The Rest Is History - 105. Classics

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

The world’s most famous classicist, Professor Mary Beard, joins Tom and Dominic to discuss how the legacy of classical Greece and Rome has been interpreted and re-interpreted over the past millennium and a half. They range from Dante’s Satan snacking on Julius Caesar’s assassins in Hell to recent demands in the United States that Classics itself should be cancelled. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. In the summer of 19 BC, the poet Publius Vergilius Maro, better known as Virgil, was travelling in Greece when he caught a fever. He took ship back to Italy, but died when he reached the port of Brindisi. He was just 50 years old. But that was not the end of Publius Vergilius Maro. More than a thousand years later, on the night before Good Friday 1300, another Italian poet found himself lost in a dark wood. And who should appear to guide him through the underworld but the ghost of Vergil? So begins Dante Alighieri's

The Divine Comedy, one of the absolute foundational texts of European and world literature. And Tom Holland, that's a really good example, isn't it, of the absolute foundational texts of European and world literature. And Tom Holland, that's a really good example, isn't it, of the imprint that the classical world, Greece and Rome, has left on our imagination. Do you think we're all kind of the children of Greece and Rome, really? Well, you know I have views on that. I do. Of course, we look back to Greece and Rome as a kind of a seedbed of ourselves. There are other influences on us as well that perhaps we might come on to.

They're the ones we talk about, aren't they? They're the ones we talk about most. The history of how people have understood Greece and Rome since the kind of the end of the classical age is itself a massive theme of history. So, I mean, you cited Dante. I mean, that's a kind of classic example. Dante is the great classic of Italian literature, and Virgil has this absolutely starring role in it. And I remember something that probably the most famous classicist in the world, Mary Beard, said once, ages ago. it was it was long before she'd kind of

become a global superstar and she gave a lecture and she talked about virgil and she said that it was her opinion that pretty much since the moment virgil had laid down his pen to die there wasn't a day when someone hadn't read the aneid it's amazing um it is and so if we're going to talk about this this kind of this legacy the way that the legacy of greece and rome has kind of evolved and and and spread over the course of the centuries and the millennia who better to have on the show than the imperatrix the basilea herself mary beards and mary thank you so much for agreeing to come on and talk to us about this subject which is a subject that is actually

very much on you has been on your mind recently hasn't it because you've just published um a fantastic new book the 12 caesars which is about it's not actually about the 12 caesars themselves it's a bit about how they've been understood yeah that's right and the book is is saying, look, you know, every time we go to a stately home, you know, what do we see? We see a line-up of 12 Caesars, probably in rather vulgar porphyry or something, with a bit of gilding. And now even people like me tend to walk past, you know,

and think, yeah, 12 Caesars, on we go. And what I've done in the book, and it fits very much with, you know, the whole idea of why the ancient world still matters to us. You know, I started to ask why, what are these tyrants doing on our shelves? You know, why are we still so interested in Caesars? I mean, you're right to say, you know, I don't think Nero quite comes up to Virgil. But in terms of the visual world in which we live, we're still surrounded by these guys.

We still use it. Even people who say, oh, I know nothing about the ancient world, which people often say. And they're always wrong because they always do. They're always wrong when they say that. But, you know, it's often the starting convo with me, you know, oh, I know nothing about the ancient world. People still pick up a newspaper, there's a cartoon of some politician who doesn't really have his mind on the job. You know, he's dressed up with a toga and a laurel wreath. And he's strumming a lyre and there's blazing fire in the background and we all know it's Nero fiddling while Rome burned we do we do and so Mary the critics have been raving about this book I'm going to quote I'm going to quote one particularly distinguished critic who has

written as this book triumphantly demonstrates there is no one on the face of the planet better qualified than Mary Beard to guide us through the great hall of mirrors labyrinthine and treacherous as it is that separates us from the 12 Caesars do you know who that distinguished critic was was it you it was yeah i am i'm coaching myself i know this is your first time in this podcast this is how it proceeds tom compliments himself a great length i'm complimenting but the reason i cite that is that i've actually rather yeah i am going to compliment myself here because I do like that idea of a great hall of mirrors, labyrinthine and treacherous. Because Mary, I mean, go on, tell me. I mean, that's OK. That's a good description. It is. You're a great wordsmith, Tom Holland, a great wordsmith.

Because the thing is that there is no one way to respond to it. And so obviously different ages have understood this in different ways so um yes so the roman empire collapses in the west and that's an important thing because obviously it continues in the east but in the west the legacy of classical literature and the memory of rome endures doesn't Yeah. And I think we now tend to think that, let's say, the rediscovery of classical antiquity, you know, was part and parcel not only of an intellectual enterprise in the early Renaissance, but it was also part and parcel of very much elite culture, dynastic power. We think of, you know, the big guys, the warlords of the late Middle Ages, you know, seeing themselves as Roman emperors.

