Hi, everyone, welcome does this history here. We've got the last little mini series, a little strand of legends, stars in the firmament of the historical Pantheon Galaxy star Artscape Sky at night. Anyway, here is Mary Beard. We've saved the best till last. We've had Eric Foner go back and check that out. We had Michael would both really wonderful conversations. This conversation took place a couple of years ago is a rerun episode. Professor Mehrabad Cambridge University is obviously a legend.

She is pretty much the most famous historian broadcaster in the U.K. Her fame has spread across the world. She's a classicist. She engages robustly on contemporary issues. She is intelligent. I went down to her house, drank wine. She put me right fairly politely on on lots of things. And I was just given a glorious glimpse into what it must be like to be taught by her. She is a national treasure and it was a great pleasure to have you on the podcast.

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In the meantime, before you go and do that, this is Professor Mary Beard. Enjoy.

Mary, thank you so much for talking to me. It's a real pleasure. Well, thanks. Now, why on earth does the benchmark matter to us today?

Well, that's the 64000 big question straight right now. And if you look at the media, the ordinary print online media, you'd think it mattered to us because there were lessons that we could learn in ancient Rome that we could think, OK, Republic turns into empire.

It's all happening. President Trump. Exactly. Caligula.

And somehow the job of the historian is to kind of match up of ancient Rome and its lessons with modern politics and a sense of prognostication now. I think that's I think that's charming, sweet and fun. And I do it all the time. But I think more to the point is that what the entire world does is that it helps us think harder about us. We don't learn lessons from it. You know, it's you know, people used to say it was deeply embarrassing.

Look, you know, had we known what a rough time the Romans had in Iraq, we would never have gotten.

And I thought, well, there's millions of other reasons not to go to Iraq. We don't need to know about Trajan's problems. You know, this is this is kind of, you know, passing the buck, really.

But I think what Romans do is that they they help us see some of our problems from the outside. They help us look at things in a different way. They help us think about actually the basic kind of ground rules of modern Western. Liberal, a supposed liberal culture say, OK, what does citizenship mean now? Romans has a very different view of citizenship from us. We don't need to follow it. But it makes us say to ourselves, look, there's another way of looking at things, when I was I was brought up with it, you know, on the the Norman Tebbit cricket test, you know, so that those kind of dumb immigrants and what you need to do is you need to go to the cricket match and you just see whether they're supporting India or England.

And I think the real point is the Romans had a completely different version of that. They knew that you could be a citizen of two places. You could be a citizen of Panem in Italy, of aphrodisiacs in what we would call Turkey and a citizen of Rome, and that there wasn't a conflict. Now, we might argue with them about the conflict, but actually they do kind of turn the question back on us and just say, why are we so certain about how we do what we do?

So history is about calling out bullshit. It's about questioning certainty, I don't know about Bush. I think people used bullshit in a terrible way, actually, but it means usually what I don't agree with.

But I think that history is about it's about challenging certainty. It's about helping you to see yourself in a different guys, to see yourself from the outside. So history is about the past, but it's also about imagining how you would look from the future.

So, you know, one of the things it does is it it teaches us to see, in my case what seems so awkward about the Romans, but it also helps you see what will seem so odd about us in 100 years, 200 years, or what will students when they're doing the history of Britain, the 21st century, will they be writing about?

I can take a few guesses. I'm OK. But why Rome? I mean, would this be true? I suppose it would be if you were studying the Ottoman Empire.

In some ways it's true of anything. In some ways, getting outside your box and becoming a kind of anthropologist of other cultures and yourself, every which one works, I think why Rome and Greece, but particularly Rome matters so much, is that Rome is not only another culture, which it is weird, strange, horrible, don't want to go there.

But it's also a culture through which our forebears from 19th, 18th, 17th century, they have learnt to think we learnt a thing about politics, about right and wrong, about the problems of being a human being, about what it was to be good, about what it was to be, you know, proper in the form or in bed, whatever. We learn that from Rome.

