Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Each Sunday, we're sharing one
Speaker 1: of our favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This.
Speaker 1: The show features conversations with some of the smartest and
Speaker 1: most well respected writers from Australia and around the world. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from acclaimed classicist and ancient Rome
Speaker 1: expert Mary Beard. Michael Williams is the host of Read This,
Speaker 1: and he's with me now. Hello again, Michael, Ruby Jones.
Speaker 2: Hello, Hello, So.
Speaker 1: Your guest this week is a bit of a departure
Speaker 1: for Read This because Mary Beard. She's a writer, but
Speaker 1: she's actually more well known for being the pre eminent
Speaker 1: scholar of ancient Rome. So tell me a bit about
Speaker 1: her career.
Speaker 2: There is a reasonable chance, Ruby that Mary Beard might be,
Speaker 2: in some circles, the most famous person we've ever had
Speaker 2: on Read This. You know that meme that did the
Speaker 2: rounds a few years ago, asking particularly heterosexual men how
Speaker 2: often each day they thought about ancient Rome, and the
Speaker 2: answer was like staggering. It was like heaps and those
Speaker 2: men and the people who love those men have heard
Speaker 2: the name Mary Beard. She's the expert when it comes
Speaker 2: to ancient Rome. She's written more than twenty books. She
Speaker 2: wrote a book in twenty fifteen called SPQR and that's
Speaker 2: probably the one that broke her through to commercial stardom,
Speaker 2: which has written Emperor of Rome, another book called Twelve Caesars,
Speaker 2: and in the UK she's a rock star. She's like
Speaker 2: parlayed this expertise into TV stardom. She's hosted shows on
Speaker 2: the BBC like Pompei, Life and Death in a Roman
Speaker 2: Town and Julius Caesar Revealed, which sounds sexy, but it
Speaker 2: is still more ancient Rome content.
Speaker 1: And even though you do discuss her latest book this episode,
Speaker 1: it does explore through a discussion about Mary's life sentence,
Speaker 1: how her obsession with ancient Rome began.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Life sentence is a format that we
Speaker 2: use occasionally in read This, where we ask writers to
Speaker 2: reflect on an influential It could be a piece of writing,
Speaker 2: it could be a piece of advice. But that earworm
Speaker 2: that they have when they're sitting at traffic lights where
Speaker 2: they can't stop thinking about this one sentence I've heard
Speaker 2: again and again and Mary Beard's, unsurprisingly is a Latin phrase.
Speaker 2: It's a lot of fun and it does reveal for
Speaker 2: her why she sees a study of the ancient Romans
Speaker 2: as not being about a celebration of empire, but is
Speaker 2: something altogether more complicated. And it's really It makes for
Speaker 2: a great conversation.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment. Friends, Mary Beard fans countrymen,
Speaker 1: lend me your ears.
Speaker 2: My partner's father, Warren, is a brilliant man, but he
Speaker 2: has the daunting habit of grilling guests and family alike
Speaker 2: with arcane points of trivia and pop quizzes. And Mary
Speaker 2: Beard is up there in his personal reading pantheon. Your
Speaker 2: knowledge of the Roman Empire gets a decent work Adam
Speaker 2: Warren's company. And while I've been reading and loving Mary
Speaker 2: Beard for years, and I've been trying to keep my
Speaker 2: sandal and Toga knowledge fresh, I have to confess that
Speaker 2: the bulk of my reading on Rome comes from Asterix comics.
Speaker 2: I don't always know my Plenty the Elder from my
Speaker 2: Plenty the Younger. Luckily, Mary Beard is in the business
Speaker 2: of making the ancient feel accessible without dumbing it down. Mary,
Speaker 2: do you meet people who automatically approach you with an
Speaker 2: intellectual inferiority complex, who are intimidated by your level of scholarship,
Speaker 2: your level of knowledge and reading the classics are imposing,
Speaker 2: aren't they?
Speaker 3: They are?
Speaker 4: And I used to notice that more when when I
Speaker 4: was younger.
Speaker 3: The old kind of thing.