And I think, you know, all that's true. But what I think is truer, both about images of emperors, but also about images of classical world in general, is that, and I suppose this is what you're talking about when you mention Hall of Mirrors, these figures have always been much more kind of fragile, ambivalent, difficult to pin down, curious. And one of the things that I'm wanting to do in the book you know is actually to say look everybody what did people in let's say 15th 16th century know think they knew they might have been wrong what do they think they knew about the 12 Caesars? Right. The first 12 Roman emperors, the most famous ones from Julius Caesar to Domitian, 12 rulers later. Well, they knew that all but one of them was rumoured to have had a not natural end. They read their Suetonius and other bits of classical literature and they knew that they were corrupt autocrats, etc., etc.

And yet they use them. They use the image of these rulers, which they pick up from ancient sculpture, but particularly ancient coins. And they decorate their private and public space with them. Now, we've sort of taken that for granted. You know, image of power, 12 Caesars. But actually, these figures are much more complicated than that. And one of the questions I wanted to ask, and it's become more relevant as my work on the book has gone on, is why did people want to see images of people they knew to be monsters in their homes, in their public spaces? And that leads you on to think, I think, a bit harder about,

so what are these images for? What are portraits of people from the past? You know, what are they doing? What are they for? How do they fit into, whether it's the 19th century, the 15th century or the 21st? Mary, let me ask you a slightly different but kind of broader question. At what point do you think those people are aware

of Greece and Rome as belonging to a different age, a vanished age, and not part of a continuum, not part of their own world, if you know what I mean? I think it's very hard to know. I mean, the standard answer would be, I suppose, you know, Renaissance humanism, you know, burgeoning in the 15th century and a little before and later, in a sense, historicised the ancient world. It showed to the intellectuals of the West that the ancient world was a subject of study.

It wasn't us. And up to a point, that's true. Do you think it's important that, I mean, there's a difference here between pagan and Christian emperors, isn't there? Well, I think that complicates things hugely because, you know, I'm rather carefully in what I've just said to Dominic, sticking, you know, taking the intellectual line and suggesting, hinting, which would be completely wrong, actually, hinting that the engagement with these figures was, you know figures was from people like me, only men in the Renaissance. You know, there was a kind of humanistic academic inquiry, which in a way put a barrier. It both opened up the ancient world, but it made it seem different. And I think you'd also have to say there's a parallel strand going on, which I think a lot of us now, we haven't forgotten, but doesn't come flooding in when you think about Roman emperors,

which is that the history of Christianity is actually embedded. The history of Christianity is embedded in the Roman Empire. And, you know, some of the most popular paintings that you get from the 16th century onwards, but you can find some examples earlier. The famous scene that we've now almost uniformly forgotten of the Emperor Augustus wondering if he was going to become a god and wondering if there was going to be anyone more powerful than him in the world and he consults a pagan prophetess a sybil and what does she do she points up in the sky and it's the very day that jesus is being born and augustus has a vision of mary and jesus in a cloud they do it rather you know sort know, they're not terribly good, most of these painters, at imagining that scene. But what we're being told is that those two histories come together. And also in Virgil, right? Because Virgil, I mean, one of the reasons why Virgil is Dante's guide is that it is believed that his poems, in a way, had foretold the coming of Christ.

And therefore, he comes to become a kind of Christian necromancer. Yes. And so you get Augustus being the ruling emperor when Jesus was born. You get Nero as the great persecutor. I mean, you go to the great ceremonial doors on St. Peter's, which one of the few bits of new St. Peter's that were taken over from the venerable old St. Peter's. And who do you see first when you go into St. Peter's that way? You see Nero. Nero is sitting there and he is condemning Peter and Paul to death. And so Roman emperors are absolutely built in to the idea of the history of the church from its very beginning to the time when the Roman Empire itself, at least from the point of view of the dynastic leaders, when Constantine would

be the classic example, becomes himself a Christian when the Roman Empire becomes Christian. So the whole of Christianity, I'm now going to say something completely outrageous and slightly wrong, but it's a good exaggeration. The whole of the early history of Christianity is incomprehensible without understanding its embeddedness in the Roman Empire. That doesn't sound controversial, that just sounds quite reasonable, I think. I think that's absolutely reasonable. There's some bits of the Syriac world which might contest some of this. I don't know how many Syriac listeners. I will probably get away with it, but you sense that i'm being very careful and covering my back i mean mary on on that theme of of um again looking at looking at

virgil looking at dante looking at the way the roman emperors are understood i mean so dante is identifying with the tradition of the caesars he He's kind of, he's an enthusiast for the empire against the papacy. And so when they go down, you know, into the lowest pit of hell and they see Satan, he's gnawing on Judas, but he's also gnawing on Brutus and Cassius, who are absolutely, you know, I mean, they're up there with the worst people who ever lived for murdering Julius Caesar.