Of course we adjusted it. We renegotiated it. But so Rome is a kind of a brilliant paradigm for us because it's both utterly different and it makes us kind of think about real difference. And here it's a culture which has somehow said this is how you learn about what liberty is. This is how you learn about what the rights of the citizen is. So we are both an interlocutor with Rome.

We both happily much better than ancient Rome, and we're also the descendants of ancient Rome.

That's brilliant.

But what strikes me about your programs that you do so well as you call Rome a weird culture, and yet in your programs, you're so famous for pointing out domestic object practices, ways of living that makes those intervening centuries disappear and stressed our common humanity.

Yeah, I think it's great fun and I think it's a really important day. But if Rome was just weird, why would we be interested? You know, if we happen to know that there were men on Mars and they do things differently? Well, you know, fine. I've been mildly interested, but so what? But what's interesting about Rome is that they do things differently and off simultaneously, completely familiar. And yet in that familiarity, they do things differently and they want things on the telly programs.

You know, not in maybe is a cheap trick. But, you know, we and wherever we go, we go to the local Roman lavatories, obviously, you know.

Of course you do. And. You know, I think people do think cheap trick, you know, it's easy to say, oh, this is where Romans know and chat or whatever, but there's no better place for saying. So where does the difference between us and them become clear? And there's no better place for getting particularly kids to say, OK, I can begin to kind of engage in this history. You know, how do they sit here?

You know, do you think they kind of wipe their bottoms? Do they stand up? Did they sit down?

And you start to see in those rather kind of often of over Poche probably very restored Roman lavatories as far apart as Tim Gardein, Algeria and Austria. In Italy, you start to see a little problem about how you reconstruct Roman life, how you reconstruct what the rules were. And we don't know whether these lavatories are all lined up in Rome. Was it was it unisex? Was it like said only we don't know about the standing up, sitting down.

We don't know about what the kind of you know, I don't know what the currently what the conventions are.

And a male urinal.

You you don't want to know. You don't tell me that you don't talk to the person next to you.

But I would imagine that you do much to it up. But when you come down to basics, you know, you don't need to know a whole lot of technical detail about the past. You can actually make it sing for you. But thinking, what was it like for someone to be there and how could I reconstruct that experience?

Where do you find the past is most real to you when you're sitting in this beautiful room looking at your computer Tacitus or when you're sitting amongst mycological reporters on the coast of Italy?

Well, they're both real of that. I mean, I think that the past speaks to you. You have to keep it in a way in its place. I think one of the jobs of the historian is to keep the past in its place, but it speaks in a very different way. And I think that, you know, there are some bits of ancient literature I've read that have always made me rethink who I was and rethink my politics. And I think the obvious example is, you know, Tacitus, his ventriloquist, a defeated person in South Scotland, looking at what the impact of Roman rule is and saying they make a desert and they call it peace.

There is never, ever been a more pithy summation of what military conquest is, and particularly in the 20th century of industrial warfare became truer than ever.

You know, justice will be not justice. It will be smiling in his grave because he showed us just what warfare and peacemaking, you know, what the what the underbelly was.

And I remember I first read that when I was at school and I was doing Latin douchiness, Greek at school. I was you know, I was a bit of a kind of bolshie little teenager. True, I'm suddenly thinking these rumors are speaking to me, you know, making it and calling it peace, that's going to get a tombstone, I think. And so I think, you know, there are bits of Roman literature which are so not just moving, but less so to the point they're so politically acute.

They're kind of. But also, I think the fun that I have is sort of putting that together with the day to day the ordinary, you know, because most of the people read about in Roman literature.

So, you know, you know, upper class hard. And if you say, okay, let's think about what ordinary life is like, what's great about going around Roman sites, whether it's in Halstead's of Hadrian's Wall or to God in Algeria, is you start to see the real life or whether it's the Romans Quoddy or the Romans Filion, you start to kind of raise the other issues about how it was to exist in that world. Do you think about.

Well, it's so funny because I've always been fascinated by total amateur and Roman history. Why you read certain years and the court historians and they are describing a litany of insanity and misrule and hedonism and all the rest of it. And yet, of course, there's this fact, which is despite civil wars and occasional major foreign incursions, the empire survives.

