‘The Romans are unavoidable,’ says Mary Beard

Professor Emerita of Classics at Cambridge, the 69-year-old Mary Beard has been interested in the Romans all her life: and her books, podcasts and TV series have helped explore the fact and fiction of that ancient world. Ahead of the Jaipur Literature Festival where she is a speaker, Beard talks to Magazine about busting myths around the early civilisation and more. Edited excerpts:

Why should the world engage with the Romans?

The way they thought, and how they argued, gave us for better or worse, the tools of the trade with which we think about the modern world, [and issues] such as empire, citizenship, what it is to be a citizen. Their phrases are still on our lips; when, in the middle of the Cold War, Kennedy went to Berlin, he quoted Cicero. I think the Romans are extremely interesting — and they are also unavoidable.

When did you decide to make the classics not only about elite white men?

I’m quite interested in those elite white men, but they’re not all the story. It developed over my career, teaching in Cambridge. Initially, I taught my students rather gloomily that we can’t ever see the position of a woman or slave in Rome. As I went on teaching, into my thirties and forties, I realised that the non-elites, the slaves, the women, have left an extraordinary mark on Roman history. Though we don’t have the shelves of literature from them that we have for those elite white blokes, we have their tombstones. We have what they scratched on the walls. We have papyrus documents from Roman Egypt. I went recently to the Palatine Hill in Rome, to an establishment of the slaves of the imperial palace. There the walls were covered with graffiti, written by slaves telling us where they came from. There was one signing his name, saying he’d originally come from Kherson in Ukraine. And I thought, that is part of our geopolitics, too. When you start looking for the stories of the people who are not in that traditional Roman governing class, you find loads of them.

As you did in ‘Women and Power’, which traced misogynist routes to Rome and Athens. But we are in the 21st century, women’s voices are still not that audible in the public sphere, or is it changing?

Look, you can’t be too gloomy. There are worrying things happening for women in many parts of the world right now. When I was growing up the U.K. Parliament was all white men in suits. If you look at photographs of MPs now, they include people of colour, they include women. And we were a bit late to the party compared with places like India, but we’ve had female Prime Ministers. But it’s still the case that women aren’t heard in the same way as men. Women get into much more trouble. We had one disastrous [female] Prime Minister recently, Liz Truss; but the reporting of her was so misogynistic. A man making that kind of mess would also get criticised, but not in the same completely damning way. And that means, there’s a bigger job.

Mindsets haven’t changed…

When I was younger I used to think that equality for women was very close, and that what you needed were some practical changes — proper nurseries, proper contraception and equal pay, and so forth. We still don’t have equal pay, but you can do most of that. But still it’s how people think about women’s authority in their heads that counts as much as all those practical things. And that mindset, it’s still a long way to go to change that.

In your latest book, ‘Emperor of Rome’, you bust several myths about the Roman world. What do the stories tell us about the imperial court?

I tried to take a new look at how ancient writers discuss the Roman Empire, and I decided not to do it through telling one biography of one emperor after the next. I thought let’s just take them all together and study the broad spectrum between so-called good and bad emperors. You could take some of the kind of very flamboyant anecdotes, things like an emperor who murdered his dinner guests by showering them with rose petals. The kind of stuff emperors got up to doing, terrible things, wicked sex things in the swimming pool. It’s pointless to try to decide whether they’re true. But what you can see is that they’re repeatedly coming back to the same themes about imperial power and its dangers — that the emperor can kill you when he’s being kind; you can never believe what he says. It’s a dystopian world in which the emperor overturns the very nature of what it is to be true and what it is to be false.

There’s a wonderful story that looks terribly trivial to start with, of an emperor in the third century, who, we’re told, never ate fish by the sea. He only ate fish on land. You think that’s a silly story, but then you see that what we are being told is that he doesn’t operate by the laws of what is natural. And then you see the anxiety that many Roman writers have about the nature of one-man rule. But what’s interesting is that there is so little opposition in Rome to the system.

So there were more collaborators than dissidents.

A vast majority of them were collaborators or co-operators. For most of them it was the only system they knew. They kept their heads down, and it was business as usual and that is where I see the big lesson for us. There are places in the world where aspects of democracy are now very much under threat and the lesson of Rome is you have to stand up and object, because if you don’t, you will be like the Romans. You’ll just let it all happen. The message is we’re all collaborators if we don’t think a bit harder.

The study of ‘malevolent chaos’ seems to really tell on the present, because we are seeing one-man rule, pretences of democracy, we are seeing rulers with crazy ideas and leaders with unaccountable power.

I think that for dynasts, dictators, kings, the figure of the Roman emperor has played a double role, because in part they became a symbol of how one-man rule could continue. There was real longevity there, the Roman Empire did not fall for hundreds of years in the West, and for thousands of years in the East, despite almost every emperor getting killed. But it was always a warning, too, because so many of them got killed. There’s that tension between the stability of the system and the awful instability of the individual ruler. So you get many different ways representing Roman power in the modern world. And that’s true also of imperialism. It is often said that British imperialism, particularly in the 19th century, found its model in ancient Rome. That is partly and obviously true. But there’s a very famous slogan written by a Roman historian when he’s thinking about the consequences of Roman imperialism, and he puts this in the mouth of a native of Britain. He says, what does the Romans do? “They make a desert, and they call it peace.” There’s been no better encapsulation of what aggressive imperialism is, and it has been a slogan of anti-imperialists for generations. Rome gives you both sides of the story always.

What is the next below stairs or outside the bloodied corridors of power story you will be bringing from ancient Rome?

Well, although my latest book is called Emperor of Rome, it’s actually quite a lot about what happened below stairs, because another thing I want to insist on is look, nobody actually rules the Roman Empire alone. So who’s doing the work? And if you ask who’s doing the work, you find an awful lot about the people who are slaving away, literally slaving, keeping the whole show on the road. What I’m going to do next is take a little break, and then write a short book about why it’s worth studying the ancient world.

sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in

Published – January 26, 2024 09:01 am IST