Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
Welcome everyone, and thank you so much for joining this Mishcon Academy session, which is part of a series of online events, videos, and podcasts looking at some of the biggest issues faced by society today. Just to introduce myself, I'm Charlotte Wood. I'm a senior communications executive at Mishcon, and I will be hosting today's event. So before I introduce Mary, there are some housekeeping points to mention. Um, if you are online, you have joined this session automatically on mute and without video. If you have a question, you can use the Q&A function located at the bottom of your screen, and we will pick this up and if you have any technical issues during this event, please feel free to let us know via the chat, and one of the Mishcon team will help you. Uh, and if you're in the room, just raise your hand. So also to say that Mary's going to have some limited time at the end to sign some books, but does have to leave quite promptly, I think at 4.00, um, so just bear that in mind.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
A bit before, I think.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
A bit before 4.00.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
Ruth, what time do we have to leave?
Ruth
3.40.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
3.40. Okay, quite a lot before 4.00. Ignore me.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
I have, I’ve signed a lot of books, so, uh, the idea is that if you actually want it personalised, that's what I can do. So yes, and we'll fit it in somehow.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
Perfect. So it feels kind of redundant to introduce you, Mary, um, but I'm going to anyway. Mary Beard is a classicist specialising in ancient Rome. She's a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, is the classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and the Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature. Up until 2022, she was also Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, and her retirement gift to the university was the funding of two scholarships for students. She is currently the host of the Instant Classics podcast with Charlotte Higgins and has appeared in numerous television programmes and is the author of a great many books including Pompeii: Life of a Roman Town, which won the Wolfson Prize for History, Emperor of Rome, which she came to talk to us about in 2023, and most recently Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old. So Mary, welcome back.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
It's great to be back. Very nice.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
Um, so I want to start the beginning of this, uh, conversation at the beginning of your book, where you start at the beginning of your book. And at the beginning, Mary starts by talking about what brought her into contact with the ancient world for the first time and it wasn't some sort of great moving piece of literature or phenomenal famous painting, it was a piece of bread in the Egyptian exhibition in the British Museum.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
There it is.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
And this is the piece of bread. Um, which doesn't look a lot like bread does, but it is very old, um, and I kind of, I wanted to start here for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my first experience of history that I really remember was also at the Egyptian exhibition in the British Museum, um, and I came away with some hieroglyphic stamps that I was very pleased of. But it was also this, like, the sense of the significance and the significance of the ordinary and how evocative the everyday can be has really stayed with me. Um, I've just submitted my PhD in medieval history and I researched medieval hair combs. So this kind of really ordinary objects and what they can tell us about how extraordinary the past is, is something that I personally am very interested in. Uh, and I suppose my question for you is, do you think that it is those sort of quote-unquote normal objects that are most effective?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
That's what, that's what first got me fascinated by, by the distant past. And, uh, it goes, I mean, the bread occasion goes back actually to when I was 5 and we lived in Shropshire and my mum, who was a village school teacher, said, ‘we ought to go and visit London’, you know, I'd never been to London. One of the places we went was the British Museum. Of course, I was 5 and what I wanted to see was Egyptian mummies, right? Absolutely, that was the draw. My mum, in a very school teacherly way, said, ‘well, if we're going to go and see dead Egyptians, we ought to go and see how the Egyptians lived too’, right? So she took me, slightly unwillingly actually, to the Everyday Life Gallery of the Egyptian Everyday Life, and none of you are old enough to remember this, but in, in 1960, museums were very, very unchild-friendly. All the cases were very high. Uh, I couldn't see into most of them. She said, my mum said, ‘oh my goodness me, there's a 4,000-year-old piece of bread’. And of course, I'd just seen the Egyptian mummies, but a 4,000-year-old piece of bread, that was really something. But it was right at the back of the case, and she tried to lift me, and I couldn't really see it. At that point, um, a guy who I then thought was very old, he must have been kind of pushing 40, I imagine, walked past and said, saw what was going on, I was trying to see, and was I wanting to, 'See something in particular?' And I said, 'yeah, you know, that piece of bread, that piece of bread at the back of the case’. And he must have been a curator because he put his hands in his pockets, he took keys out, he unlocked the case, and he got the bread out of the case, right? And he held it, I didn't touch it, but he held it right in front of my nose. And that was, that was my kind of, you know, Pauline conversion moment, you know, actually being, you know, without intervening glass, you know, 2 inches from a piece of 4,000-drop bread. And it really, it had a kind of impact on me about its, you