Longevity is everyone's interest in longevity. So when you're looking at the difference in the source and then when you go on the ground, what does that told you about about the relationship between the Imperial Center and these the real life of these Romans all around the periphery?

Well, that's a really good question. My work has done a really good question.

And that's the question, because, you know, one of the big issues about thinking about the Roman Empire is how did the guy in the middle or the guy in the middle with his advisers, how did they actually control anything? Well, you know, they could send a letter to what is now Turkey, and it would take a couple of months to get there, by which time, presumably any crisis was over and.

So you start to think that this is a you know, this what is it like to live in a world of not rapid communications, but also of autocracy and very clearly big things that happen? You know, and Peregian travels the empire. You know, he goes around, he meets people. He rather prefers the east to the west and the north. But he goes around and he makes his mark and he gives a vision of what it is to be a Roman emperor, emperor visiting a community.

Mostly it can't be like that.

Must be it was guys learning how to use the new lavatories that have been just set up in their local town, really new because they're sort of running water and their relationship with Roman power is, well, you know, the very least it's mediated by the big guys in the community, the lower officials in the Roman administration and Rome in Rome works because it in a sense, because it leaves people alone, I suppose.

So the local elites, if the accommodation with the local elites is fundamentally.

Yeah, yeah.

If you're going to do the big structural analysis of why the Roman Empire works. Yeah. Given it has you know, it has very few officials on the ground, very few troops really compared with the size of the local population.

I mean, it makes the British Empire overstaffed right then. The only way you can see that it works is by collaboration, so it collaborates with the local elites. The local leaders do its dirty work. The peasant just knows he's paying tax to someone. But it doesn't much matter whether it's the romance or lost. The last guy who is asking for tax and the Romilly the local elites are in a sense, drawn in by.

The excitement of being part of the imperial project, now, we don't know how that how that works on the ground. I mean, Testa's is very cynical about it now. He looks at Britain and says, oh, you know, so they all like the idea of balls and togas. Oh, oh. Just another facet of their of their enslavement.

But there were examples of elite Syrians, Brits rising quite high in imperial hierarchies, enjoying patronage.

I mean, so it did work on one level, despite Toaster's being rude about justice or the the soft underbelly of it.

I mean, I think that the only way it works is that they incorporate the outsider. And so we have a model of empire which is very top down. Now in some ways, structurally, I guess every empire is top down. But Romans made whether this was consciously or not, they made the upper echelons of the oppressed feel that they could get to be on the top. And so you see. Oh, yeah, you get Roman emperors in the second and third centuries, A.D. who are actually or born elsewhere.

You know, they're not they don't they're not people who think of themselves as Roman in terms of coming from Italy, representing corporative empire.

Now, in some ways, I think that's probably as not you know, maybe it's as nasty an empire as any empire, but it's still a different version from us.

What about the dysfunction, the Imperial Center? Just our lesson impact, because you've got these quite stable elites around the periphery, or is the imperial centre less dysfunctional?

We've all come you know, I don't know how we know how dysfunctional the Imperial Centre was, you know? But, you know, if you if you were to read about the centre of British politics, you know, in the second half of 2017, you would think that it was entirely dysfunctional. And we know that if we were to look at this with a longer viewpoint, we would partly think, yes, it was. But we also think that probably Britain has managed quite well for hundreds of years with a dysfunctional centre.

We also think that the kind of crises for us mean dysfunction, you know, probably conceal the fact that there is a basically a perfectly decent system kind of trundling along, humming away and moving away, you know, and and I think there is we can't see that in Rome.

You know, you can't you can go look at the empire, what you know about the imperial bureaucracy. You know, it's hard to say, aha, that's the civil service. But somewhere under there, there is an imperial bureaucracy humming along. You're listening to history here with Mary Beard, all coming up after this. Talking about cooperative empire, you've got in a lot of trouble recently married for talking about multiculturalism and and parallels with the Roman world.

I mean, is this an empire in which people had equal access? Would Rome have felt like New York today with a different culture?