And, you know, so it is, I mean, I think what's interesting with the worst people who ever lived for murdering Julius Caesar. Murdering Julius Caesar. And so it is, I mean, I think what's interesting, and it's what I hope I bring out in the book, is that these equivalences and this embeddedness is always more complicated. It's always more complicated than it looks. And one way of telling the history of the early church is, of course, to see pagan emperors as great persecutors. But there's always another side and there's always another kind of engagement. I mean, I think one of my favourite objects, it's a bit over the top,

is a Transylvanian religious chalice from a cathedral in Transylvania, 16th century, 17th century. Fuzzy day. And it's a communion chalice. And what is set in this communion chalice, out of which the faithful are going to drink the blood of Christ and take the bread. What do you see? They've set in it a whole array of Roman coins, including Nero. So the kind of the image that you have to conjure up for yourself is somebody drinking the communion wine, sipping the communion wine. And as they do that, who are they brought face to face with? They're face to face with Nero. And so these figures are kind of operating as a world within which the history of Christianity is being understood. And sometimes it is to bring those worlds together, which you have with your Virgil and Dante example

and with a lot of these, you know, Augustus is always cropping up in the context, in art of the birth of Jesus. So you've got, you're saying that these histories go together and you're also saying these histories are forever in opposition to one another. But it's fair to say, is it, Mary, that throughout the history subsequent to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, that Rome in particular has been seen,

I mean, I don't know so much with Greece, but Rome has been seen as synonymous with kind of power and a kind of prestige, right? I mean, that's a constant, isn't it, in post-Roman history? That's one of the constants. Certainly we can really forget Greece here. I mean, the rediscovery of Greece was hugely influential, particularly in the 19th century. And you can trace the history of, say, Alexander the Great

through some of this period. But essentially, when we're thinking about imagining the ancient world and thinking about how the ancient world impacts on us, then it's Rome. And it is about power. It's about larger than lifeness. But it's also about corruption. It's about murder. It's about dynasties going wrong uh it's about persecution um it's very male world too but so that that i mean that sense that actually what we're talking about in the middle ages if we're looking at the the legacy of the classical world is really rome i mean and and the the extent to which greece appears so the stories of the tro, the Greek myths, I mean, it's being mediated through Rome.

It's being mediated through Rome. And the other person that you'd add into the equation, along with Virgil and Dante, is you'll say, look, you know, where do people know what we call the Greek myths from at this period, anything from the Middle Ages to the Baroque period, I suppose. Where do they know those? Well, mostly they know them through Ovid. There are Roman versions of the Greek myth. And they're always kind of looking, I think, one eye over the shoulder at what Dominic's talking about, really Roman power as well as the Roman imagination. And they're making kind of different arguments and debates and discussions around it. I think that if the 12 Caesars, let's say, or any of these images of Roman power had been utterly, simply rubber stamps of modern political power looking back to antiquity, they wouldn't have had half so much edge. They wouldn't have had half so much longevity. You know, we'd have got bored. We'd have got really, really bored of them by now. But it's because they always raise questions and they're always harder to pin down than you think

that they've got such continuing momentum. Mary, I've got two questions. So one is a very boring, small housekeeping question. Is the reason that we think of Hercules rather than Heracles and Shakespeare refers to Jove rather than Zeus, is that just because we're getting all filtered through the Romans? That they don't have access to the Greek myths unmediated by the Romans? Yeah, it's mostly that. And I think that as soon as you get, and it would start a bit earlier than the late 19th century. But as soon as you get a load of self-conscious Hellenists looking back and saying,

hey, guys, you need to, you know, there's somewhere else to go. Then, of course, we get the naming wars. And you can tell that in, you know, you can tell that someone who calls Heracles Heracles is telling you, think Greece. Tom Holland. Tom Holland is that person.

Yeah. Okay. So we've got a very good question, much better than my last question, from one of our listeners, SO3 Klausowitz. And Klausowitz says, and I think this is a fascinating question, was the Renaissance destined to be Greco-Roman?

So he says, basically, is there a counterfactual what if where it's Egyptian or Persian or whatever, sort of more Eastern, or was it always bound to be Greco-Roman? I suppose because of the imprints of the Roman Empire on Western Europe. I think that you could say it was almost bound to be. Because, you know, we're sitting in a continent and a landmass where we dig in the soil.