know, its ordinariness, its familiarity, but its unbelievable age that was that made an impression much greater than the rather garish mummies did. Um, and I think that, so I never forgot that sense of close and how close you could be to something that was so trivially ordinary. I also, I think in retrospect, never forgot, I'm not sure this was the message I took at the time, was that that guy had given me a very important message, you know, which is, you know, the job of the expert is to open cases for kids, right? Um, and as I re-thought the whole occasion, it's that sense of how important that was to me, you know, that, and, you know, maybe you can't always do it literally, but you can certainly do it metaphorically. And so it kind of, it was a moment that stuck with me forever. But partly, as you say, Charlotte, it was, it was the shock of the ordinary, really, um, and I mean, I call it in the book ‘Thauma’, the Greek word for wonder. It was kind of that real wonderment, which is, you know, Plato and Aristotle talk about it quite a lot. They also talk about it not just in not just in terms of very big wondrous things, pyramids and eclipses, but also the wonder of the everyday. And so it was a, and I should have gone on to learn hieroglyphs, I suppose, but I did the next best thing.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
So there are two things I want to ask you about, and one of them is responsibility and that expert responsibility. But the other is, you talk about, I think you say, ‘the wondrous, breathtaking, up-close ordinariness of the ancients never quite dispels the equally wondrous distance that will always separate their past from our here and now’. And I feel like that's something you do so well in this book and is so difficult, and you make it look very effortless. How do you approach making the classical world very relatable while consistently reinforcing all the ways that it isn't at all?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
Takes you decades to learn how to do it, I think. Um, my first reaction, and I think it's like our first reaction to a lot of things, is, um, oh, how close I've got to them, you know. And it's like when you do a telly programme and people say to you afterwards, and I slightly cringe when they do this, weren't the Romans just like ourselves? And you want to say, in part, you know, what is wondrous about the ancient world is that in part they are just like ourselves, you know. They make love, they go to the loo, they eat, they sleep. Um, if they weren't a bit like ourselves, they would be very boring, you know but it's the fact that they are a bit like us. But the, why history is so intriguing for me, I think, is because there's a much bigger, that paradox is built into it, you know, that they are both human beings, we share all kinds of things, but the more you find out about them, you know, when you stop being 5 and looking at a piece of bread, the more you find out, the alien, the more alien, the more different, the more unfamiliar, the more difficult to understand they become. So, you know, it's a bit like a friend of mine once said, kind of, you feel like when you're studying the past, it's like you're on a tightrope. You know, you look down one side, you're balancing very precariously, and one side you look down and everybody's doing completely normal things. And you look the other side and they're being completely barking mad, you know, and you can't, you, and you think, how is this the same? You know, how can I understand that world? And I think that's, you know, it is, you know, it is, it's a wonderful challenge actually to think about, um, how the familiar and unfamiliar go together. And that's why I think, you know, that's really why the past is interesting, because you want to say, you know, are they like us or aren't they like us? And it's the fact you can never pin the answer down that makes it so, so exciting, actually. I think, you know, everybody's been going on about Artemis II and I know that the dark side of the moon is very exciting. I mean, I accept that, I've watched it, I've watched that stuff. But the past, the deep past, any bit of past is actually, for me, it's just as puzzling, as kind of edgy, as difficult, but eye-opening as the dark side of the moon, that little piece of bread, you know.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
And you go on to talk later in the book about how the distance is actually what makes the classics so continuously compelling and what makes studying it so rewarding, is that you do have this gap that you can kind of have these conversations in an almost, in a way that feels almost safe compared to…
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
Yeah, I think that there is, I wouldn't say it was frustrating, I think there's something kind of terribly alluring about the difficulty of understanding it. But at the same time, like you say, it's the wonderful thing about the past is that you can say what you like about it, and that you can, um, you know, nobody's got skin in the game in the Romans, you know. You can say what you like. And I've had all kinds of really good experience with students at all levels of actually being able to use that real distance of the past in a way to talk about now more interestingly. And I talk about one encounter in the book, which is going to a London comprehensive school and sort of, um, observing, to start with, a discussion these bright 15, 16-year-olds were having about free speech. Um, it became apparent, you know, as I listened, that they thought that the problem of free speech had only become a problem with social media, right? That it went back about 15, 20 years, you know? I, I've been trying not to sort of muscle in on this, but at this point I had to say, look, this is a much longer problem than that, um, skipping lightly over the Renaissance, um, we went back to Socrates, you know, 399 BC, Socrates is put to death basically on free speech issues. Um, now these kids first of all claimed that no one had told them about Socrates ever before. I don't know whether that's true, but that's what they claimed. They were really interested, and they were interested in what I was trying to