I mean, it's a thorny issue. Look, you know, Rome would not have felt quite like, yeah, I'm not sure I should talk about what New York feels like, because I think it probably feels quite, quite exclusionary to some people in New York today. Right. You know, no rights to it. So I think, you know, there's a problem here, but there's always a problem about this kind of, you know, the dream of the open society.

But I think what's important about Roman.

Is it it is desire and its commitment to incorporate those that it conquers now, that doesn't mean that we think the conquest was nice, but but Rome's distinction is its follow through and it follows through. It follows that through both in myth and in reality. So, you know, if you're a Roman, you say, where do we come from? Where we Romans come from?

Well, actually, we Romans, by the way, we're refugees. You know, we came from Troy and there was a nurse. He was a refugee from war torn dry. And he founded a race and didn't actually drive, but he founded the Roman race here in Italy.

So their origin is one of the incorporation of outsiders. That's the same. Same is almost true with Romulus, who actually found the city. You know, he was sort of off the Roman race. But what does he do? You know, he kills his probably puts up a notice because he's got he's got a new city and he hasn't got any citizens. He says refugees.

Wilko Right. Now, that is an extraordinary myth of origin in terms of how the ancient world sees this and how we see it, actually, and it's utterly hardwired into the way Romans think about themselves. But you see that they invented that myth. It wasn't true. You see that in terms of many of the things that the other people in the world thought was odd about that. So, for example, when a Roman citizen frees a slave, as they did much more often, it seems all of a slave owning societies in the ancient world, that slave who is freed becomes a Roman citizen.

So there is a kind of but absolute kind of feedback loop from the foreign, because originally most slaves are far from the far into the idea of citizenship. Now we have a very, very ethnocentric view of citizenship. And I don't think there is not you know, it would be glad to say we can just look at the Romans. Do it their way and we're different, but it is important, I think, to say, look, there is a community which, you know, which in the past hugely successful empire, whatever you mean by success, who actually worked on different principles from us.

It doesn't say, I want you away from here. All you outsiders says going to take you in. I also want to talk about women, because you've been doing a lot of work recently about women. I'm really struck by every time I and I'm a generalist, every time I discover a new period and I talk to new historians, specialists and I read wonderful new books, they go, this period is very unusual.

And there's some very powerful women behind the scenes. And it seems to me that that just happens time and time again. So have women actually been excluded from governance with a few exceptions, or has traditional tellings of history deliberately ignored or been unable to recognize the role that women have played in wielding real power?

Um, it's sort of both of those, I guess, in every every historian of every different culture with claims a particularly interesting role for their own women. Exactly. You know, but you don't actually get real, as far as I say. And no, I don't want to be told that women in my period, my period wielded power behind the scenes. You know, that's what they always say, and therefore I'm much more interested in the women of no doubt talent, intelligence, flair, whatever, how they were put down, you know, and I think there are many, many ways of putting women down throughout history.

And I think that also there are ways and those are the ways in which we still learn to put women dead. I mean, I don't look back to the ancient world for role models of how women can be successful. You know, I think, you know. Iraq may not go by, women got shot up in the period that I'm interested, but I'm looking at the ways in which that has. It was part of ancient culture and also in the ways that we have, in some senses, inherited.

Largely indirectly, but partly directly of you, of women's exclusion from the public sphere from that.

Why has women's exclusion been so persistent?

Big question, because if I knew the answer to that, I'd be really, really famous, popular, believe me.

OK, but what I can tell you, I can't answer that question, but I can say there are ways in which our own exclusion of women from the public sphere both pick up on unlatch and pre-process.

The exclusion of women from the public sphere in Western culture has gone for two thousand years.

And one of the things is very, very much struck me recently was looking at the Clinton Trump election campaign. And there were troop souvenirs. Which portrayed. Actually, a replay of the myth of the hero Perseus cutting off the head of the snake, he looked Gorgon, Medusa, and so in a sense, kind of proving his manly worth.

