Classic Chats: Tom Hiddleston on Pompeii

Summary

INSTANT CLASSICS
Classic Chats: Tom Hiddleston on Pompeii
July 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Instant Classics welcomes celebrated actor and former classics student Tom Hiddleston to discuss his new docudrama, Pompeii: Out of Time. Hosts Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins delve into Hiddleston’s lifelong passion for the ancient world, the haunting relevance of Pompeii, and how the classical past continues to fire modern imaginations. The discussion explores Tom’s formative experiences in Pompeii, how his classical education shapes his work as an actor, and the role of imagination and uncertainty in both history and contemporary life. The tone is erudite, personal, and laced with wit and affection among fellow classicists.

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Main Discussion Themes

1. Tom Hiddleston’s First Encounter with Pompeii

(Starts at 05:17)

• Tom reminisces about his first visit to Pompeii in 1998 as a teenager interrailing with friends, each drawn to different aspects of the classical world.

• He describes the “lights go on in the mind” moment of walking through Pompeii, seeing the lives of ordinary Romans materialized, and being struck by the plaster cast of a dog:

  “Suddenly, the ordinary humanity of these people from 2000 years ago felt very, very close. And I felt a great expanse open up of that distance and proximity at the same time.” (09:57, Tom Hiddleston)

• The visceral proximity and shocking tragedy of the eruption give Pompeii its power, as Mary adds:

  “It was like time travel... It made you shudder, that kind of proximity.” (10:35, Mary Beard)

2. The Paradox of Pompeii: Familiar and Strange

(Starts at 12:38)

• Discussion of how Pompeii is both relatable (bars, graffiti, daily life details) and profoundly alien—providing a tension that fuels its fascination.

• “If they were just like us, I don’t think they’d be so interesting. It’s the fact that they are both like us and so very difficult to understand at the same time.” (12:38, Mary Beard)

3. New Perspectives: Focusing on Survivors and Disaster Psychology

(Starts at 16:58)

• Tom talks about surprising findings from Pompeii: Out of Time: survivors are traceable by inscriptions and graffiti, reframing Pompeii not as a city frozen in time but as one in the process of evacuation.

• Tom discusses the input of disaster psychologist Sarita Robinson on understanding real human response to catastrophe:

  “She sets off a fire alarm in the Archaeological Museum of Naples, and nobody does anything... The people of Pompeii would have been used to the earthquakes... but nobody moves. They go, ‘well, probably, okay.’” (22:29, Tom Hiddleston)

• Mary concedes the value of this modern perspective:

  “What's a modern disaster psychologist going to tell me about Pompeii? Well, it turned out a hell of a lot, actually...” (22:56, Mary Beard)

• The group draws comparisons to the normalization of danger and disaster in places like contemporary Ukraine.

4. Tracking Individuals in Pompeii: Evidence and Imagination

(Starts at 25:14)

• Mary applauds the focus on individuals—like Avianius and Julia Felix—identified through inscriptions, revealing who may have fled or rebuilt lives elsewhere.
• Discussion zeroes in on businesswoman Julia Felix and the small but telling details glimpsed in Latin inscriptions (e.g., the “bathhouse of Venus”):

  “You see, that the Latin really speaks to you a bit extra, because part of this estate is a bathhouse, a balneum... a bathhouse to pleasure the senses, right?” (28:04, Mary Beard)

5. Imagination at the Heart of Classics—and Acting

(Starts at 29:37)

• Tom draws parallels between building a character as an actor and reconstructing ancient people as a classicist:

  “Actually there's a certain amount... you can research as much as you like, but then you have to imagine, you have to fill in the gaps.” (29:37, Tom Hiddleston)

• Charlotte notes Tom treats Pompeii itself like a character:

  “It seemed to me that you were almost treating Pompeii like a character... how do I build something understandable from the evidence that I have?” (30:38, Charlotte Higgins)

• Mary champions the necessity of embracing imagination, countering the myth of solely evidence-based history.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Tom on entering Pompeii as a teenager:

  “It was truly like going back in time and I couldn’t believe it... that these ordinary people had been captured in an extraordinary moment because of the eruption... Absolutely amazing.” (08:09)

• Mary on stepping literally in ancient footsteps:

  “You walked across the stepping stones... you thought, this is what people did 2,000 years ago. I am literally stepping in their footsteps.” (10:35)

• Tom comparing ancient and modern disaster response:

  “It seemed to be a new way into the story for me.” (20:33)

• Mary on the danger of projecting modernity back:

  “There are patterns of human behavior which, you know, they might be slightly different in antiquity, but... reluctance to move from home, reluctance to leave granny is pretty constant.” (22:56)

• Tom on classics as foundation:

  “It really is the foundation of my curiosity and my thinking. I loved it so much. I always have.” (34:41)

• Mary on classics enabling difficult questions:

  “It gives you a space to talk about difficult questions... within a safe environment. The ancient world opens up those kind of questions for you to really safely engage with.” (43:04)

• Tom’s conclusion:

  “The courage to live in the question, to tolerate uncertainty, to actually to understand that doubt is the driver... Don't leap to strong opinions. Think again. Always think again.” (44:33, 46:12)

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Key Segment Timestamps

• 05:17 – Tom Hiddleston recounts first visit to Pompeii and its impact.
• 09:57 – On feeling the humanity of Pompeii’s residents.
• 12:38 – Discussing Pompeii’s combination of the familiar and the strange.
• 16:58 – New research focus: Pompeii’s survivors and their choices.
• 22:29 – Disaster psychology experiment: fire alarm at Naples museum.
• 25:14 – Spotlight on individuals (Avianius, Julia Felix) in Pompeii.
• 29:37 – Imagination’s role in both classics and acting.
• 34:41 – Tom reflects on the fundamental value of studying classics.
• 43:04 – Mary on classics as a “safe space” for grappling with timeless questions.
• 44:33, 46:12 – Tom on the virtues of doubt and intellectual rigor.