Speaker 4: You get on a train and it's a long journey,
Speaker 4: and someone would say what do you do and you'd
Speaker 4: say I'm a classicist. It didn't start a good conversation. Usually. Well,
Speaker 4: I soon got to realize you said I'm an archaeologist,
Speaker 4: and if you said that, things open up. And now, actually,
Speaker 4: I think, you know, I've been quite lucky because because
Speaker 4: I've been on the telly, and because what I do
Speaker 4: on the telly doesn't look posh, it doesn't look kind
Speaker 4: of as if this is all I'm talking about things
Speaker 4: that you don't know about, you know. I know I
Speaker 4: found my train journeys are much better, you know, And
Speaker 4: I can say, oh, yeah, you're Mary Beardy does the Romans,
Speaker 4: and I can say, yeah, I'm a classicist, and people
Speaker 4: think it's kind of cute rather than off putting.
Speaker 2: One of the things I love in Twelve Casons is
Speaker 2: you make the case that the interchangeability of emperors is
Speaker 2: a feature, not a glitch, that we're the ways in
Speaker 2: which they blend into one in our minds is a
Speaker 2: very deliberate function of their period. Can you explain that
Speaker 2: for it?
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you go to a museum where there's a
Speaker 4: lot of Roman sculpture, let's say, you see how slightly
Speaker 4: anxious people are because they can't I can't be certain
Speaker 4: that they can tell one emperor from another. And I
Speaker 4: used to be deeply afflicted by that. I used to think,
Speaker 4: I am just hopeless. You know, there are all these
Speaker 4: busts here and I can't tell Tiberius. And it wasn't
Speaker 4: really an until well, I've been teaching for a long
Speaker 4: time that I realized that's the point.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: The point about the Roman emperor, you know, when he's
Speaker 4: recreated in marble, is that he looks like the other ones,
Speaker 4: or occasionally there are ruptures. But the other thing that
Speaker 4: I really like about them, and I think it would
Speaker 4: hugely help in our own culture wars and statue wars,
Speaker 4: is that they were very adept. At one rain comes
Speaker 4: to an end, they've just got a new statue, just
Speaker 4: made of Nero, let's say, and they think, oh gosh,
Speaker 4: we've got a new dynasty, no Vespasian. They just get
Speaker 4: their hand on chisel and they turn the features of
Speaker 4: Nero into the features of Vespasian, and I think if
Speaker 4: only we'd thought of that.
Speaker 3: You know that you don't need.
Speaker 4: Necessary to pull statues down. You can leave them up,
Speaker 4: but you can adjust.
Speaker 2: Them, chip away a different chin line, chip.
Speaker 4: Away, make it a different give him a different airstart,
Speaker 4: give him a different label underneath. And they see quite
Speaker 4: unlike us. I think they see statues as works in progress.
Speaker 4: You know, you can take the head off if you like,
Speaker 4: put another one on. You know, you can add something
Speaker 4: to you know, give him something to hold.
Speaker 3: In the hand. And that seems to me to be
Speaker 3: a whole level of.
Speaker 4: Imagination that we just haven't recreated. We're a bit over
Speaker 4: serious about statues.
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that I so love
Speaker 2: about your work is this internal ambivalence between a deep
Speaker 2: moration for certain vests of ancient Roman society on the
Speaker 2: one hand, and on the other deep skepticism. You know,
Speaker 2: you're at pains to stress. You're not studying this because
Speaker 2: you love engine.
Speaker 4: I mean, people always come up when they say, oh,
Speaker 4: you must love the Romans, what you know.
Speaker 3: I think that you.
Speaker 4: Can find people interesting, you know, for decades without liking
Speaker 4: the bastards. I think what you know, what is so
Speaker 4: interesting about the Romans is that kind of ambivalence between
Speaker 4: them being we can barely begin to make sense of
Speaker 4: in our horror, what would it be like to sit
Speaker 4: and watch people being put to death in the gladiatorial arena?
Speaker 4: And people say we shouldn't judge the past, Well maybe
Speaker 4: we should sometimes and say that that is really awful,
Speaker 4: and wonder what enabled them to do it? And yet
Speaker 4: you can put that together with finding them just so
Speaker 4: smart about things in a way that surprises you. You know,
Speaker 4: they can talk about themselves.
Speaker 3: In a way that is jaw dropping.