And what do we find? Well, if you're in Italy, we might find busts of Roman emperors. You know, you can be in Durham and we're finding coins with Roman emperors. You know, Shakespeare refers to the imprints of Roman figures on coins. But what lies beneath our feet is Roman, really. I mean, it's not actually Greco-Roman, it's Roman. What I think is, why that question I think is interesting is, of course, it's slightly challenging, the kind of assumption that comes from that,

that the only thing worth studying in antiquity, the only people who've got any brains at all were the Romans and the Greeks. Now, in fact, we know that it's a much more complicated intellectual world than that, which certainly, for example, and there'd be many others, includes Egypt. And both the Greeks and the Romans knew that they had got boffins on board and they tell him how to reform the calendar. So you can't in kind of in my world when I'm teaching, I'm wanting to encourage students to look a little more critically at that kind of, you know Romano-Greek antiquity, I'll call it, and to see where it comes from and to see its relationships with the other cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. Mary, I mean, with the specifically on Egypt, of course, I mean, people were fascinated by Egypt in the Renaissance and they yearned to kind of crack what they thought was the hidden wisdom of the Egyptians. But they couldn't because they couldn't read the text.

That's right. I mean, the key to and of course, the key to the rediscovery of Greece is also the rediscovery of the Greek language and learning the Greek language. And I guess that we're calling this episode classic. So up till now, we've really been looking at, you know, the reception of Greece and Rome. But classics is also particularly about the languages, about Greek and Latin. And I wonder if we should perhaps go the way in which the idea of classics being the study of Greek and Latin and how that's kind of influenced the role. I mean, it has a kind of sense that this is a very elite thing to study and all that kind of stuff. And I know that you have strong views on that.

So perhaps we could come to that after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's therestisentertainment.com. Ave, we are looking at classics, the way in which the civilisations of Greece and Rome have been interpreted, reinterpreted over the course of the centuries. And we have with us none other than Mary Beard, who is professor of classics at Cambridge and Mary this idea of classics the joining together of Greek and Latin as a fit subject of study at university I mean this is this has a very kind of lengthy tradition doesn't it I

mean in Europe but but it has it kind of takes on a particular contours in England. Yeah, it takes on particular contours in England. And it would be naïve to say that there's been no connection between class and classics, that the learning of Latin in particular, rather less Greek. Greek has always been a bit more kind of market recherche, you know. Bohemian, is it Greek? Slightly more bohemian, yes. And it's got all kinds of connections with some things that we don't much like. Like, you know, Athenian democracy was not terribly the flavour of the month in the early 19th century, for example. And so we're seeing it through Rome and we're seeing an elitism here.

And also up to a point, we're seeing the acquisition of Latin as a gatekeeper to elite culture here. OK, so we have a question from Andrew here. What is it about studying the classics that seems to appeal to the elite? Well, I would say almost nothing. I mean, I think that one of the points about what, let's say, the English elite studied in the 18th and early 19th century was that they studied Latin and Greek. They studied language. And what did they spend most of their time doing? Well, they were translating Shakespeare into Latin. They were translating Milton into Latin. And part of the point of this,

and I think you can't really emphasise this too strongly, they weren't much. They were reading Virgil, but they weren't thinking about Virgil as a literary text. They were thinking about how they wrote like Virgil. And one of the kind of bizarre things and one of the things that made the learning of Latin so good as a gatekeeper to elite culture was it was also in many ways so pointless. So the pointlessness is the point. Pointlessness is the point. You were learning absolute fluency in a dead language. They were not. They were a bit, but they were not much, certainly not at school and not a lot at university. They were not thinking about the literary merit of the Aeneid. They weren't thinking much about, let's say, Roman philosophy.

They weren't reading Cicero in order to think about how you organized a state. The big, real focus of their learning was translating English into Latin. And we now think of classics as a subject. I'm happy to say it is very much now in the modern world as a subject which is about the Greeks and Romans. You have a you access it through language often, not always. But it's but it's about that kind of culture. I think if we'd gone back to the late 18th century, we wouldn't recognise what these people were doing. Mary, what's about this argument that's a bit... I know Tom's got a question about Thomas Hobbes, but I want to jump in before that.

Oh God, I always pass on Thomas Hobbes questions. So my question is, there's a slightly, what seems seems to me a slightly crude way of thinking that people learn do classics because they want to be because of empire, because they want to purely because they want they would be imperialists. Is that right or is that wrong? I think it's half right. Most of these kind of stereotypes that we have about why and how the classics were studied in, let's say, 19th century, 18th century, they're always half true. And there is no doubt that some people who were avowed imperialists saw the Roman Empire as their lodestar, really, that Britain had taken on the mantle of ancient Rome and was, in a sense, replicating and doing better than the Romans. But I think it's more complicated than that. I mean, partly the relationship between the Roman Empire and the British Empire was always

a very fragile one. And I think you can see that if you go to the famous statue of Boudicca. Tom loves this. We've done a whole thing on this. Oh, brilliant. Well, you go to that statue and you look at what's written underneath. You know, here we've got, you know, a big rebel against Rome standing up for the native Brits against imperial oppression. And the poem that is the Cooper poem that's written by her underneath her, you know, says words to the effect of don't worry, Boudicca. Your descendants will rule more of the world than the Romans did. It's basically the message. I love that. So whose side are we on here?