say, which is that the problems of free speech go along with speech. You know, as long as there's been human speech, there's been issues about who can say what to whom. Um, and so we started talking about Socrates, had to fill them in a bit because they claimed to know nothing. What was really interesting was not only did they find him interesting to talk about, but the level of discussion that they were having when they were talking about the ancient world, it was just so much higher than it had been when they were talking about the modern world. That was partly because, um, when they were talking about now and social media, you could see that they were anxious, they were a bit looking over their shoulders and thinking, you know, if I say I support J K Rowling, well, I, you know, it's just am I going to get a pile on, you know, etc., etc. They, they really got in to talking about Socrates. So kind of as a sort of pedagogical exercise, as more than that, I think, as a place where you can explore quite safely issues that are still our issues. There's, you know, nothing to beat the Greeks and Romans, really.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
I think that ties into what I was wanting to ask you about responsibility, because you are probably one of, if not the most well-known classicists. For many people, you're kind of their primary or predominant touchpoint with the ancient world. Um, as a law firm, we like responsibility, we think about it a lot. Do you ever think about your responsibility in terms of what it is, or is it like, you know, looking in the sun, if you do it you'll kind of go blind?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
I think responsibility comes in different forms, and I think one is a kind of professional responsibility. I suppose one of the reasons I wrote the book in a way was that I've been paid to study this subject for 50 years basically, um, and I have some obligation I think to share that. I mean, that's like my curator story, that, you know, that I think that you have a social obligation to explain to the rest of the world who, even if they're not quite paying with their taxes like they used to be 40 years ago, are still at some level are paying you to do this. How do you justify yourself? How can you bring people in? How can you, how can you make sure that that's, um, that people, that people can see and judge what you're doing, right? You know, it's a socialist perspective with a small ‘s’ really. So I think that's one responsibility. But I think that there's a kind of wider humanistic responsibility that, that academics, teachers of any, at every, any level of teaching have, which is to, I mean, I think academics have a duty to help people see that the world is more complicated than they think it is, uh, and Classics is one safe way of doing that, and I think that's very important. And I think that humanities subjects also have a, they have a civic responsibility, actually, to help people see that what it might be like to think differently from the way they think. You know that, now, in terms of the ancient Greeks and Romans, it's very, it's very clear why they think, you know, they're a very long time ago and they didn't, they didn't think like us. Let's see if we can start to, to unpick what it would be like to think like that. And, you know, that's an interesting intellectual academic exercise. I think it's also pretty clear that, uh, it's a modern democratic obligation. I mean, I think if you were to look at modern geopolitics, you might say, you know, one of the main things that these guys, and they're mostly guys, need to do is understand what it might be like not to think like them. Now, it doesn't mean that you agree with the other person if you try to understand what it would be like. You can still deplore their point of view if you want, but the sense of seeing what it might be like to view the world differently, I think that that's what something like classics, history also helps you, fiction helps you do it in a way. I think that's absolutely, that is the ultimate civic responsibility of the humanities academic.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
I was saying in a meeting earlier that I think one of the ways that your book is so brilliant is that it really, it does that very effectively. It kind of teaches you, or helps you think about the ways that you are thinking about the past and about history, um, and the kind of nuance that you have when you engage with this. I think you say, 'Interest over adoration and reverence when looking at the past’. Um, you argue that line very effectively, but do you think the nuance and the interest that's required to take that approach, do you think that has changed in kind of recent years?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
It's very hard to say. I mean, I think it's very easy to, uh, look back at the history of any discipline and to crudify it, to say, once upon a time, uh, classicists just admired the ancient world. Um, they didn’t, they didn't engage in that kind of nuanced interpretation. We, however, you know, us kind of new enlightened 21st century people, we of course have a very complicated and sophisticated view of the past. Now I think actually, um, there's always been people who have, um, have seen the complexity of history. We don't always recognise it, you know, because we tend to, I think we read them rather crudely, but we don't recognise it. But I think that for me, the most important thing, and it's what you say, is that there is nothing worse than kind of passive reverence for a golden age, wherever it was, whether it's 200 BC or whether it's 1900 AD, you know, um, and one of the things that you're wanting to do, and I think is always there amongst, in the study of history, even if we choose to forget it, is seeing beyond admiration, you know. And that's one of the things that's kind of very, very depressing if you're a classicist, to see one strand of modern support for the subject actually is, is built on that sort of passive reverence about the great age of the past to which, you know, in whose shadow we gratefully sit. And I mean, the obvious example of that is democracy, I guess, you