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Episode Takeaways

• Pompeii is an unmatched lens on the ancient world: its tragedy, preservation, and immediacy continue to spark both personal and scholarly fascination.
• Modern tools and perspectives—like disaster psychology—bring new insights to old stories, reframing our understanding of human choices in crisis.
• Imagination is not a shortcut or indulgence, but a necessary method in both historical inquiry and artistic work.
• Studying the ancient world imparts habits of curiosity, comfort with doubt, and the courage to challenge one's own certainties—skills ever more crucial in a polarized present.
• Timeless stories, although terrifying or challenging, are made approachable—and still relevant—by the safe distance of history and myth.

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For more insights, debate, and laughter around ancient stories and their enduring relevance, tune into future episodes of Instant Classics. Share your thoughts at instantclassicspodmail.com or on socials @InstantClassicsPod.

Transcript

[Mary Beard]

I'm Mary Beard.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And I'm Charlotte Higgins.

[Mary Beard]

Welcome to Exploring the Odyssey.

[Charlotte Higgins]

This is a book club where we really drill down into some of the most exciting bits of Homer's epic poem. Whether it's your first time or whether

[Mary Beard]

you're taking another stab at it, we'll

[Charlotte Higgins]

be here to share our debates, our questions and our insights. It's just one of the most remarkable things in the poem.

[Mary Beard]

This is a story that captures the

[Charlotte Higgins]

imagination and you kind of go, ugh.

[Mary Beard]

It's quite a lot of the consumption of human flesh in this part of the Odyssey.

[Charlotte Higgins]

This is a super good bit, absolutely knockout.

[Mary Beard]

We'll give you some background information that you might need to get the most out of the poem.

[Charlotte Higgins]

It's going to be serious reading, but

[Mary Beard]

with a lot of jokes, a lot of fun and quite a few laughs along the way.

[Charlotte Higgins]

So put the kettle on or pour

[Mary Beard]

yourself a large glass of wine and

[Charlotte Higgins]

read along with us.

[Mary Beard]

To join, go to exploringtheodysy.com watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts. As an ancient site, Pompeii is hard to beat.

[Charlotte Higgins]

With its sister town of Herculaneum, which was also destroyed in the eruption of 79 CE. It's one of the few places anywhere that you can really feel that you're stepping back into the Roman world.

[Mary Beard]

You can walk into the bars, even into the brothel. You can snoop on its houses, admire its decoration, or sometimes not admire its decoration.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And with a bit of practice, you can still read the graffiti and the election posters on its walls.

[Mary Beard]

It's full of real Roman life, but of course, it's also a place of terrible tragedy. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, were killed in the eruption.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And that combination of life and death has attracted novelists and movie makers and documentary makers for. For decades.

[Mary Beard]

The most recent to join them is none other than the actor Tom Hiddleston. Well known, among many other things, for playing Loki and starring in the Night Manager. He is presenting and devised a new three part docudrama, Pompeii out of Time, which will be out from July 23rd on Disney plus and National Geographic.

[Charlotte Higgins]

But what perhaps not so many people know is that Tom goes a really long way back with classics. It's what he studied at university and rumour has it that he may have been to some of Mary's lectures back in the day.

[Mary Beard]

So we're really pleased to welcome him onto the podcast to talk about the new programme and a bit about Classics Ball generally and what he got out of it.

[Charlotte Higgins]

I'll obviously be testing Tom on What

[Mary Beard]

he remembers from Mary's lectures help. So this is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now this week, Classical Chat with Tom Hiddlestone.

[Mary Beard]

I'm Mary Beard.

[Josephine Quinn]

And I'm Josephine Quinn. At the Rest Is Fest this September, we're putting on a show that can only be described as an iconoclastic romp through the ancient world.

[Mary Beard]

We're talking about leaders behaving badly, emperors putting their horses in charge, cities built by asylum seekers and empires getting their comeuppance. There will be some proper myth busting, but we'll also be asking why these myths matter even when we know they're wrong.

[Josephine Quinn]

So if you love your ancient history and you're free on September 6th, get your ticket now and join us at London's South Bank Centre.

[Mary Beard]

Tickets are on sale now.

[Josephine Quinn]

Just visit southbankcentre.co.uk that's southbankcentre.co.uk.

[Charlotte Higgins]

welcome, Tom. Thank you so much for joining us. What a joy.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Thank you so much, both of you. What an honor it is to be here.

[Mary Beard]

Nice to be in the classroom again with you, Tom.

[Tom Hiddleston]

I've been looking forward to it so much. It feels like yesterday, but it was, it was some time ago now.