And Mary also, I mean, it's not just in Britain, is it? Because in France, you know, they're using, in Algeria, the French see themselves as kind of the heirs of Rome, bringing civilization and baths and things to the desert wilds. But simultaneously, they're bunging up a statue of Vercingetorix to mark the defeat. And the Germans are doing the same with Arminius, who's defeated. That is absolutely right. So even with that broad equivalence between Rome and modern empires, there's always that. So, you know, who's coming out on top? Who's really like whom? I think also we tend to forget that Rome gave people a language

for critiquing empire. Well, exactly. And that seems to be hugely important. You know, there were some of these, you know, some of these boys, they were boys at Oxford, nipping off to quotes, and I put all this in inverted commas,

quotes rural India. Others were going up to work on the Manchester Guardian to say what an absolute pile of shite imperialism was. And they'd all learned it from the classics. But Mary, just before that, the reason I just wanted to mention Hobbes was that he famously, after the execution of Charles I, said people should not be reading Greek and Latin history, because it just encourages them to kill, you know, their rightful kings. You know, their tyrannicides and things. It's terrible behaviour. You know, it's got to be stamped out. And both the American revolutionaries and the French revolutionaries were absolutely steeped in the classical world. So it is also about, you know, it kind of underpins revolution, doesn't it?

I have been banging on about this for more years than I like to think, you know, that there isn't inherent politics in the classical world. are classical examples, classical tropes, classical clichés to justify revolution as much as to justify oppression. And, you know, the classics has got a, you know, it's got a pretty kind of poor record when it comes to underpinning European dictatorship. You know, Mussolini's the start. Yeah, that's right. But it's also got a in my view others might disagree it's got a pretty fine record in asking people to critique imperial power to critique

corruption I mean I don't see really how you can read even if you're not reading it for its history, how can you study the Roman historian Tacitus and not come away with a counter-cultural version about autocracy, one-man rule, and the corruption of empire? And indeed empire. Well, even beyond that, though, I mean, Tom and I were talking about this before we started the podcast, and I said to him that the two best-known,

popular, modern versions of the Roman Empire, so there are Claudius and the film Gladiator. And in both, there's a narrative device where one character wants to bring back the Republic. He says we're corrupt, we're autocratic, we're repressive. So even in our sort of modern retellings of Rome, that stuff is woven in. We can't ever, you can't ever tell Rome or you tell a very, very uninteresting story of Rome if you didn't keep that, that side, that other side on board. And I think, you know, look, for me, when did I first really see that Latin could speak for me?

It was when I read Tacitus and it was the biography, not his main histories of the early Roman Empire, but his biography of his father-in-law, Agricola. And I was a sort of disaffected lefty teenager. And I'd sort of fetched up learning Latin because they thought that's what brainy girls did. And we were reading Tacitus' biography of a curricular. And then I came across the bit where Tacitus puts into the mouth, admittedly, of a native Brit, though the native Brit never said it. He rallies the opposition to Rome by saying, what do the Romans do? They make a desert and call it peace. And that was when my eyes sort of opened because I thought there are people in the Roman world who were talking to me about me. You know, they're not just sitting there yomping across Gaul, you know,

on a kind of pledge of massacring the poor natives. They're thinking about what empire is. And, you know, actually, if you were to say, you know, has there ever been a better critique of empire than they make a desert and call it peace you know i i think taskers wins hands down at least on um succinctness and lucidity um well kind of on that a slight angle to that that we've got a question from murph man aka justin murphy who asks and i think it's a really interesting question, have classicists traditionally downplayed and do they still the cruelty and unfairness of the Roman world? And if so, why? I mean, that is quite an interesting question. Classicists inevitably are kind of passionate

about the need to study the literature, the languages of these ancient peoples, does kind of emphasising the wonder of Virgil or Homer or whatever lead people to downplay the costs of what Greece and Rome meant for people? I mean, I hope I haven't. No, absolutely, you haven't. But I just wonder, the tradition, is this a problem with the tradition? I think there is a degree of a problem with tradition. You know, throughout my career, you know, I've been reading people like Moses Finlay or E.R. Dodds, you know, who are looking the classical world in the eye and always have done. And I think you can go back to the 19th century too,

and you can find writers doing the same. I think to some extent, there can be a fudge, as much in popular writing as in academic writing, from saying this culture is extremely interesting to saying this culture is admirable. And then tending to downplay things like the treatment of women, slavery and sexual violence, if you like. I mean, it's certainly the case that when I was at school and a bit when I was at university, we would read Ovid's Metamorphoses. Now, my young students now see Ovid's Metamorphoses, interesting as it is, as a work of literature, which is basically a handbook of rape. It's one rape after the next. And in some ways some ways that's true we never talked about it like that i mean we had that wonderful word rapture you know this was a rapture it wasn't a rape and that went hand in hand with a way of seeing the gods isn't it it's a way of seeing

the gods you know and of course we can know, what price do you want to pay? I mean, it's kind of only an observation perhaps. Ask Semele. Ask Semele. You know, is there a downside to seeing the gods? Well, yes. Is there, you know, what is Ovid saying about what the costs are of that? But I think you could find that outside sexual violence.