know, that, um, uh, we're taught extremely unreflective things about democracy, like, and the past, you know. We're taught that the ancient Athenians in the 6th and 5th centuries invented democracy, you know. As soon as you say it, you know, it's not, democracy isn't like an iPhone or a steam engine, isn't something you invent, you know. It's something that you do and that people have been doing and experimenting with. I mean, the Athenians, Greeks, invented the name, but the idea of the, the basic principle of, of a democratic, and relatively equal society, has been found in many places at many times with many different origins. But I suppose that where my kind of distaste, particularly for the reverence, comes in in relation to democracy is that It took me a long time when I was a student, you know, I'd been, as you say, I'd been brought up with that kind of admiration. And what I was studying, I discovered, when I actually studied Athenian democracy, I discovered that it wasn't at all like that sort of, you know, men in sheets, you know, being frightfully responsible and arguing, you know, rationally, right? You know, no women and no slaves, but we were somehow taught to kind of not mind that, you know, that was just what the Athenians did, you know. But the history of the 5th century BC in Athens is a history of assassination, coup, and attacks on democracy, and no one had ever said that to me. They said it was somehow, you know, a great monument, great achievement, uh, of the Greeks. And there I think there's a, what you see is a sense that we've sold ourselves short there. I mean, you know, after about 20 years, what the message I took was not that Greek Athenian democracy was, was some way particularly admirable. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. The lesson I took was that it's a damn hard process to keep on the road and that if you want democracy, Athenians didn't have it for very long, um, and they had to fight for it.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
I actually found a lot of this book really uplifting, like the way that you talk about the messiness of being human and how the past is not clear-cut and there aren't sort of good and bad and right and wrong. And it's a mistake to look at it through that lens. Actually, it's much more rewarding, um, when you kind of embrace how difficult it is to be a human being at any age. And I was wondering if that was intentional, if you meant it to be a kind of a guide to appreciating humanity.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
It would be wrong to say that I sat down to write a book saying, ‘I'm going to write a guide to appreciating humanity’. I didn't do that. Um, but I think that insofar as it's a one undercurrent of the book is me asking myself what I've got out of 50 years studying the ancient world. And that is, that is certainly one of the things that I've got out, you know, that things are very complicated, that it, it's, it's dangerous and it's messy and it's difficult but also uplifting to think about how you engage with the past. And of course it is, I mean, because you're always caught, it's a bit like my tightrope again, you're always caught between the necessity, and I think it is a necessity, to try to understand the past in its own terms, you know, how did it make sense, how did their world make sense to them, and also to understand it in yours, right? Because, because it's you that's actually doing the understanding. And it's, it's very interesting, I think, that, I mean, I would hesitate ever to say that, um, any kind of form of teaching in the British educational system, you know, hadn't somehow got it right. But one of the biggest, um, strands of criticism I get, you know, on social media so, you know, we don't know who the critics are, is to say, Mary Beard is always using her own views to look at the ancient world, you know, she is foisting on the ancient world her feminism, her social, you know, you name it. And you want to get these people, I do sometimes try, but it's hard on Twitter. Um, you want to say, look, but the past is about, you can't, you can’t leave, your own morality at the door. And I challenge people to describe the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome without any sense of moral judgement on that. Now, I can understand, I can try to begin to understand how that kind of, square quotes, entertainment, what sort of sense it made in Rome and I think that is part, to try to do that is part of the duty of the historian. But you've also got to say, I think that's wrong. You know, at a certain point you're allowed to say, I disapprove, right? And now, if all, all you did was criticise the past from the perspective of the present, you you'd be a jolly bad historian. But if you never criticised the past from the perspective of the present, you'd also be a jolly bad historian. So again, it's another of these very, very kind of, um, delicate balancing acts, I think.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
I think it's either the second to last or the last chapter you talk about being able to find how, like you finding your way to do that, you finding how your voice and how you wanted to talk about history and the way that you wanted to talk about the ancient world. And I think you say there's a bit where you say that you didn't always think you did a good job or a bad job, but you always saw and heard yourself. Um, and I was wondering if that's something that I think everyone wants to be able to do, no matter their career, be able to communicate in a way that reflects themself.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
Yeah. And you know, that can sound slightly self-indulgent, but it's what I think.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
I don't think that's self-indulgent.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