Speaker 2: Sometimes we have already touched on the way people perceive
Speaker 2: the Classics in a particular way, and it can sometimes
Speaker 2: be seen a synonymous with a glorification of empire.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of things
Speaker 4: are all mixed up into one. I think in people's
Speaker 4: assumptions about people who study the ancient world.
Speaker 3: And part of that, I.
Speaker 4: Think in any Western culture is that Classics was used
Speaker 4: as a gatekeeper for the elite. You know, how better
Speaker 4: to define an elite kadra of little boys than teach
Speaker 4: them a language no one speaks. It is absolutely classic
Speaker 4: gatekeeping practice and people of color were kept out, women
Speaker 4: were kept out. But I think that that then goes
Speaker 4: together with the idea that that culture legitimated empire ever after,
Speaker 4: and that what the British Empire was doing was providing
Speaker 4: a justification for itself by looking back to the stories
Speaker 4: of the Roman Empire. That all those guys who were
Speaker 4: busy exploiting the empire, all the stories that they had
Speaker 4: learned at school, and so there was a neat circle
Speaker 4: and a join up between class privilege and the exploitation
Speaker 4: of the empire.
Speaker 3: And I think some of that is right.
Speaker 4: What it ignores, I think is that when there were
Speaker 4: debates in the nineteenth century in England, as there were,
Speaker 4: we forget this and we think of them all as
Speaker 4: jingoistic imperialists.
Speaker 3: No they weren't.
Speaker 4: They were busy talking about what the imperial project was,
Speaker 4: whether it was justifiable. And you look and you see
Speaker 4: the people involved in both sides are coming from the
Speaker 4: ancient world. You can see these guys on the Manchester Guardian,
Speaker 4: you know, in the eighteen seventies and eighties, and they're
Speaker 4: actually an anti imperial newspaper straight down the line, and
Speaker 4: they're kind of trying to recruit from people in red
Speaker 4: Classics at Oxford and Cambridge, because in some ways, I mean,
Speaker 4: the point about classics is that it's never quite as
Speaker 4: easy to pin down as that simple characterization of it
Speaker 4: would suggest.
Speaker 2: To what extent is the study of classics almost entirely
Speaker 2: about the art of reading and rereading the same fixed points,
Speaker 2: the same fixed texts, again and again for reinterpretation to
Speaker 2: better understand, because surely the core material is more or
Speaker 2: less unchanging.
Speaker 4: One of the real pleasures about it for me is
Speaker 4: not just, let's say, reading Virgil. It's reading a text
Speaker 4: that I know people have been reading ever after. I mean,
Speaker 4: Virgils are near it. I could not prove what I'm
Speaker 4: going to say, but I'm sure it's true, Virgilson, there
Speaker 4: is a text that has been read by somebody every
Speaker 4: day since Virgil almost finished it. And okay, they've mostly
Speaker 4: been men, and they've been privileged people. But it is
Speaker 4: a text which actually joins up, literally joins up in
Speaker 4: the experience of reading us and people in the eighteenth century,
Speaker 4: in medieval monasteries, and in the ancient world itself. And
Speaker 4: I find that hugely pleasurable to think that I'm sharing something.
Speaker 4: It's very hard to share an experience with people in
Speaker 4: the past, but you can share the experience of reading
Speaker 4: in a way that you can't share the experience of medicine.
Speaker 4: So I found that very challenging and simultaneously challenging and reassuring,
Speaker 4: I think. But it also I like the idea that
Speaker 4: those texts, some of them at least, are so hard.
Speaker 4: And I mean people they do find it, to start with,
Speaker 4: I think puzzling that they can't read it like they can.
Speaker 4: You know, you learn French, and after you've done a
Speaker 4: bit of French, you can pick up a French novel
Speaker 4: and you can read it pretty much like you can
Speaker 4: read an English novel.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: I've never been able to do that with Latin, or
Speaker 4: certainly not with Greek. And to some extent you think,
Speaker 4: and this might be right, that I'm just not good enough,
Speaker 4: But I think that really it is the text that
Speaker 4: we are constantly returning to are very very hard. If
Speaker 4: you look at something like Tacitus is Annals, the history
Speaker 4: of the early emperors, that would have seemed as weird
Speaker 4: to them as we find reading James Joyce. Reading James
Speaker 4: Joyce is really hard. We're kind of confronted by language
Speaker 4: doing something that we didn't think language ought to do. Right,
Speaker 4: And that's the same with certainly tests, it's annals. You
Speaker 4: go back to the Greek fifth century, Thucydides is history
Speaker 4: of the Peloponnesian War. We still can't translate it because it's
Speaker 4: anymore than you know, imagine translating Finnigan's Wake into French.