[Mary Beard]

Let's not go there. Let's not go there.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Okay. In terms of the distance between us and classical antiquity, the blink of an eye.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Very true. That is very true, Tom. What I want to start with is by, I mean, like this very basic observation that often when we watch a documentary fronted by a very famous person, it can feel a little bit like window dressing. But this is absolutely not the case with the series that you've made. I mean, you obviously have a really deep connection with Pompeii and I wonder if you could take us back to that first visit you made when you were. Because we start that in the series with kind of memories of you, I think, having quite a transformative experience visiting Pohnpei for the first time.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Well, thank you. And I know both of you have spoken so eloquently about those moments in life when the lights go on in the mind and a door is opened to a pathway of curiosity about something. And for both of you it was about the ancient world. And for me too. And as we put in the show, it seemed like we had to really. I first visited Pompeii in the summer of 1998. So this was at the end of my lower sixth form year at school and just beginning my last year at school doing my A levels. It was a very happy time and it was a great summer. I remember the World cup was happening in France and we got me and two friends. I had a friend who was studying ancient history for A level, another friend who was studying the history of art and I was studying Latin, Greek and English literature. And so this trip through Europe seemed to intersect with all of our, our interests and we interrailed. And for those who don't know what that means, back in the days of our membership to the European Union it was possible to buy a train ticket I think at Waterloo or perhaps they bought it at Paris. Anyway, you could get on any train, pretty much anywhere in Europe. You'd have a ticket that would get you on any train. And so we interrailed all the way from Paris to Rome and traveled around Rome. Of course that was interesting for all of us, given the art of the Renaissance and also the archaeological sites of the ancient world. Hadrian's Villa. And then we went down to Naples and we went to Pompeii and Herculaneum. We climbed up Vesuvius, as all 17 year olds must. We jumped in the sea and ate lots of pizza and played football on the beach and. And then I went on to do my A levels in Latin and Greek and I applied to university to read classics which I did under the supervision of Mary Beard among others at Pembroke College, Cambridge. But to talk about Pompeii I really vividly remember I had been. The ancient world had been in books for me until that point and

[Mary Beard]

I

[Tom Hiddleston]

hastened to blow any trumpets. I may only have one, certainly in terms of my academic career, but for some reason I discovered when I started Latin at school that I understood it. Maths and science I was much slower at apprehending but languages seemed to be my thing. It was French and Latin and then when I was able to do Greek I did Greek as well and Spanish. But Latin was the Oxford Book of Latin. It was declensions, it was reading little passages of Virgil or Cicero or somehow trying to translations, breaking language down. And we arrived in Pompeii and it was truly like going back in time and I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that the ancient world felt so far away and yet so close. And it hit me like a train. I thought it was so fast, the size of Pompeii. First of all, I Know this will resonate with both of you, but that it was that you could somehow glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, that it wasn't about generals and emperors and senators, it was that these ordinary people had been captured in an extraordinary moment because of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE or 79 AD. And I remember being really particularly struck by the plaster cast of the dog that was chained to the wall and was trying to escape. And we had a family dog at home and it was about the same size and I thought they had a pet dog. Suddenly, the ordinary humanity of these people from 2000 years ago felt very, very close. And I felt a great expanse open up of that distance and proximity at the same time. And I've never forgotten is absolutely amazing.

[Mary Beard]

I think I first went to Pompeii when I was about your age, though it was a bit earlier. And just walking down a street, finding a street in which there was no other 20th century human being in and walking down it, I mean, you're absolutely right. It was like time travel. And you walked across the stepping stones from one pavement to the other and you thought, this is what people did 2,000 years ago. I am literally stepping in their footsteps. It's kind of. It made you shudder, that kind of proximity.

[Tom Hiddleston]

I find it a magical feeling. It makes me feel extremely small in the scale of time and the universe in a very comforting way, that our lives are so brief and we exist on the timeline of humanity and yet because of places like Pompeii, you can. There's a common thread of humanity which is, which is. And of course, Mary, you've spoken and you taught me very, spoken very eloquently and taught me very rigorously about not being too simplistic in saying, oh, they were just like us, that they also weren't in so many ways. I remember with my friend George, who was the friend of mine who was doing ancient history for a level, he was already onto Herculaneum. And he said, by the way, we've gotta go the other side of the volcano to Herculaneum, which is even better preserved. And again, those ordinary details of, of seeing a baby's cradles and bread that is still baking in the oven. It's mind blowing for a 17 year old who had just been doing lots of Latin translation and declension. Suddenly I thought, oh, there's something else here, there's more to discover. It very, very memorable, of course, in all the pizza and all the football. Pompeii had made a big Impact,

[Mary Beard]

you're absolutely right. That, in a sense, it's the combination that you just hinted at of it being utterly familiar. You know, there's the lavatories where they. You know, there's the beds where they slept. There's the kind of smarty graffiti on the walls. It feels just like us. And simultaneously, they feel very weird, you know. So it is, as you're saying, I totally agree that it's the. It's the closeness and the almost impossible to imagine distance that gives it that extra edge. If they were just like us, I don't think they'd be so interesting. It's the fact that they are both like us and so very difficult to understand at the same time.

