“It was a cruel world, and it was a painful world.”
This article was originally published in Radio Times magazine.
So, Mary Beard, you’ve immersed yourself in Ancient Rome your whole professional life. It fascinates you and you love it, and your enthusiasm for all things Roman has inspired countless others.
Would you actually have liked to live in that time and place? The answer is emphatic. “Absolutely not!”
Being Roman is the title of a new six-part series Beard is presenting on Radio 4. It’s a departure for our most cherished historian of the period, in that its focus is less on military and political might than on the whole spectrum of Roman society, from a slave to an emperor.
But the idea of living in that society herself fills Beard with horror.
“For a start, I’m a woman. That’s quite a good reason in itself for not going back to that time. Women had no political rights. They had limited legal rights — in fact, a kind of ability to control property that wasn’t the case in the UK until the 19th or 20th century.
“But essentially, a woman’s job was to have baby after baby, and they often died in childbirth. They had no possibility of having a public voice at all. So, no thank you!
“It was a cruel world, and it was a painful world, whether you were a man or a woman.”
Beard is in a studio on the sixth floor of Broadcasting House, taking a break from recording her Being Roman script. Now 68, she has retired from academia — she taught Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, for getting on for 40 years — but her energy and productivity show no sign of waning.
She has just travelled down to London on a sleeper train from Edinburgh, where the night before she was giving a lecture that drew an audience of 650, and spending an hour and a half signing 1,500 copies of her new book — Emperor of Rome.
And in addition to the radio series and the book, there’s a forthcoming BBC2 documentary that Beard has been filming.
Ancient Rome is a lifelong cause for Beard, so how did it all begin? “I just really got into it at school,” she says. “Back in the ’60s, it was still a time when teenagers could go and volunteer to be on archaeological excavations, which I think would not be possible now.
“I did that in Shropshire. I discovered that there’s something hugely affecting about being able still to have physical contact with the ancient world — like, a piece of pottery that was once held by a Roman. That’s a very trivial example, it’s very corny, but I found it quite moving.”
The trip wasn’t just about the broken bits of Roman pottery. “I remember the exciting social life that I was able to have, out of the clutches of school and parents, camping in a muddy field with a load of other young people, going to the pub and having a good evening’s entertainment in all kinds of ways. I remember that very vividly.”
Beard benefited so greatly from studying Latin and Greek at school that I wondered where she stood on the teaching of those subjects today.
Rishi Sunak recently announced that he wants maths and English to be compulsory to the age of 18, so how about Latin as well? “What a nightmare! I don’t think any subject should be compulsory after the age of 16!”
Don’t get Mary Beard wrong. She says we must make sure we don’t lose Latin and the study of ancient Rome, but she is confident that “every generation reinvents it for themselves and finds different things in it”.
“We feel very pleased with ourselves when we find it again, but we have to remember that people have been finding it again since about the fourth century.”
One major cause of her optimism is the change in the requirement around studying Latin at university. “There is not a university in the country now where, if you want to, you cannot learn Latin and Greek from scratch to do a Classics degree.
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“In my day, many universities, if you wanted to do Classics, you already had to have Latin. Now you can learn it from scratch.
“Now, that is hugely important because it means that it’s not only people who went to the kind of schools that teach Latin and Greek who can go on to do Classics. That completely changes the constituency of the academic discipline.”
As with all history, the study of Ancient Rome means nothing if we don’t apply its lessons to today, so what are the perspectives on the modern world that Beard thinks the world of 2,000 years ago provides?
“I think there are similarities and differences. One thing is the Romans effectively lived in a world with no boundaries. Centuries later, we mark them on the map — this is the end of the province of Britain or whatever, but they’re by and large modern fictions.
“Romans would look at our issues about illegal migration, say, and wouldn’t understand what we meant by that.
“They lived in a world in which there was no such thing as places where you were or were not allowed to go, be and live. I’m not saying that one should emulate the Romans, but getting your head around the idea that we could see the world differently, I think is quite interesting.”
The lessons don’t end there. “Another thing that has struck me from those times is the question of, how do you trust your political leaders? Do you think your political leaders are just performing an act? Do you think they are speaking words in which they believe? Do they lie?
“We talk about that these days, and exactly the same it was a focus of debate in antiquity. We are not the first generation to wonder whether our political leaders are having us on.”
You wonder that? “Of course you wonder that. To be a Roman emperor, was that a performance? Are you always performing some kind of act? That was discussed hugely in relation to Nero.
“When we see a prime minister filling up a small car with petrol at a petrol pump, do we think that he’s really doing that? Or is it a pose, is it an act?
“The emperor Augustus, in a way, almost mirrors this. He was supposed to have had his wife sit in the inner courtyard in his house weaving, with the door open so people could see Livia at her female tasks. That is just the same. No one really believed Livia wove all Augustus’s clothes, although that was one claim.
“There was a pretence there. Maybe we want a bit of pretence in politics, but certainly, I think seeing those kinds of issues through the lens of the Romans is quite interesting.”
Do you live, breathe and sleep ancient Rome? “No! It’s a really interesting job, and it does kind of affect the way you see things in the world. But I do occasionally escape from the ancient world.”
What do you escape into? “Oh, you know — food, a bit of telly, newspapers. All the things everyone escapes into.”
So what TV have you enjoyed recently? “Well — I, Claudius, of course. But I’ve missed out on some things I think I would enjoy. If I could get into Strictly, I think I’d really enjoy it, but I never have.”
Perhaps they need to invite you on? “I think that’s a big lose for me, isn’t it!” Would you if they asked? “I haven’t got the time, she says judiciously. But no, it’s true, I haven’t got the time. My friends watch Strictly, and I’m part of the culture because I can join in the conversations about it, but I’ve never actually watched it.”
Come on Strictly, where’s that invitation?
Being Roman begins on Radio 4 at 11:30am on Wednesday 8th December.
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