Speaker 4: I mean something no doubt has tried, but it will
Speaker 4: be an issue that was right at the very limits
Speaker 4: of what language can do. And in part I think
Speaker 4: both thecidities and these are two historians, of course, but
Speaker 4: both Thucydides and Tacitus, they're not just kind of using
Speaker 4: language in a difficult way perversely, anymore than Joyce was
Speaker 4: being perverse in Finnigan's work. They're using a kind of
Speaker 4: confrontation with language behaving badly.
Speaker 3: Really, She's what it is.
Speaker 4: To start to think about, how do you write about
Speaker 4: a system that is corrupt?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean, I know, I know. Tacitus for
Speaker 2: you is a really important part of your own reading.
Speaker 2: He was a kind of crucial moment for you as
Speaker 2: a working glass girl coming up through the classics, to say,
Speaker 2: wait a minute. They weren't all triumphal ust. They weren't
Speaker 2: all telling a history of success.
Speaker 4: And that's actually where my life sentence comes from.
Speaker 2: Oh go and give it to us.
Speaker 4: Because it was the kind of light bulb moment when
Speaker 4: I understood that the Romans weren't quite as imperialistic and
Speaker 4: jingoistic as i'd thought. You know that I was at school,
Speaker 4: and I must have been about fourteen, and I was
Speaker 4: at an academic girls' school, and you know, yeah, I
Speaker 4: was fourteen, and I was reading testas I was reading
Speaker 4: Taestus's biography of his father in law, Agricola, one of
Speaker 4: his easier works.
Speaker 2: Actually not what a sloucher were married.
Speaker 4: And towards the end of this account of Agricola's life story,
Speaker 4: there's an account of a battle between Agricola's Roman forces
Speaker 4: and the forces of the Brits, and as in many
Speaker 4: Roman or Greek histories, that the battle starts almost entirely fictionally,
Speaker 4: with the pep up talk to the troops on both sides,
Speaker 4: and Calcucus is scripted by Tastas, and Tustas had no
Speaker 4: idea what this guy in North Britain said in eighty three.
Speaker 4: Absolutely certainly he had no idea. He's giving him a
Speaker 4: version of what it is like to be a barbarian
Speaker 4: enemy under room. And at one point he's saying, look,
Speaker 4: what do the Romans do? You know, they're robbers, they're thieves.
Speaker 4: Huge denunciation of empire. And then he says, and they
Speaker 4: make a desert and they call it peace, it'll be
Speaker 4: solitudin them vacuunt paken appellant.
Speaker 3: And I remember reading this this.
Speaker 4: You know, they make a kind of they make destitution,
Speaker 4: they make a scorched earth, and then they give it
Speaker 4: the name of peace when they've done it. And it
Speaker 4: was the first time, although I was sort of good
Speaker 4: at Latin, it was the first time only bit of
Speaker 4: Latin had ever spoken to me.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: It actually said there's a point here, and it's not
Speaker 4: just a point about Colgagus under a curricula, and the
Speaker 4: barbarians in the end, of course are going to get thrashed.
Speaker 4: I'm afraid, so what about us? You know, this was
Speaker 4: the time of the viet no more. And so they
Speaker 4: make a desert and call it peace. You do it
Speaker 4: in five words, And you're speaking about now as much
Speaker 4: as about eighty three CEE. And I think it was
Speaker 4: those few words which convinced me that I could go
Speaker 4: on with these guys because they were so smart about
Speaker 4: their own faults.
Speaker 2: When we return, Miry reveals the true lessons that we
Speaker 2: can learn from the ancient Roman Empire. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Part of the project of Emperor of Roman seems to
Speaker 2: me is explicitly to suggest the ways in which we've
Speaker 2: misunderstood the nature and the role of emperor as a position.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think that we've thought about them
Speaker 4: as individual characters, mostly bad, you know, somewhere on the
Speaker 4: spectrum from psychopath to just a bit dotty, occasionally interspersed
Speaker 4: with someone trying to do his best. And we have
Speaker 4: been very one down down the road which the ancient writers,
Speaker 4: I think encourage us to go down in a way,
Speaker 4: and thinking that what you need to do is you've
Speaker 4: got to get their biographers straight. You've got to see
Speaker 4: these as individuals with a story, and the only way
Speaker 4: to understand them.