Um, but it came, it came after years and years where, and I think this was particularly true for women in the academy, uh, it came after years and years of wondering how I could speak about the ancient world. I remember when I was a young lecturer, the only model really I had for lecturing, teaching in that kind of public arena was a male model, and I just, I copied it, right? I sort of thought, yeah, ladies and gentlemen, you know, all this kind of old-fashioned Oxbridge stuff, you know, um, and my lectures were a very good pastiche of a particular old-fashioned style, and I think they were reasonably successful, except that when I heard myself speak, I thought, ‘Who's that talking’? It took me a very, very long time to think, right, what I want to say is, you know, I think it's very hard to even begin to understand the character of Cicero, or whatever, you know. And I suppose it took me, well over a decade of active teaching before I felt, okay, I shall speak my mind and, you know, when I say I recognise myself, that's true. I mean, very, very occasionally I watch television programmes I've made, very, very occasionally, usually with a gin and tonic. But, um, some of them I think are good, and some of them I think are not so good. Um, but, you know, as you say, I made those to the point where at least I could see that that was me talking. Sometimes she doesn't talk very good sense, sometimes she does, but it's me. And I think that's one of the biggest, the biggest rewards of the Academy is finding, and I'm sure it goes in other walks of life, like law, one of the biggest rewards is being able to find your own role in it and to feel that you aren't somehow, you're not pretending to be somebody else. I think that I spent a hell of a lot of time pretending to be somebody else.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
It's interesting you say that because it feels like it's taken a lot of practise to get to this point where you can see, in the same way that it takes a lot of practise to be able to walk the tightrope between the distance and the kind of familiarity of the past, right? You're constantly sort of, is it just constant trial and error through the whole way?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
It's just trial and error, and it's also support from other people, and in some ways, I think in terms of voice, it's obviously support from women, but not only. And there's one moment that I talk about in the book which did jolt me, and I think was very helpful, was, I suppose I must have been in my mid-20s and I'd written an article, so quite young, very young career really. Um, and I had written an article on some kind of arcane bit of Roman religion, I think. And I showed it to an older colleague. I said, ‘Could you read this and tell me what you think’? And I said, in the way that people always do, "I want you to tell me really what you think. I'm not looking for praise." And nobody, I have since learnt that is never true, you know, when people show you an article and say, tell me what you think, what they mean is tell me you like this. Um, and we went out to lunch to, uh, discuss this, and at the end of lunch, it was so in my mind, I can still remember where it was, it was in the Pizza Express opposite the British Museum that we did this. And we got to the article and he said, "I'm sure it's right, um, but do you know it's very boring?" And I thought, that's true, actually, that's true. And I thought, why is it boring? And I, you know, one of the reasons, I think there are many, but one of the reasons it was boring was because I was still in kind of, copycat mode. I was still, it wasn't saying what I wanted to say about this arcane problem of Roman religion. I was kind of, I was pretending to be a bloke writing an academic article for the Journal of Roman Studies, and it was boring, right. I think there's sometimes things to be said for being boring, but not, I think, in this case. And I didn't, it didn't help me solve that issue of voice. But, it's a bit like the bread moment, it stuck with me, um, you know, and I thought, I don't want to be boring, I really don't. You know, I don't want to be wrong, you know, there's lots of things you don't want to be. I don't want to be inaccurate. I don't want to be wrong, but I don't want to be boring. And in order not to be boring, you have to speak for yourself. You can't, you know, it's impossible to conquer boredom, your own boredom, as it were, your own boring voice, if you're all the time wondering what it is an academic is supposed to say at this point. So that was, it was very unpleasant. Now I think you'd probably be, you wouldn't exactly be sacked, but I think somebody would be disciplined from telling a younger colleague that they were boring. Absolutely beyond the pale.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
But it was useful.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
It was so useful. I remember we had an awful lot to drink and I was, and I now see he was nerving himself to say this, you know. It wasn't so, it's hard, it's, you know, it's not nice to be told you're boring, it's damn hard to tell someone else they are.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
Have you ever had to?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
I think that I have, I think that I have and I'm not sure that I've always done it very well. And, um, I think that within the academy in particular, there is still a sense, and this is slightly tangential to my own trajectory, but I think very important. There's still a sense that what an academic is doing is telling the world what they think instead of helping the world to hear them, right? And, you know, I'm sure we all know this, you must, Charlotte, from Oxford, you know, how many seminars have I been to where the graduate student keeps their head in their paper and reads out, um, rather too much to fit into the 45 minutes, uh, because nobody has ever said, ‘think how this is landing’, you know? Think about what you want to say, but it's not just what you want to say. You want to, you want to persuade people, you know, having a good idea is no good if you're boring, um, because you want, the only point of having a good idea is to persuade other people it's a good one.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