[Tom Hiddleston]

The scale of it is what. Release always strikes me, even as I talk about it now, 2,000 years ago, not a couple of hundred years ago, but 2,000 years ago, and the sophistication of the architecture and the town planning and I don't know, it's a comforting thing to know that at a basic level, of course, our technologies have changed and the way we structure our societies. But human beings, you know, ate and lived and loved and slept and they had jobs and businesses and. But the story of Pompeii is, I think, also very captivating and was to me then, because it's this great thriller. It's got the story, got a volcano in it, you know, and that was also very captivating to my imagination as a young person. This extraordinary geological event and the idea that this volcano is still there and is still active and Naples has built itself up around that. They're all aware that it's overdue, I think.

[Mary Beard]

I like you. And quite much more recently than you was sort of made to go up to the top of Vesuvius. And I thought, go up to the top? Well, look, I was, you know, old lady, no. And I thought, oh, do I really want to walk up? You know, what is there to see? You know, I will do this. But really, is it going to be worth it? My goodness me, it was worth it. I mean, you know, you get up there and you just. You can still see the crater and the stuff coming out. And, you know, I'd always been very sort of cynical about volcanoes, you know, but it was, you know, I thought, wow, you know, then I begun to understand what it would be like to have this thing explode all over you. I mean, it was truly. I mean, it is. You know, it was another of those kind of gobsmacking moments that you get around the Bay of Naples the sheer

[Charlotte Higgins]

power and the imminent ferocity of that extraordinary geological phenomenon. It's just extraordinary. But in a way, Tom, that brings us on to, you know, you've identified this sort of central paradox in Pompeii, which is it's both about the living. You know, we have so many traces of people's actual ordinary lives. And it obviously, the reason we can understand it in the way that we understand it is that it came to a very sudden and. And brutal end and many, many people died. But there's this super interesting thing that you do in the documentary, which is to change the focus to the survivors and you work with the scholar Stephen Tuck. And I mean, all of this was a really interesting thing to focus on. One thing that I found also super interesting, Tom, was that you talked to a disaster psychologist about how people actually react to. To the proximity of catastrophe, which I think was extremely revealing. Tell us a bit about working with Tuck and this whole business of the psychology of disaster.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Well, that for me was the revelation was I almost, perhaps naively, had concluded that Pompeii was an open and shut case that the volcano erupts and the city's buried by the pyroclastic flow of ash and pumice. And it was National Geographic and Plimsoll, actually, who approached me with this and said, are you interested? And in early sort of concept meetings about what the show might be, I learned, I think, for the first time that actually there was, I don't know if it's exactly 24 hours, but a day, what we would consider a day, that unit of time between the eruption and the burial by the pyroclastic flow. I mean, that's quite a long time. That gives you time to make choices. And through the research of Stephen Tuck, realizing that people did make certain choices, people did make choices, and people did get out because of the scale of graffiti and inscriptions that are now available, that you can track the incidence of a name. For example, we find this name Avianius, early on, and Avianius crops up in other inscriptions that are dated later, after the eruption outside Pompeii. And so the conclusion is that Avianus probably got out.

[Mary Beard]

When you say it, I mean, now it kind of sounds obvious that some people would have escaped, but certainly that's not how Pompeii was taught to me when I was a student. And actually, there are all kinds of weird things about Pompeii which are really partly explained if you think about people escaping. I mean, one of the things that strikes, strikes you when you go around the town and you go into the houses. You know, there is very, very little furniture, high value stuff. Now part of the reason for that is it's been carted off to the local museum. There was. But part of it is that some people had got out probably even before the volcano started to eruption that, you know, that we don't know what would make you decide that you were going to, you know, leave town. But the idea that this was a city of choices about whether to stay, whether to go and that, and that what we were seeing when we go around the city is not just a city going about its everyday life as normal, just kind of frozen for us. There was that day in which people were doing all kinds of things with their staff and with themselves and that partly we're seeing a city which is in the process of being evacuated. So these houses are not kind of. MARIE Kondo kind of aesthetic, pure uncluttered wastelands. They're probably terribly cluttered, but people have packed up their stuff or were packing up their stuff. And so we're seeing that very particular moment. And I think it's great that that's, you know, that you decide to kind of focus on, on that.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Well, it's, it seemed to me a very, I'm careful of being anachronistic, but a very contemporary image that, you know, we. There have been so many climate related disasters in our, in our recent history all over the world. Whether that's earthquakes or tsunamis or wildfires. And as those are reported in the news, you see, because of the immediacy of our news cycle, you see people making choices. People do heed early warning signs and get in the car and flee or they get in a boat or they somehow organize or make an attempt anyway. And then of course, we hear the tragic stories of people who don't make it out. They don't manage to escape the tsunami or the earthquake or the fires. But it seemed to be a new way into the story for me.