Speaker 3: Is to know the story.
Speaker 4: And you've got to know why this one has a
Speaker 4: different story from that one. I mean, one of the
Speaker 4: things I wanted to say is, look, most emperors are
Speaker 4: very similar. Sure they have their different characteristics, but they're
Speaker 4: much more similar than they are different.
Speaker 3: And if we think about them as.
Speaker 4: People doing the same job from the same place, with
Speaker 4: the same staff, the same resources, we then start to
Speaker 4: see something much more clearly about I think the terror
Speaker 4: in part of the Roman Empire, but also the mundane
Speaker 4: working life of these guys. Now, what is interesting is
Speaker 4: that they spent their time in their filing cabinets going
Speaker 4: through their introy but they were written about as if
Speaker 4: they were having sex in the swimming pool and showering
Speaker 4: people with rose battles.
Speaker 3: That's where you get to the problem.
Speaker 2: It is one of my favorite things about your approach
Speaker 2: is that you kind of take us by the hen
Speaker 2: and you say, if you're asking are these stories true,
Speaker 2: you're asking the wrong question. These stories have survived, and
Speaker 2: so the fact that they've survived, the fact that they
Speaker 2: were the ones that were told is what makes them interesting.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right, I think.
Speaker 4: You know, I was brought up when I was a student,
Speaker 4: and then actually my early academic career, I thought the
Speaker 4: most important thing was to kind of try and work
Speaker 4: out which of these were true, which of these were
Speaker 4: flagrantly untrue, and which were a kind of bit exaggerated,
Speaker 4: and that once I'd done that, I would then have
Speaker 4: a story of the Roman Empire that I could tell.
Speaker 4: And it took me decades to realize, first of all,
Speaker 4: that we can't know. It's not that I can go
Speaker 4: through and say that's true and that can't be.
Speaker 3: We don't know whether it is true.
Speaker 4: My hunches that most of them are somewhere on the
Speaker 4: spectrum between untrue and exaggerated, but I couldn't prove that.
Speaker 3: But what I can say is that the important thing
Speaker 3: about them is they.
Speaker 4: Get told and retold by Romans, and actually the same
Speaker 4: stories about different emperors. You know, they get exactly the
Speaker 4: same treatment, and that what you're seeing there is not
Speaker 4: literal truth, but you's seeing truth at a kind of
Speaker 4: higher level. That what these stories are trying to capture
Speaker 4: is what imperial power is like.
Speaker 2: Share with our listeners that you've mentioned the rose pedants
Speaker 2: and being showered with rose petals, and it really did
Speaker 2: jump out of me as an acute example of something
Speaker 2: that doesn't have the ring of gospel truth about it.
Speaker 3: No, it doesn't.
Speaker 4: It's a story told about the emperor Elagabalus, about whom
Speaker 4: most people quite understandably have not heard. He's a teenage
Speaker 4: emperor from Syria, originally at the beginning of the third
Speaker 4: century CE, and an awful lot of what we know
Speaker 4: about the Roman Empire in popular culture comes much earlier
Speaker 4: than that in I Claudius, you know, whether it's the
Speaker 4: movie or the novels or whatever. First century Cean, the
Speaker 4: usual cast of characters. Actually this very interesting stories from
Speaker 4: much later, and this is one of them. The whole
Speaker 4: reign of this kid is treated as if it is
Speaker 4: an example of about the worst thing that could ever
Speaker 4: happen to the Roman Empire to be ruled by this kid.
Speaker 4: What you see is a whole series of anecdotes which
Speaker 4: try in different ways to capture his villainy. And the
Speaker 4: one I think that has got kind of currency and
Speaker 4: as appealed to writers and artists for since, is he
Speaker 4: invites people to dinner and at the end of the
Speaker 4: evening in a traditional Roman way, and Nero had done
Speaker 4: this before the ceiling opens, and most battles fall out
Speaker 4: on top of the guests. You know, that's what an
Speaker 4: imperial dinner party, That's what it looks like, except in
Speaker 4: Eligabalus's case, there are so many rose battles that the
Speaker 4: guests smother and I now it doesn't take much to
Speaker 4: say us sitting here now saying I wonder if that
Speaker 4: was true, isn't really getting to the point of this.