But I think there was a tradition of seeing slavery as a bit in the model of country house service. It's upstairs, downstairs. Upstairs, downstairs. It's Downton Abbey. That's right. And the truth is that some of it probably was like that. And those are the bits we know about best. You know, the faithful slave of Cicero who gets freed and, you know, and remains a friend of the old master. Very nostalgic, euphemising version of slavery.

Not entirely wrong in some cases. And what didn't we look at? We didn't look at agricultural slaves, slaves in factories, slaves in the mines. Yes, who would be castrated or blinded in an eye. I mean, how hideous. You know this story, Tom, but I'm going to tell it for your listeners. You know, there's the story of the Emperor Hadrian who gets mad at a slave and blinds him in one eye and then feels terribly remorseful and so says to the slave, please let me recompense you, let me buy a present, you know, and what would you like? And the slave says, my eye back, please. So Mary, let me ask you a question allied to that

about slavery and violence. The most famous, I mean, I know you've written about this, the most celebrated Roman monument probably in the world, the place that everybody goes to when they visit Rome, the place where children line up to pose with swords and to dress in the costumes. I believe Sandbrook Jr. is in that arena. He's going there for half term, isn't he?

He is going there for half term and we've got it penciled in. So the Coliseum, gladiators, this is part of that, isn't it? Do you think, do you find, if you are driving past, do you find that distasteful and wrong? I don't warm to the idea of gladiatorial display um i hope it tells us a little bit about ourselves because when when sandbrook jr lines up and has his photograph taken with the dress-up gladiators um i hope i'm sure you point out to him, Dominic, that he's invested in that kind of violence and culture. I'm constantly interrogating violent practices in my episode.

And I think that the Romans are horrible. And one of the reasons we study them is because they are horrible. And, you know, they themselves wonder what they are doing, sitting down and, you down and supposedly enjoying the slaughter of human beings. We picture them as just a lustful crowd. And some of them aren't and some of them aren't. And some of them are both a lustful crowd and a questioning crowd about what's going on. But I think that we have to reflect a little bit on why we so like that site. So we find it tasteful, but we're so invested in that site.

Gladiator has its cake and eats it. Yes. And I suspect we have our cake and eat it and the Romans had their cake and eat it. I. And, you know, I suspect we have our cake and eat it and the Romans had their cake and eat it. I think that we also have to remember that it's there's been different versions of how we take that on board over the last few hundred years, because, you know, if we were in the middle of the 19th century and visited Rome, the Colosseum was then still basically a shrine to martyred Christians. And it was totally overgrown, extremely romantic.

A great big cross. A great big cross. The cross is still there, but nobody notices it. And there was a little hermit in his hermitage, you know, in one side of the kind of overgrown garden. That's the classiest hermitage in the world, isn't it? Can you imagine a classiest hermitage? And if you said Colosseum then, it's about the persecution of the Christians. And of course, you go back to the reason why,

you know, why was the Colosseum built in the first place? Well, there's two reasons for that. One is it was built by the new dynasty under Vespasian to obliterate part of the extravagant palace that the Emperor Nero had built. The Golden House. The Golden House. And the Colosseum is built on the site of Nero's ornamental lake. And it was it was a kind of quasi-democratic gesture. It was saying this used to be the private pleasure grounds

of a tyrant. And me, Vespasian, I am giving it back to public entertainment. It's like politicians playing football, isn't it? In a way, in a way. But just also remember the other kind of awkward side. How did Vespasian get the money to build this? Yes, how did he get it money to build this? Yes.

Well, very expensive piece of work. He got it because of his and his son's put down of the Jewish rebellion just before he took power in 69 and his destruction of the temple. Mary, just a thought about this kind of idea that perhaps we as a society generally perhaps don't engage with the brutality that underpins so much of, I guess, particularly Roman civilization. And I wonder if it's to do with the fact that most of us study it when we're children. It's a topic, you know, it's the childhood of Europe. Perhaps, therefore, it's appropriate to children. And, you know, the thing that I always have to struggle against is the influence of asterisks in which Julius Caesar conquers Gaul without killing a single person. And in which the Gauls are total sweeties.