I recently became the enemy, or the person I swore I was never going to be, by going to a conference and presenting with slides with all text and no pictures, um, for a full 15 minutes. And then I finished that and I was like, oh God, I've been institutionalised too long, I've got to get back to work. Um, I want to pivot a little bit and ask you about evidence, because quite early on in your book, again in the introduction, you talk about how, um, lots of people are interested in the classics because we have a lot of evidence. There's a lot of evidence. We're finding new stuff out every single day. We're offering new translations. People are really engaged. There's so much to read. Um, but what do you think, you know, 3,000 years in the future, what are people going to think about us? We do so much online. What's going to survive of us?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
I mean, in practical terms, I think that there's a real historical problem here because stuff is going to disappear. First of all, stuff is going to disappear, you know. When email first started, I kind of, strangely, sort of self-important way, I used to print the emails out, right? And I felt quite good about this until when I retired, I came across these files. Of course, they'd all faded, you couldn't read them, all the writing had gone, right? Completely fruitless. Um, and I worry, um, I worry about our unwillingness to, um, to consign things to paper, you know, partly, you know, fear of FOI requests and this kind of thing. And I work in institutions who, um, if you go back to their 19th century minute books, you get absolutely fantastically rich accounts of the discussions that led them to whatever it is. If you look at the current minute books, it says a discussion was held about the acceptance of a donation, right? You think, because we're scared, you know, and so it's not just that it's the technology, it is, uh, the, the idea that we feel anxious about consigning things to paper. So I think that really, it really is important that we think about how we are going to give history what it, well, the kind of material on which it can make its mind up about us, right? Um, but I think in a more general sense, um, one of the things that history, looking at any period, opens up is what will the future say about us? Or, you know, what will people in 300 years be writing essays about, about us, right? And I think that that sense that history frees you up to look at the future as well as to look at the past. Um, and you can have some very good discussions about it. I mean, I'm going to give you my answer when, you know, what will people be writing essays about in 300 years' time about Britain in the early 21st century? It will be, it'll be about prisons. It'll be about why did they bang so many people up so expensively in order to turn them into even more hardened criminals. That would be a fantastic essay something like that.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
Has thinking about that changed the way that you kind of, has it had any impact on the way that you live your life now?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
I think I'd be the last person capable of judging that because, you know, I'm certainly not someone who goes around thinking, ‘No, what will this look like in…’, uh, but I think it, it sharpens you up to the false certainties of your own age. It, it makes you, looking at the past helps you see through the sanctimonious self-righteousness of the contemporary world. Uh, it helps you see its oversimplifications. And I would hope that, you know, you hope that in some sense that does, that impacts on how you live and work. I mean, but that's for somebody else to judge, I think.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
Has the, you've recently retired, and has the way that shift changed the way that you write or research and work?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
Um, I don't think it has very much, um, but that's, I suspect, because my own career in the academy, I mean, I think most Cambridge, Oxford, any, any university's academics are actually overworked, right? Um, they're underpaid and overworked, but they do have some kind of flexibility about how they, where they, where they put that overwork., right? Um, so I think that retirement has less of an impact. Some of the obligations that I had were removed, and some of them I slightly regret, but, you know, I'm delighted never to have to mark an exam paper ever again, absolutely wonderful, right? But it's, the overall template is the same, you're just shifting it in different ways. Now I think that’s, that would not be the case for, you know, obviously not the case for all, um, professions when the shift from full-time work to retirement is much more clearly demarcated, you know, it doesn't feel to me very different.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
You're still doing quite a lot of work?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
I'm going to utter the most appalling cliché now, um, but it's true. You know, I'm just, I feel busier than what I've ever been, right? And, you know, that's what active grannies always say. I feel busier than ever. But, you know, this year I'm judging the Booker Prize, and I can tell you, reading 160 novels in 7 months, it's quite hard work.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
That's quite a lot of novels.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
I can tell you, that's quite a lot of novels.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
Okay, I'm going to ask one more question and then open it up to Q&A from the audience, um, and it's a fun one and also possibly quite a naughty, well, bad question. And it's, you, you use this book to kind of argue or show us how, um, classics can still be relatable to us in the modern time. But we have just gone in a time machine and we are dumped on the streets of ancient Rome. How do we fit in and be relatable to the Romans?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