Speaker 4: And what I've tried to do in the book is
Speaker 4: to say, what is that storytelling us?
Speaker 3: What does it hit.
Speaker 4: Home when we're thinking about Ella Gabalus or about the
Speaker 4: emperor in general. And I think it hits home because
Speaker 4: it's saying, when the emperor is really generous to you,
Speaker 4: that's when he's his most deadly.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: Imperial cruelty is not just about knives in the back
Speaker 4: in dark corridors. The Emperor can kill you literally.
Speaker 3: By being kind.
Speaker 4: Now, at that point you start to begin to get
Speaker 4: a glimpse of the sort of way that the morality
Speaker 4: that governs the Imperial Palace, the morality that governs the
Speaker 4: autocrat and those who surround him, Just how perverted it
Speaker 4: could be. These guys they try to be kind, but
Speaker 4: it's deadly.
Speaker 2: That does really nicely bring us back to that idea
Speaker 2: of classical studies. Wagan active rereading an act of looking
Speaker 2: at it and interrogating, are there stories that endure that
Speaker 2: you think create a kind of damaging understanding of the
Speaker 2: Roman Empire, or at the very least are not useful one.
Speaker 2: You know, ancient Roman seems to me to have lots
Speaker 2: of bad fans who've learned the wrong lesson from it.
Speaker 4: And we I suppose we saw that a few months ago,
Speaker 4: didn't we?
Speaker 3: With the that.
Speaker 4: TikTok meme of the woman and then many times replicated
Speaker 4: the woman asking her bloke how many times you thought
Speaker 4: about the Roman Empire? And you know you said, oh,
Speaker 4: about fifteen times a day or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is wild, And he thought, he, I don't
Speaker 3: believe that.
Speaker 4: But b he thought, in what way is that big
Speaker 4: a bad fan? And it did seem to me there
Speaker 4: and I think this up what you're asking that the Roman.
Speaker 3: Empire has become.
Speaker 4: Partly because it is sort of officially classical, it's become
Speaker 4: kind of safe space where you can you can have
Speaker 4: matro fantasis. You know that what you're doing is you're
Speaker 4: thinking about a world in which it's okay to imagine
Speaker 4: invading people in your little skirts with your shield and
Speaker 4: your spear. And you're going to build roads, and you're
Speaker 4: going to build bridges and aqueducts, and you're going to
Speaker 4: be really male. That is part of what the Roman
Speaker 4: Empire is about.
Speaker 3: Got to deny that.
Speaker 4: But I thought if somebody said on TikTok, I think
Speaker 4: about the Third Reich every day, you think this is work, This.
Speaker 3: Is not good.
Speaker 4: But you can say I think about the Roman Empire
Speaker 4: and you're allowed.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: Of course, you're only thinking about one bit of the
Speaker 4: Roman Empire. You know, you're never imagining yourself as poor,
Speaker 4: you're never imagining yourself as a slave. They imagine themselves
Speaker 4: as generals and emperors, of course, and so you know,
Speaker 4: I found it quite cheering because I thought, well, there's
Speaker 4: work to be done here, because there are people who
Speaker 4: are kind of interested, but maybe you could show them
Speaker 4: that it was actually even more interesting if they took
Speaker 4: a wider view. But you're right, you know, the Romans
Speaker 4: have been and Classics in general have been good alibis.
Speaker 4: You know, go back to the seventeen eighteenth century and
Speaker 4: you want to have a really launchy painting with the
Speaker 4: kind of sex shown that you would never be allowed
Speaker 4: to actually show. You dress them up as nymphs and gods,
Speaker 4: and you can do anything, you know, So classics has
Speaker 4: been an alibi for being able to think about things
Speaker 4: that we perhaps shouldn't be thinking about in quite that way.
Speaker 2: It is true in pop culture it's often a shorthand
Speaker 2: for a kind of idea about the bauchery, or an
Speaker 2: idea about the kind of respectable face of that.