What they did was that they picked up Cellini's sculpture of Persis Medusa, still on display in Florence in the Piazza Villazon area. And what they did was they put Trump's face onto Perciasepe, the heroic murderer and the bleeding, nasty gunge.

Amazing head of Medusa had Hillary Clinton's face. And at that, I thought you just said in the end, the clash, the gender clash between men and women violently. Played out in the ancient world is still a gender clash that we replay what it is that it was then that I think that this was something you could buy this image or get on tote bags, on the computer folders, on coffee cups, on t shirts. And the idea that somehow still we were buying into the decapitation of a powerful woman with a snake locks.

And the same goes for Theresa May. It goes for Angela Merkel, for any other woman, you know. In part, they're always represented as that awful, disruptive, dangerous turn you to stone woman that's Medusa. We stop doing it now. I thought it was very interesting because, you know, just after Trump had come to power, there was a bit of a, you know, minor storm in a teacup. You I want a comedian.

I have no taste, actually. Hold up on television, you know, a head of a decapitated Trump. You know, not that I don't want to do, that's not nice. She loses her job. The comedian loses her job. The previous 18 months, we'd seen images of a decapitated Hillary Clinton as kind of souvenirs. Now you'll say, where does the ancient world lie in our sensibilities? It was not right there.

Can you explain why the Romans created and built that trope? So what? Because actually, the Romans faced and there's lots of interesting women in their own period from from there's always lots of interesting.

But so but why did they and why were they uniquely stigmatized and turned into some of Romney's most famous enemies? Where were these women?

Very patriarchal culture, like every patriarchal culture, both fights. I mean, that's the danger for them. How do you justify patriarchy? Because I think that, you know, many individuals within patriarchy are extremely anxious about it's about what it's standing for. You invent the justification of patriarchy by inventing the danger of women. Women have to be dangerous. You have to you have to show everybody that if you if you if you turn your back, the women will take over and wreck things or make a mess of it.

So great literature particularly has taken taken over many respects by the Romans.

You know, it was full of women and we're about to kill you, you know, are about to go mad now that, you know, the Amazons, the mythical Rasam Warrior, women on the margins, who, you know, it is the job of every good Greek boy to to stop. You know, I tell of you have glimpses in all kinds of Greek tragic drama of what is going to happen if women get in control.

You know, so enlightened Astra is left alone when Agamemnon goes off to the Trojan War, you know, he happens to actually sacrifice their daughter in the run up to this bad news and takes up really slave girl.

But, you know, he comes by on what you know, what is Clytemnestra?

She has taken over the state and then she kills her, you know, so there is no way of being a powerful woman in antiquity in any public sense who is not somehow undermined by the threat of death or in a sense, a collapse of civilized values as we know it.

And, you know, there are multiple stories even about, you know, poor women who just get up to to speak in the Roman forum because they want to say something. And and their words will be reported as she barked in the yapped that somehow women don't talk in male language. They don't get listened to, but they are always dangerous dogs.

Women are dangerous dogs.

What's interesting about Mary Beard is that you say that history needs to be kept distinct. You say it should be it's not for our time.

And you say there are no lessons and you spend a lot of time talking about the present when we talk.

Yeah, yeah. I actually agree with you.

I think that for me, what I dislike about the use of Roman history is the kind of the matching up scenario, you know, you know, we shouldn't do this because the Romans got it wrong. That's stupid. But actually, you know, I think one of the reasons that it's still worth studying debt load is because we're still talking to it. We're still learning from it. We're still actually kind of, you know, negotiating our position in relation to antiquity.

And so, you know, you can kind of. You can say that you're not interested in the ancient world, but nobody living in this country can escape the. We can't get rid of it. And, you know, you can't get rid of it because it's a bloody teacups if you're in the United States. You know, it's still defining how we think about women. You know, one of the things I was both pleased and sad to share with people quite recently was you go to The Odyssey, probably the second work of ancient literature, the second work of Western literature ever written.