[Charlotte Higgins]

I've spent a lot of time reporting in Ukraine and I just see all the time the way people absorb and normalize the proximity of catastrophe. So it's just humanly, people adapt and very often are prepared to play the chances. And I just kind of feel that really came home to me when you were talking to the disaster psychologist on the program that, you know, whatever rumblings there may have been over weeks and months, possibly years from that mountain, that actually it's so relatable to what humans actually do that a lot of people would just Kind of play the chances or leaving your home, packing up and becoming a refugee is a really, really big deal. And a lot of people, and I see it in Ukraine all the time, just particularly if they're older, they just

[Tom Hiddleston]

don't want to do it or they can't. They don't understand. Like, that's what the disaster psychologist Sarita Robinson shows us in the show is, you know, she sets off a fire alarm in the Archaeological Museum of Naples, and nobody does anything. And that's almost because they would have been. The people of Pompeii would have been used to the earthquakes, but the earthquakes are warning signs, but nobody moves. They go, well, probably, okay, you know,

[Mary Beard]

that was a really wonderful moment. And I'd had a bit of kind of cynicism, like. Like my trip to the top of Vesuvius. I thought, what's a modern disaster psychologist? What are they going to be able to tell me about Pompeii? Well, it turned out a hell of a lot, actually. You know, the idea that there are patterns of human behavior which, you know, they might be slightly different in antiquity, but, you know, your. Your strong sense is that that reluctance to move from home, reluctance to leave granny is pretty constant. And, you know, I did think that moment when. When she puts the alarm off in the Museum of Naples. And I thought, I wouldn't have moved either.

[Tom Hiddleston]

You know, I would have thought we

[Mary Beard]

all do the same, you know, So I thought that that was. That was a really nice injection because you can start. It started to help you see what people's realistic choices were and why and why they might not do what we would think of as the obvious thing.

[Tom Hiddleston]

It suddenly seemed to be the way, a really new, at least I hoped, new and dynamic way of telling the story, which was to suddenly. It's rather like it's a story where we know the ending. You know, it's not. There's no great tension in, oh, what's going to happen, what's going to happen? Most people know the ending, but I. They maybe don't know that it took a day. And so it's almost like we could set a timer on our. And say a ticking clock and say, a day. They've got a day. And then. And put me, as it were, in that environment of trying to understand through research and talking to archaeologists and classical experts and also disaster psychologists and in real time, try to update my understanding as the clock is ticking, as we're getting closer and closer to the burial of the city. How long do they have? What are they going to do now. And as I take on more information, the story updates, as it were.

[Mary Beard]

We don't know how many people escaped and we don't know whether the people who escaped from the city, whether they got clobbered by the volcanic debris after they'd gone a kilometer or so up the road. So there's. That you can't ever know. But one of the things that, that you show, I think, and that. That Stephen Tuck's work shows is that it looks as if there are people. People, some people did get away and establish their lives. They re. They reintegrated themselves in one of the nearby towns. And I mean, I thought it was very nice the way that, I mean, you choose to look at three people where you can get a handle on. You've got this young avianius and you've got your great retired soldier from Herculaneum. But the one Charlotte and I, of course, feel very, very attracted to is your third person, who is a woman called Julia Felix, whose house you can still. Whose estate, not house you can still visit in Pompeii. If you come in through the amphitheater entrance, it's the first house to. That you really come to. And you could actually put some flesh on the bones of someone living there and making those choices. And a woman. Right, there's this wonderful bit and I thought it was lovely because outside Julia Felix's estate there's a kind of. There's a notice which is advertising some parts of the property for rental. And you can get Elise on this. And she's. She's quite business savvy, obviously. And, you know, you're very good at reading Latin and you of course think when you see Jewel fail, you of course, think as any of us would. You think, oh, this must be a man. Julius Felix. Right. And then it turns out that we have one of our, you know, one of the quite a large number of women in Pompeii that you can, it's amazing, characterize and, you know, find out what she did.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And hats off, hats off, Tom for reason A, you know, making your way tentatively through some Roman inscriptions on your actual telly. I don't think there are many. There are not many Hollywood stars who could. Who could pull that one off. And it was really nice to see. I mean, if you're lucky enough. I mean, all three of us are privileged in slightly different ways. I mean, but we all had this amazing opportunity to learn Latin and it's such a gift, it's such a joy to be able to Just sort of do that. It's a beautiful thing.

[Mary Beard]

And you find, I mean, in that inscription, which is explaining that Julia Felix is kind of renting out the management of some bits of her estate. You see, that the Latin really speaks to you a bit extra, because part of this estate is a bathhouse, a balneum. And there's a wonderful adjective. I think I've got it right, that goes with it, which is venerium, which is a bathhouse of Venus is being. Now you think, right, this is. You know, I don't think this is a brothel. So, I mean, but you think this is a bathhouse to pleasure the senses, right? And you start that one word. Do you describe this bathhouse you. A bath house of the goddess of love is what we got on offer. And it's also non gentum. And you rightly said, this is not plebeian. This is rather posh, a posh bathhouse. And those Latin words, when you look at them, they, you know, they just conjure up those little nuances about what's going on in the city. I'm going to the Balnaeum venerium, thank you very much.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Yes, non gentam.

[Josephine Quinn]

Yes.

[Mary Beard]

No, there's no riffraff here.

[Tom Hiddleston]

And one. And I think one can't help, but of course, we all do this, that you project a contemporary sensibility back into the past and go, you know, this is a quite a fancy spa that people are going to.

[Mary Beard]

That's right. Yes, it is. Yeah.