Well, they're all sweeties, aren't they? In fact, we wouldn't much like living in ancient Gaul. No, an indomitable village, it'd be terrible. Absolutely terrible. But I think there is that. It is a kind of, you know, there's a certain infantilisation that we have of the ancient world, you know, a projection of, you know, the nuclear family

and we've got them all dressed up in their togas, you know, wife, faithful slave and husband and wife and two kids. But there's also, I think, a little bit of a sanctimonious self-righteousness about it. I mean, and I think that's the other side of our discussions of slavery, because you take students around slave quarters that you can identify in some Roman houses or Hadrian's great palace at Tivoli outside Rome. And they are terrible, dank, dingy workhouses, really. And even with clever students, you can often say to them, would we do that now? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, we wouldn't. You know, we don't have slaves.

Well, it's convenient for us to imagine we don't have slaves. But, you know, think where your smartphone's made. Yeah. And in what conditions? And, you know, so I think that our relationship of investment in the ancient world is always combined with a sense of certain kind of self-righteousness about how much better we are. We are better. You know, I'm not going to take I'm not going to take a trip back to ancient Rome if you paid me a very, you know, you know, it's not like. Not even if you were going to be an empress. I was going to know. So you'd me a very you know you know it's not kind of like I was a celebrity get me out of ancient Rome you know um great show that would be um but we have to see that there's there's a complexity here in our engagement and uh we've we tend to think about these things in very binary terms.

Well, Mary, this raises some really interesting questions about the future of classics, which is, of course, so... I mean, a lot of listeners won't know this, but in America, in academic circles, I mean, really, I think specifically in America, it is intensely controversial. there's an assistant professor at Princeton called Danel Padilla Peralta, who has written and spoken at length about basically dismantling classics as a subject, because he believes that classics is a kind of bull book of white supremacy, Eurocentrism, all of these terrible things. What's your take on all that? Well, I think I should say that, particularly in the case of Danel, he's really smart and what he writes on Roman history is extremely good. I think that there's a baby in bathwater problem here. And it does play out differently in the context of post-slavery America. It does play out differently. But I think that, you know, anybody who studies classics

and tries to deny that it has been used to legitimate some of the, you know, most horrible political movements that we've got, you know, would just not be looking history in the face. I think what the

most fervent of those critics of classics in the States tend to sometimes forget is that, first of all, there is another side to it. You know, as we've mentioned, you know, there's the revolutionary side. Go and look at revolutionary architecture. We think of architecture and classics as being Prince Charles liking columns. But look at Boulay and people like that in the French 18th, 19th century using classical forms to reconfigure the very nature of what architecture is. the people who use classics as a bullock for white supremacy, you name it, far-right causes, usually they've got it terribly wrong. They're very bad classicists.

I think that possibly we could spend more of our time just patiently explaining why the Spartans, for example, are not entirely admirable and represent a good model for a modern state. We've talked a bit already about where the study of classics ends. And there has been a very, not just Greco-Roman centeredness, it's been very centered on Italy and what is now modern Greece. And I think there's a lot to be done in saying, look, parts of the African continent, crucially important parts of the Roman Empire. And classicists have sometimes themselves given the impression that it was a white man's subject. Now, it isn't and hasn't been for a long time. But I think we ought to shout a bit about that before we decide to burn it all down. And isn't there a danger as well that classics is just endangered anyway? I mean, classics is always a bit embattled, isn't it?

Well, I think it's been embattled since about the fourth century AD, probably. You know, I mean, there is something about classics which embedded in the subject is the idea that people before us did it better. Right. That's interesting. You know, and so there's a venerable classical organisation in this country, the Classical Association, founded in the early years of the 20th century. Why did they fight it? Because they thought that classics was going down the tubes. They wanted to have a society that would preserve classics. Now, we look back to the early years of the 20th century as a moment when classics was, you know, you could see it everywhere.

Their perception was people aren't doing as well as they used to be. We need this. You know, there are people kind of pleased because I think, you know, although one way of representing classics is that it's an awfully self-confident, elitist discipline, which kind of involves not much more than quoting bits of Homer at random. You know, it's also a discipline that as long as I've been involved and for decades earlier has been concerned about itself, you know, wondered what it was for, how it should fit into a modern curriculum, etc, etc. You know, classicists are, you know, they're quite sort of heart-searching. They're not... Well, Mary, there's a question from Mark Woodhouse. If we stopped studying classics tomorrow, what would we lose? I mean, that's it. That's it. Yeah. Well, that's for you. I actually wrote an exam question almost exactly like that about 20 years ago. If classics goes, what else goes? It was my exam question. I don't think many people answered it, I have to say. But I think that we've already touched on that. You know, I'm not in any way an advocate of, you know, every 11 year old being put through compulsory Latin, you know, for whatever reason.