You know, one of the obviously it's the story of, you know, Odysseus in the Trojan War, got to get back to Penelope. And he's got a hell of a lot of difficulties getting back to his lovely wife. And, you know, how is this going to happen? Well, the first book zooms down into Odysseus, this palace. He's still trying to get back home and Penelope and she's got loads and loads of guys who want to marry a real plane.

And at one point and I think it's an absolutely formative moment in Western culture, soon into the first book of the Odyssey, her young son or the wet behind the ears teenager is that it becomes don't has been doing women's stuff upstairs and she comes down. There's all these kind of guys who want to marry you and there's a board and he is strong on his lawyer and he's saying and he's kind of telling singing a song about how awful it is for the Trojan, the the great heroes to get back from the Trojan War.

Come back. Back. It's terribly depressing, so but I would really rather you sang rather more cheerful. No, actually a perfectly reasonable request. Telemachus just wet behind the ears. Teenagers, this. Shut up. Speech, public speech is for men get back upstairs. Now, if you wanted a kind of a symbolic start of Western cultures, erasure of the voice of women. You you don't need to look further the you know, the one of the very first works of Western literature in which a teenager is likely not yet grown up, says to savvy middle aged woman, stop talking.

Speech is man's business. It's my business upstairs to your room. And I think to some extent, you know, I've been very lucky. It would be it would be wrong of me to say that I have been deprived of voice. You have not been stuck. You know, I have not been stuck to my limit and I've been very lucky. But I think that that basic idea that you don't hear what women say is still something that that sticks know.

And when people light on things like come, you know, how many how many people of color that were in Rome and Britain in Iraq to me, are you stupid?

Then you put any put any kind of noun in that you like. You know, you just, you know, don't you know, you're just silly. You don't understand this. You know, they're doing the Telemachus. No, they're saying, shut up, woman. Get back to what you understand knitting.

We're struck by Twitter when you get into your periodic fights and the rest of the world and the people will tell men that they disagree with them and they'll be very rude about the opinions, you know, but then with you, they make it immediately about you as a person. Yes. Yes, they do.

And I think it's I think it's a very interesting sense here that the men are allowed to have wrong views. You know, in the public sphere, men are allowed to have wrong to say things that they regret that are wrong. And, you know, and they're told that what they said that it was wrong. Women are told that they're not allowed to voice. You know, I'm going to cut your head off and rape. So don't speak again, darling, or they are stupid.

You know what? We happen to disagree. They are stupid. And I think that that's how that came out. I think very, very clearly around the election campaign in the the different treatment of Diane Abbott and Boris Johnson, who both got it wrong, terribly wrong in radio interviews.

You know, I didn't even begin to compute the cost of the new policing policy, and Johnson didn't seem to know a thing about the parties. You know, key aims in the Post manifesto World Other is treated as if somehow she's just not up to it. Boris is just rapped over the knuckles and told to, you know, come on, boys, get a grip. Now and nobody tells me to get a grip, they tell me I'm stupid, are you going to leave this world?

I mean, if you've got you've got it's a bit depressing because you've got two thousand eight hundred years since the honesty of culture to contend with. Are you confident you're going to leave the next generation in a better place than where you failed?

Absolutely. I mean, look. When I did this, that very, very parochial terms, but now when I came to the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate, there were about 12 percent. Women were undergraduates as well as I was 50 percent last 50 years. And I think, you know you know, I think it's really important that women go on fighting this stuff and say, you know, come on, you know, there's more to be done here.

But also they do need to take a bit of time off to say, Don, you know, if you have a huge amount my mum was born before women had a vote in parliamentary elections.

You know, that's one generation. So I think at the same time, as one goes on and on, battling with also want to kind of raise a glass, as I'm about to do, to know the successes that we've had. You know, there has been in my lifetime a revolution and, you know, I'm a beneficiary of it.

You pass me glass to my family. Well, I've been a beneficiary of it, too. Thank you so much. You know, we're all a beneficiary when when the talents of women are exploited, we all benefit.

Period in the history of our country. Hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go a bit of a favor to ask. Totally understand. If you don't become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or have you get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, perjure yourself, give it a glowing review.

I really appreciate that tough world law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get, so that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you do, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.