[Tom Hiddleston]

But I wanted to sort of acknowledge that, really. And I think the. Also the strange central circle in the Venn diagram for me, of the show is that the whole process of it, of the curiosity and the research and the imagination, has become the center of my. Of my day job, of my working life as an actor, is that. Actually there's a certain amount, especially if you're playing a real person, you can research as much as you like, but then you have to imagine, you have to fill in the gaps. And I think perhaps, Mary, you can speak to this, and I know, Charlotte, you can, too. But the record will only take us so far. And if you have gaps in the Alphabet, you have to make informed guesses or you have an educated instinct about the gap.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And I think part of it is also then you holding several possible or multiple possible hypotheses in the space of that question. But I had the theory, Tom, please, can I try my theory out on you, which is that you were using your actor's imagination. You know, it was all coming together here, you Were treating. It seemed to me that you were almost treating Pompeii like a character, or in the sense, how do I build something understandable from the evidence that I have, whether it might be a script or whether it is the remains of Pompeii and its inscriptions and the historical writing about it? I mean, am I onto something? Did you have a sense that, like, your actor's mind, where you're building out from the evidence into a fully formed picture, was happening here?

[Tom Hiddleston]

Yes, and that's very eloquently put. And I probably wouldn't have. It didn't crystallize in those terms for me, but that's exactly right. And I think perhaps I've always studied classics in this way. Even when I read history, the ancient history, and when I read about real figures and real people that lived in 5th century Athens or in the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire, I was always slightly casting them in my head and imagining the environment. And I remember reading the Symposium, Plato's Symposium at university, and I couldn't help but sort of cast them all and direct the film in my mind, in a way.

[Mary Beard]

I mean, I think that the bottom line is that that's what all historians. I mean, certainly of the ancient world, but probably all historians do. And, you know, I think there should. There's no reason for any of us, whether we are professional historians or not, to be embarrassed at that part of the process. That is part of the process. And the key is that you should. You should accept that and face up to that. That need for imagination, rather than pretend somehow that absolutely everything comes directly from the evidence. And that's what I think this program does, you know, show. I mean, demonstrates, you know, really interestingly.

[Josephine Quinn]

It's.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Yeah, it's. It's a visualization of something that's always happened inside my mind. I did the same thing when. When studying, like, 5th century Athens and studying the, you know, the city Dionysia. I would. I. Because I've been to Athens and I'd seen the theater of Dionysus, and okay, it's an audience of men and there are three actors in the chorus and it's a festival. And essentially I'm sort of try. I'm imagining what's happening as, like, these aren't. They've never been dusty, dry facts for me. They've always been very vivid. And I think in developing Pompeii as a show, I realized that I was gonna try and bring to life the figures and the characters in my imagination that this kind of research inspires Brilliant, Tom.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Let's take a break now and we'll come back to asking you a bit more about your life as a young budding classicist back in the late 1990s.

[Mary Beard]

Tom, and you can be as frank as you like about this. Don't think that I'm going to get upset. Looking back to being a full time student of classics, really, what do you think you got out of it?

[Tom Hiddleston]

Oh, goodness. Impossible to sum up. It really is the foundation of my curiosity and my thinking. I loved it so much. I always have. As a child, I loved the Greek myths I think I had. It was the Osborne Book of Greek myths and it was Theseus and the Minotaur and Daedalus and Icarus and the twelve Labors of Hercules or Heracles, as I then learned to call him Jason and the Argonauts, all those things. Medea, Perseus and Medea. I loved, loved, loved those stories. And then when I started. When I started to learn Latin and started to. And then decided to do it for a level, reading passages of Homer and Virgil, the poetry of Catullus and Propertius, extracts from the Bacchae. The Bacchae?

[Charlotte Higgins]

Oh, the Bacchae. Tom, when are you going to do the Bacchae?

[Tom Hiddleston]

Should I be Dionysus or Pentheus? Okay.

[Charlotte Higgins]

That's what the casting director's Bearden Higgins says.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Okay, good. Okay. From your mouth, the God's ears, the weight and the gravity and the scope of these stories always appealed profoundly to my imagination. I loved those stories so much. And then to really talk about our time together, Mary, and that period at university, I think initially I felt like a very small fish in a very big pond. I felt like, oh, gosh, there's some really, really clever people here.

[Mary Beard]

I still feel that. Tom, don't worry.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Okay. Okay. And the. The confrontation of. The rigor of my one to one supervisions. You would be given an essay question, does Plato think the world is just. And a reading list. And within a week have to come up with 2000 words which you could defend on the subject. And initially I was very. A very sort of. I just felt very inferior. I didn't feel like I was up to it. But the more I read and the more I kind of just took it on and the harder I worked, the more my own interests started to emerge. I realized I truly loved epic poetry. Reading the Iliad and the Odyssey is still one of my. I count as one of the great privileges of my life that I had the time to read the Iliad and The Odyssey in Greek and study it and be taught by those amazing people. And to read and get into Greek philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Epicurus and the Stoics. I just loved it. And it made me think about my own life. And I remember I'd always have almost these existential questions doing philosophy. I turn up to supervisions and my supervisor would say, look, Tom, you don't have to take this so seriously. You just have to think about the argument.

[Charlotte Higgins]

What is the meaning of life?

[Tom Hiddleston]

What is life? Exactly? 19, 20 years old. And then, Mary, I don't know if you remember, my dissertation in my third year was really on the. Was on a small character in the Oresteia plays, Pylades. So I went all the way through. It was like, what's the role of Pilades? What does he tell us about Apollo?