Speaker 4: Yes, and I don't know, And you never quite know
Speaker 4: whether you're looking at these same painting, these creations of
Speaker 4: the Roman orgy.
Speaker 3: You know, are you looking at it to enjoy it?
Speaker 4: Or are you looking at it to say, God, worn't
Speaker 4: those Romans dreadful? And of course you're doing a bit
Speaker 4: of both. You know, nobody ever says weren't those Romans dreadful?
Speaker 4: Without having a slight sort of lurid fascination. I like it.
Speaker 2: Mary Beard is onto you for Roman students, she says,
Speaker 2: right through this, I have to ask you are well
Speaker 2: and truly on the record as being no great fan
Speaker 2: of Marcus Aurelius.
Speaker 4: This will now get me into trouble, as he always does.
Speaker 4: But you know I'm already in trouble, so there's no.
Speaker 2: Point in trying to escape lean into it.
Speaker 4: I have to say I admire him. I admire him
Speaker 4: for being two thousand years on a best seller. And
Speaker 4: you know, when I look at the Amazon charts in
Speaker 4: Roman culture, he almost always outsells me, and you know,
Speaker 4: fair cop, I'm both impressed and slightly jealous.
Speaker 3: I think he's interesting in all kinds of ways, but
Speaker 3: I can't stand.
Speaker 4: Is the best seller, which is the Meditations. You know,
Speaker 4: his jottings to himself are vaguely based onto philosophy that
Speaker 4: he put in his little notebook, and somehow we don't
Speaker 4: know how they got published, copied and circulated. And I
Speaker 4: can't stand them because they're such dreadful cliches, and yet
Speaker 4: they have this aura of almost kind of legitimate sexiness because.
Speaker 3: They're maram an emperor, you know.
Speaker 4: And if he's said that President Clinton used to have
Speaker 4: a copy of Marcus really is his meditations on his
Speaker 4: bedside table, Heaven knows what he learned from them. I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm going to parody slightly, but you know, they say
Speaker 4: things like, when you get up in the morning, always
Speaker 4: think what you're going to do that day, have a plan,
Speaker 4: and you think, really.
Speaker 2: You know, So now it is it's the Little Book
Speaker 2: of Karma at stage just it happens to be written
Speaker 2: by a Roman emperor.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it shows you that the Roman Empire in
Speaker 4: different ways, and Roman emperors in particular still have something
Speaker 4: going for them because it's because it's written by a
Speaker 4: Roman emperor. You know that people think this is interesting.
Speaker 4: And there's Clinton, head of the Western world, is it?
Speaker 4: You might say, once he got by his bed, the
Speaker 4: self help cliches of a two thousand year old head of.
Speaker 3: The Western world.
Speaker 4: I think it's all a bit more commercial though. I
Speaker 4: think that, you know, why does Marcus Aurelia still selling
Speaker 4: great quantities? Partly because publishers can absolutely marketing without ever
Speaker 4: having to pay him any royalties.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 2: I think it would be a very lovely author for
Speaker 2: publisher to work with, but you'd still be higher maintenance
Speaker 2: than Marcus Aurelis.
Speaker 4: I think I would. There's nothing better than a dead
Speaker 4: bestseller of bread.
Speaker 2: It's a pretty good thing to embrace. I just wonder
Speaker 2: whether those countless heterosexual men on TikTok who are thinking
Speaker 2: about ancient Rome fifteen times a day, I wonder if
Speaker 2: you offer the therapy to men who otherwise are uncomfortable
Speaker 2: to go to therapy through the lens of the advice
Speaker 2: of ancient Rome. I think I think you're on to
Speaker 2: a winner.
Speaker 4: And I think possibly that's the market to which Marcus
Speaker 4: Aurelius is already playing.
Speaker 2: I think that's possibly right. I have no doubt of
Speaker 2: the therapeutic player of the work that you do, and
Speaker 2: I'm so grateful to thank you. Mary Beard's many wonderful
Speaker 2: books can be found at your favorite independ bookstores. Marcus
Speaker 2: Aurelius probably can too, but focus on Mary beards Fire.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our
Speaker 1: favorite interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations
Speaker 1: with Michael Wondacci and Charlotte Wood. And if you don't
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Speaker 1: you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts.