So, Mary Beard<\/a>, you\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n Would you actually have liked to live in that time and place? The answer is emphatic. \u201cAbsolutely not!\u201d<\/p>\n Being Roman is the title of a new six-part series Beard is presenting on Radio 4. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But the idea of living in that society herself fills Beard with horror.<\/p>\n \u201cFor a start, I\u2019m a woman. That\u2019s quite a good reason in itself for not going back to that time. Women had no political rights. They had limited legal rights \u2014 in fact, a kind of ability to control property that wasn\u2019t the case in the UK until the 19th or 20th century.<\/p>\n \u201cBut essentially, a woman\u2019s 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!<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a cruel world, and it was a painful world, whether you were a man or a woman.\u201d<\/p> 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 \u2014 she taught Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, for getting on for 40 years \u2014 but her energy and productivity show no sign of waning.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 Emperor of Rome.<\/p>\n And in addition to the radio series and the book, there\u2019s a forthcoming BBC2 documentary that Beard has been filming.<\/p>\n Ancient Rome is a lifelong cause for Beard, so how did it all begin? \u201cI just really got into it at school,\u201d she says. \u201cBack in the \u201960s, it was still a time when teenagers could go and volunteer to be on archaeological excavations, which I think would not be possible now.<\/p>\n \u201cI did that in Shropshire. I discovered that there\u2019s something hugely affecting about being able still to have physical contact with the ancient world \u2014 like, a piece of pottery that was once held by a Roman. That\u2019s a very trivial example, it\u2019s very corny, but I found it quite moving.\u201d<\/p>\n The trip wasn\u2019t just about the broken bits of Roman pottery. \u201cI 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\u2019s entertainment in all kinds of ways. I remember that very vividly.\u201d<\/p>\n Beard benefited so greatly from studying Latin and Greek at school that I wondered where she stood on the teaching of those subjects today.<\/p>\n Rishi Sunak recently announced that he wants maths and English to be compulsory to the age of 18, so how about Latin as well? \u201cWhat a nightmare! I don\u2019t think any subject should be compulsory after the age of 16!\u201d<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get Mary Beard wrong. She says we must make sure we don\u2019t lose Latin and the study of ancient Rome, but she is confident that \u201cevery generation reinvents it for themselves and finds different things in it\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n One major cause of her optimism is the change in the requirement around studying Latin at university. \u201cThere 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.<\/p>\n Read more:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIn my day, many universities, if you wanted to do Classics, you already had to have Latin. Now you can learn it from scratch.<\/p>\n \u201cNow, that is hugely important because it means that it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n As with all history, the study of Ancient Rome means nothing if we don\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n \u201cI 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 \u2014 this is the end of the province of Britain or whatever, but they\u2019re by and large modern fictions.<\/p>\n \u201cRomans would look at our issues about illegal migration, say, and wouldn\u2019t understand what we meant by that.<\/p>\n \u201cThey 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\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The lessons don\u2019t end there. \u201cAnother 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?<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p> ![\"Mary](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/3\/2023\/05\/Mary-Beard-credit-BBC-1b7306b.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Mary")
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