[Charlotte Higgins]

Quite obscure, Tom.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Well, I needed 10,000 words, but I thought the headline was, why does Orestes need a little help from his friends? Obviously big decision to kill your mother. But at the moment he turns to Pylades in Agamemnon and says, what do I do now? And Pylades has three lines. And I kept trying to think, well, there are only three actors in a Greek play, so who's playing Pylades? And then he's there in Sophocles, Electra, no lines. And then he's there also in Euripides, lecturer. And Orestes, I think, from memory, you'll correct me if I get this wrong, but 10,000 words on that. And then I did. So, my final year at Cambridge, to be precise, was I did the paper on the Odyssey. I did that dissertation on the Auris Diet and of the two electorates. And then two papers with you, Mary. One was called classics in the 20th century, which I loved, which was essentially a study of how the ancient world shows up in the 20th century. So Hitler's appropriation of the Republic and why suddenly all those Roman epics in Hollywood in the 60s and then nothing in the 70s and 80s. And then Ridley Scott makes Gladiator in the 90s. What does that mean about who we are? Why does the Wall Street Stock Exchange look like a Greek temple? Why are both political parties in America? The etymology is those things about the same thing. One's two Greek words and one's two Roman words.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Sounds like you're running back through episodes of Instant Classics, which have touched on almost all of those things, actually.

[Tom Hiddleston]

But it was so interesting. I mean, and then I remember going to see Fiona Shaw at the National Theatre in Or in the West End in Madea, directed by Deborah Warner. And it being a packed house and a five star, five star reviews across the board, very profound piece of work. But if you're doing Medea in 1999 in London with Fiona and directed by Deborah Warner, what are you saying about the world? Or if you're doing Trojan Women and all of the Trojan women are played by Eastern European women in the sort of Bosnia, the Balkan War, what are you saying about the world? But you're using this ancient 2000 year old text to say it. And how does that differ from the initial first performance of the trojan women in 5th century action. So that was the paper.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Brilliant. Gosh. It was all a bit more forward thinking than the Oxford syllabus that I did, where the 20th century was not really, not really to be thought about.

[Mary Beard]

It was really exciting and, you know, Charlotte's right in a way that people hadn't done that in Cambridge before. It was a, you know, it was an experiment, but it's an experiment which has lasted with me, you know, decades now. It's prompted me to think that I. About things that I still want to think about. And I mean, what's great about teaching those kind of third year courses at university is, of course, although students never realize this quite, but actually the teachers are learning as much as the students are and it stayed with me. And in some ways those kind of questions that we were asking at the fag end of the 20th century are still the questions that I'm working on. And you know, it's great hearing. It is great hearing you because, you know, partly, you know, it warms me because I think, ah, right, you know, in a certain way it worked. It worked, it worked.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Of course it did.

[Mary Beard]

But it's also, it's a wonderful reminder of just how far studying the ancient world, if you think of it broadly in the way that you're talking about how far that really opens up all kinds of things, you know, difficult questions. It gives you a, gives you a space to talk about difficult questions. It gives you, it challenges you, I mean, it challenges you to think about really hard things, but in a, you know, to put it in kind of modern terminology, within a safe space, within a safe environment, the ancient world opens up those kind of questions for you to really safely engage with. I mean, you know, we talked about Medea, that actually thinking about murdering your children, actually a play about murdering your children, it's terrifying. It is absolutely terrifying. And somehow I think we can face that terror more easily if we Think of it through something that was written two and a half thousand years ago. The terror remains, but we have different ways of approaching it and dealing with it and allowing our. You know, we can allow ourselves to think about it in ways that it's harder now in contemporary things.

[Tom Hiddleston]

And the thing I learned and the thing I've really taken away, I mean, Charlotte, you asked about that, or Mary, perhaps, one of you asked me how. What. What did it give you? And one of the things that I know it's given me for the rest of my life is the courage to live in the question, to tolerate uncertainty, to actually to understand that doubt is the driver rather than a kind of solid. The ideas they need interrogating, they're never set in stone, even the ancient ones. And it's such a formative period of thinking for me, and you challenged us all. There was another paper of cultural identity in the ancient world, which I, by the way, inshallah, I hasten to add, I had to read a lot of Greek and Latin to get here. It was. It was. The first part of the degree was absolutely. Have you read. How much Tacitus have you read? And Tacitus, bless him, wasn't my favorite, if I'm allowed to say that I found reading lots of military history was not my favorite thing. And also some of the more obscure stuff. But when we got to the third year and this I remember, you and John were asking us to read Derrida and Foucault, and talking about the first lecture, I think, was, you asked us all, what does it mean to be British? What are 10 things you could write down?

[Mary Beard]

Oh, God, I don't remember that saying.