I think that that in some ways is the other side of my, um, alien-familiar question. I'm going to show you one more slide. Um, I've often been entranced by this petrits, some paintings that were put up in a bar in Pompeii. And it's, this is kind of Charlotte's question, it's kind of showing us, um, it's projecting the image of life in the bar, first of all to the people who inhabited the bar in 78 or 79 CE, but also to us. And it's another of those kind of, I can see the familiarity here, you know, there's a couple having a snog. There's a couple, there are two people getting fresh with the waitress. Uh, there's, um, a couple having an argument about a board game, uh, and in the final scene on the bottom right, um, they're still having the argument, and the long-suffering landlord is saying, ‘look guys, if you want to fight, you get outside’, right? And you think, you see that and you think, I could fit in on the streets of Rome, you know, I could really fit in. Um, but again, it's a bit like with, you know, with the bread and the immediacy. The more you think about it, the more you'd be in a completely, a completely alien environment, you know. I wouldn't know how to behave in a Pompeian bar, you know, I just, I simply wouldn't. And you know, that's another return to the, I can imagine what it would be like to, and then the simultaneous realisation that we don't really know what's going on here. When I was writing the book, I was trying to find ways of thinking about that difference and, and the unfamiliarity. And I think when people talk about that, they usually think about very big things. They think about what would it be like not to know that the Earth went round the Sun rather than the Sun going round the Earth. I think it wouldn't matter very much, probably. Looks as if the Sun goes round the Earth, doesn't it? Um, it's the, it's the kind of, the problems of knowing the individual bits of knowledge about identity, about self, about being me, that where I see the biggest gap, which would make it really impossible to fit in. And the obvious example of that, and, um, you can probably do the dates later better than me, but, um, one thing that is, I think, a true fact about antiquity is that nobody knew what they looked like. Um, there's, there are mirrors, but they're only kind of polished bits of metal. So, and we know what happens if you look at yourself in a spoon. I mean, you get some sort of idea. And that's only for the very rich. Um, the rest of the people would catch sight of themselves in a puddle or in a pond, but they would have no idea really, you know, what, what they look like. Now that's where you, you start to see the, how impossible it would be to fit in, because, you know, for us particularly after, you know, now having spent years and years on Zoom calls, the person that we look at all the time is ourselves. So, we know our own face better than we know anybody else's face. Now, what would it, what would it be, and this would be true for anybody up to about 17th century Venice, probably when mirror glass was invented, what would it be like to be a person in a world where people didn't know, they couldn't recognise themselves. And I think that that is just, I don't know, I simply don't know. Um, we know that there are lots of jokes in the ancient world about that, which suddenly, when you've seen that problem, kind of come into perspective it's, you know, very short one is two guys walking in the street, and one says to the other, ‘hi’, and he says, ‘hi’ and then the other one says, ‘hey, I thought you were dead’?. And the second guy says, ‘no, you can see, you know, here I am alive’. And the first guy says, 'but the man who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you are’. And you think, ah, got a bit of a laugh, you don't often get a laugh. What's happening there is that's appealing to a sense about who knows what about whom, and who do you, you know, how do you know who you are. And it's, it's so alien that I think I can't begin to imagine how, how difficult, and how impossible it would be even to walk down the street in Pompeii and sort of manage, right? You'd stick out like a sore thumb, wouldn't you?
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
You would. Thank you. Okay, I'm going to stop being selfish and we've got some roaming mics if anyone wants to ask a question in the room, and then also online if you use the Q&A function. We've got one down here and then one at the back as well. There's one down the front row.
Audience
Professor Beard, Mary, um, my name is Barry Sherman. Um, we have communicated in the past, if you may recall.
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
Yeah.
Audience
I've, like you, just retired after 45 years in Parliament, but I did chair the Education Committee for 10 years, and so much of what you do has been so, um, influential on my life, professional life and personal life. And if someone jumps up and says, what should I read? I usually say to you, Emperor, or these days Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, uh, if you really want to get started, your brain cells moving. Um, can I just concentrate the question on, um, academic life now? Um, there's a tremendous movement to against the arts subjects, um, and a move to emphasise practical subjects that pay well very quickly. I'm a graduate of the London School of Economics, and, uh, that has been transformed in recent years. Um, I think you know, and I do, that there is a big change. How do we, how do we keep your discipline alive?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
I think we have to, not defend, I think the word defend is not right. I think we have to stick up for it better. I think that there is, I'm including myself in this. Um, the way the humanities subjects are defended by their practitioners is often awfully feeble. It is, you know, I mean, I have read seriously intelligent people say, um, oh, it's really good, you know, the whole, the culture of literature and music is really good because it contributes to our well-being. And I'm afraid I think, try Wagner, you know, it never contributed to my well-being, thank you very much. You know, the idea, and that goes along with a sense that, which I think you feel more in the UK than you do in the US, where there's more of a direct opposition to humanities. I think the British opposition to humanities is much more in the form of, we think it's wonderful, you know, I'm really pleased that there are people here who can still read Virgil, whatever, but that's not what government should be paying for, right? That's