You know, I am an advocate of people getting the opportunity to study Latin and that to be encouraged. But in a sense, I think we've we've already hinted at what would go. I mean, if you're going to read Dante, how do you read Dante if nobody in your culture, and happily, culture is a kind of sharing enterprise, so we don't need absolutely everybody to have read Virgil, but how is Dante going to make sense to us without Virgil still being on our cultural horizon. You know, you look at the Coen brothers, O Brother Where Art Thou, which is based on the Odyssey. Is that kind of movie possible without that sense that Homer is still part of our world? I don't think that you, you know, as I say say classicists can sometimes come over

a bit heavy and a bit strong but my claim would be and this is one of the reasons of course that i wrote the book is that a visit to a art gallery a major western art gallery is actually impoverished if you don't know what the painters are painting. So to turn that slightly on its head. So if classics went, if there was no opportunity to study ancient Greece and Rome, I reckon that there would still be people who would want to do it desperately. And one of the reasons for that is I remember an editor years ago when I was kind of debating what to write a subject. And he said that, you know, the top three topics that sell to the general public, obviously, Second World War comes in absolutely miles ahead. Then Tudors and then the Romans. Not the Greeks, not the Egyptians.

It was always, but the Romans in particular have that glamour. And I wonder that a lot of the hesitancy that kind of shadows maybe the study of classics is in part a fear of that glamour, that it's seen as a kind of almost... it's dangerous perhaps. It's hard to control because it is alien to us. Yeah, that's that's why it's exciting. You know, it's sheer alienness, while also the sense that it remains part of our world is what gives it. Which is what Gladiator gave, wasn't it? Which is what Gladiator gave. But I also think that there is huge popular interest.

You know, you only have to look at what plays sell out in the West End. But I also think that there is huge popular interest. You only have to look at what plays sell out in the West End. Now we can go back to the theatre and the ancient Greek tragedy is still a blockbuster. It's still putting bums on seats. that why that popular enthusiasm can be sustained is because there are people doing some hard, possibly not very glamorous, academic work on those texts, which keep them on the intellectual and contemporary horizon. I mean, I think people often say to me, but we don't need people like you because everything's been translated. And I said, well, look, if you think, go back to Gilbert Murray's translations of Greek tragedy in, and you wouldn't have a run of more than a week if you tried to put it on. Because actually what Murray was doing is what we all do,

which is mediating the ancient world to our own concerns. And of course, making our own concerns seem different in the light of ancient concerns. But you sure can't do it with the rhyming couplets of Gilbert Murray in 2021. And so keep on supporting the doing of academic classics as well as gladiator. You are, as ever, the most eloquent defender of your of your discipline uh it's been it's been

wonderful to have you on but we have one last question tom dominic does it's dominic here who is massively lowering the tone let's just know that we like to end with the really big historiographical kind of what they call the meta questions so we've had a question an excellent question i know you've responded to this already so so I know your game. It's from Carlos D. And this is the question I think that everybody wants to know the answer. If Alexander the Great fought Julius Caesar, who would win? It's a brilliant question, isn't it?

All I can tell you... With their armies, do we think, or kind of man on man? Yeah, they've got to have armies. It's not man to man. One thing I can tell you, I'm not very good. You're so much better at military history than me Dominic and I'm sure that you could give a... Dominic hates military history. Well, if he hates military history, God knows who

loves it. But what I would say is do you know it's really interesting because the Greeks and Romans thought that? Yeah, it's like Plutarch's lives, isn't it? When Plutarch writes his lives, the great Greeks and the great Romans, and he puts them into pairs, he pairs Julius Caesar with Alexander the Great. So you've got a kind of double-headed biography.

And part of the issue is, OK, so which of them would win, guys? Well, which of them is it? You're the professor of classics. We want to know. Everyone's hanging. But it's very hard because neither of them last very long, really. So if you were to say Augustus, is it Alexander the Great or Augustus? That's very evasive.

Then I would go for Augustus because he was kind of unbatterable. I'm going to take the Roman part and say they were both absolutely horrific massacres of innocent human beings, but probably Julius Caesar has the edge. See, I don't want to – it's foolish to disagree with the professor of classics, but I think Alexander would win because he had a track i said this to tom beforehand he had a track record of fighting bigger against bigger odds the big superpower of the day persia julius caesar just fighting a load of ghouls i agreed with you but obviously this is a debate that will run and run and run what do you the listener think let us know Alexander was a terrible drunk

that was his Achilles heel well you're just listening to the Roman propaganda here aren't you I think this is the perfect note on which to end Mary thanks so much and thank you everyone for listening and we will see you again soon bye bye thanks very much bye bye everybody thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening and access to our chat community please sign up at rest is history pod.com that's