome was jabbering away in Greek when they fancied it. Most, I mean, the elite writers that we know. But again, it's much more of a cultural mix, I think.

And I think there are people in the Greek world who do say, look, the Romans are a load of bullies and conquering bastards. And, you know, there is a perspective in which that absolutely true. Bullies, bastards and building bridges. But as you say, that's one version of the story. Mary, Charlotte, this has been such a wonderful and wide-ranging chat on the story with the Greeks and the Romans and their interactions together. You are both here, of course, to promote your brand new podcast, Instant Classics. Tell us a bit about this. And it's

breathtaking appearance on the podcast world, the podcast stage. We are me and minnows compared with you guys, you know, new boys on the block, new girls on the block. Mary. We're supposed to be fighting the patriarchy. Sorry, I forgot. New girls on the block. We're really excited about having all of fun with it. And we're going to be picking a fresh topic every week.

We'll be looking at Greece and Rome. It will be history, but not only history, because we want to kind of encompass the idea that these are big cultures with literature and architecture and philosophy and, you know, many, many aspects. And at moments, although, I mean, not invariably, but there will be moments when we will want to try and connect the modern world with the ancient world in ways that we hope are sophisticated

rather than just sort of too crude. But part of the point is that obviously Mary is one of the, well, you know, perhaps the world's most renowned classicist. And I studied classics at university, but I'm a journalist. I write about culture for The Guardian. and so I've got most of my head in the contemporary world with a strong interesting in classics that I've pursued through writing books and so on

and Mary's sort of the other way around and that we will connect in the middle that we will talk about really interesting things in the classics but with an eye to what's happening now and we're also doing an amazing book club which is reading the Odyssey together which we really hope people will join us in Tristan you have to join us Tristan

Well, I hear there's a good new film coming out. It's a big film next year, all about it. Yes, Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. That is not escaped or notice. But our book club's going to be even bigger. Fantastic. And Charlotte, let's not also forget that you've written some fantastic books on Greek mythology in ancient Greece

as well as being a over-journalist. And she knows more about ancient weaving than anybody I know. Can't be true. Well, there's a wonderful way to finish our chat today. I'm really grateful for you both taking the time out of your busy schedules to do this. It just goes to me to say, Mary, Charlotte, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Oh, thank you, Tristan. It's been a joy. Thank you.

Well, there you go. There was Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins giving you an introduction to the interconnected world of Greece and Rome. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, of course, Mary and Charlotte, they are promoting their new podcast Instant Classic. and I think this episode gives you a great idea of just how well these two work together. No wonder they are co-hosts. So yes, go and check out Instant Classics too. Thank you for listening to this episode.

Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all from me.

I'll see you in the next episode.