so, it's not in a kind of outright assault on what the humanities do, it's just putting the humanities below the bar of what, what the state should contribute to. Now, I think some of the things that I've said today, I think of the building blocks for an argument. I mean, I find it very irritating, not to say kind of strangely, kind of paradoxical, um, when government ministers who have just at least given the nod to, e.g., the closing of several English departments in universities, then deplore the low level of political discourse in, e.g., social media or wherever. If you say that the words matter, right, uh, then most humanities disciplines contribute to the absolute essential building blocks of democratic civic debate. Look, and if you, if you want to see what happens in a, in a kind of world that doesn't have that, um, just, you know, spend a few hours on X and, you know, it is, it is about that kind of wondering what the argument looks like from the other side. Now how do you ever find a way of doing that except in some form through history or through fiction? And, you know, that public discourse will collapse unless we support the kind of skills that underpin it. And you can see that, I mean, I thought we might get through an hour without mentioning Trump but if you think about what people say about Trump, they take him seriously but not literally. Now, if we're in a world in which we cannot actually trust what people in power say. We might disagree, whatever. That, I think, is the kind of the end of political debate as we know it, you know, I think, I think he's, he is at the pinnacle. He's not the only one. He's at the pinnacle of that end of political debate as we know it. And the, you know, I'm not saying that everybody who does a humanities degree comes out, you know, whenever I say this, people always say Boris Johnson, you know, he did classics, right? Yeah, education doesn't get it right 100% of the time, you know, but it gets it right more than not having it. So, but I think, you know, we have to start not, not kind of, it's so sort of lily-livered about it all. Oh, it's kind of really nice, you know. And this campaign we have at the moment, which to some extent I really support it, campaign for get Britain reading, right? Great. But it's all about reading being fun. Well, some reading is fun, but reading makes you think, and it can be very uncomfortable to read things. Again, you know, Wagner, you know, try a kind of short course in Kafka and see if you come out feeling better. You know, no, you don't. But it's been mind-changing. So no, I agree with you, we need you back.
Audience
Hello, there's been like a surge of re-imaginings for classic stories recently with like Madeline Miller and Pat Barker. There's also like Odyssey by Christopher Nolan coming out in June. I just wondered your thoughts on like these modern interpretations of old stories and if you think is a positive or negative?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
Oh, totally positive, um, because I think that that's, if classics and classical stories were just kind of in, in some refrigerator somewhere where we could kind of get them out with, you know, with blue gloves on and then put them back, we might as well give up. Uh, you know, the myths and stories were constantly reinvented in the ancient world itself. They were told in different varieties, sometimes dramatically different varieties. You know, we all know the story, I think, of Antigone, who in Sophocles' play, you know, buries her brother against the orders of the tyrant and ends up dead. You know, there are other versions in which she kind of marries Hymen and has a nice life, you know, with a couple of kids later, you know. And there, there's always this and I think that it's been really great, I think, to see people saying, hey, let's, particularly women who've said, what does this look like from if you tell it from the point of view of Circe, or you tell it from the point of view of the women in the Trojan War, etcetera. I think they've been absolutely great, and their sales show that there's a great market. I, I hope it doesn't get stuck in that, you know, I hope that all potential classicising authors are not just trying to find another neglected woman to talk about. I hope that, you know, but it's been brilliant. And, you know, I think, I mean, I hated Gladiator 2, I really hated it. But Gladiator 1, and I'm hoping that Christopher Nolan will give, um, will give The Odyssey the kind of boost that Wuthering Heights got, you know, I'm looking to see The Odyssey in Sunday Times bestsellers.
Mishcon
We have a couple online, but we'll try to get through this one first. What is the most interesting or intriguing fact that we all must simply know about ancient Rome?
Mary Beard, British classicist and Cambridge Professor
Oh God, I can think of things that people get wrong. Oh, I know, I think this really does help you change your view of the Romans. Um, question: what did Roman men do when they met? You know, you meet somebody, what do you do? Now we tend to think, you know, shake hands. No, they kissed, right? And that seems so un-Roman, doesn't it? That you kind of think, you know, you meet your friend in the street and you kiss. It feels very Mediterranean, um, because we, we have this version of the Romans as deeply formal, you know, that, you know, they stand there in togas and it's kind of their, you know, stuffed stock shirt kind guys. Now, I think it's a trivial point, but it, if you start to kind of put that back into your image of Rome, um, it really does launch a different image. You know, Gladiator, even Gladiator 1, doesn't have them kissing. And I mean, we know, we know this for a fact, and there is a wonderful little anecdote about the Emperor Tiberius which just supports this, that, um, there was a very, very nasty outbreak of infectious herpes in the palace, um, in the early 1st century CE. What did Tiberius do in order to kerb it? He forbade kissing, you know, it makes you feel quite differently about the Romans, I think.
Charlotte Wood, Senior Communications Executive
Well, Mary, thank you so much. Please everyone join me in thanking Mary for coming in. It's been wonderful to have her.