[Tom Hiddleston]

What do you connect to? What are things that we can all agree on that we're like? We have our own personal identity, but we have a cultural identity that we connect to. What are those things? Is it pubs? The Premier League, the Royal Family, you know, fish and chips? Like, are. Are. Are they those things? Is it sort of a. A particular sense of humor? Is it the nhs, like, you know, what. What. What is it that makes us feel, oh, we're British, you know? And then if those things are up for debate and you take it back to the ancient world, how could you. What's. What does it mean to be Roman? What does it mean to be Greek? And how does that change if you're a man or a woman or someone living right in the center of things in Rome, or maybe you're in the outskirts? How does it change if you're living in 300 odd CE. And it's almost the end of Empire. And so I suppose to bring it back to your question, two things I've really taken with me from my classics degree is, and these are still things I say to collaborators on films and theatrical productions is that rigor is so important and be very careful of having a strong opinion that hasn't been interrogated by you, by yourself. Don't leap to strong opinions. Think again. Always think again. Think. Have I got this right? Living in the doubt.

[Josephine Quinn]

Yeah.

[Mary Beard]

And I think that you might make this a lesson for almost everybody who contributes to debates on social media where, you know, living in the. Living in the doubt is, I'm afraid, conspicuous for its absence.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Absolutely. Yeah, I know. And it's. It's. And it's happening to. But it's also happening to our sort of discourse and our social discourse are the way we share ideas and the ease with which we can disagree. It's so good to disagree if you disagree in it. Yeah, it's so good to be disagreed with. Oh, maybe I've got this wrong.

[Mary Beard]

Yes. Things are complicated, guys.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Things are complicated. Things are complicated. Exactly. So that's the thing that's really lasted for me, is living in the doubt and. And rigor. But also I think that even in my own life, those periods of interrogating the ancient world left a real mark about interrogating the received certainties in my own life and how I, you know, I left university and, well, how do I want to live my life? And maybe some of the certainties that I've been given or that my young mind has tried to cleave to, because young people sometimes need a bit of certainty, maybe those can be set down now and in terms of how I kind of root my own life, I can take those ideas on a bit.

[Mary Beard]

Tom, that is music to my ears and I'm sure to Charlotte's ears too. It's absolutely great to hear you say that.

[Tom Hiddleston]

Oh, Mary, you should know. You should really. In case it's unclear, that time. That time for me was so formative and so nourishing and it didn't become an academic. Maybe that's for the best. But I sometimes think about. I sometimes think about what would have happened if I had. But it set me on a path. I went to drama school after that and I became really aware that I had had this very unique privilege of. That's training a creative, training you to be an artist in things like dramaturgy and building character, but also skills doing different accents and using your Body in a different way so you could be in the theater. But I realized I'd had this very unique privilege with you and with John Henderson. You've given me something that has really lasted, which is this. I mean, I think in my final papers, I don't think I concluded anything. I think I just said there are more questions. All we have is more questions. And honestly, I find it in my life when people approach me with certainty about a political idea or a moral idea, they're so sure and resolute. My first instinct is to go, have you thought about it in a different way? Maybe we don't have all the answers yet. Maybe it isn't quite so cut and dried. Maybe it can't be reduced.

[Mary Beard]

You'd have been really good at it, Tom. But I have to say, without wanting to sound as if I'm really smile me that, you know, I'm very pleased that you remember what. You know, those kind of interactions. But I also have to say that you've given us a lot that's lasted, too, in a different way. And I think that Charlotte. Charlotte and I are now really looking forward to you as Pentheus in some performance of Euripides or any Greek tragedy.

[Charlotte Higgins]

To see you do some Greek tragedy, Tom. I mean, having seen your wonderful Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse, you've got the ancient chops, you know, you have.

[Tom Hiddleston]

So they're all there. There are many ancient texts left. Many ancient texts left.

[Mary Beard]

Yes.

[Tom Hiddleston]

It did come in all that. It did come in handy. I know this is probably. It sounds like a reach, but it wasn't lost on me that I ended up. It wasn't a Greek God, but I ended up somehow in the. In a pantheon playing a trickster God. Of course, I'm referring to Loki, Hermes,

[Charlotte Higgins]

Loki, his first cousin, twice removed from Hermes, isn't he? And, yeah, playing with those mythological stories. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[Tom Hiddleston]

And knowing that they matter. Knowing that actually mythology matters. And mythology can be like a sacred space, or as you say, Mary, a safe space to project all these complicated things that we feel as human beings and say, what if it was happening in a pantheon? What if it was happening to these divine beings and they were disagreeing like we do, and having fun, making mischief and having fun.

[Mary Beard]

And I think, you know, the other thing about classics is it's actually fun.

[Tom Hiddleston]

It's so fun.

[Mary Beard]

So thank you. Thank you very much for being with us.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Thank you. It really has been a great fun to have you on the show, Tom. We really appreciate it, as ever. We want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions. And so if you have them, please do send them to [e-mail] or on our social media at Instant Classics Pod.

[Mary Beard]

Bye Bye. I'm Mary Beard.

[Josephine Quinn]

And I'm Josephine Quinn. At the Rest Is Fest this September, we're putting on a show that can only be described as an iconoclastic romp through the ancient world.

[Mary Beard]

We're talking about leaders behaving badly, emperors putting their horses in charge, cities built by asylum seekers and empires getting their comeuppance. There will be some proper myth busting, but we'll also be asking why these myths matter, even when we know they're wrong.

[Josephine Quinn]

So if you love your ancient history and you're free on September 6th, get your ticket now and join us at London's South Bank Centre.

[Mary Beard]

Tickets are on sale now.

[Josephine Quinn]

Just visit southbankcentre.co.uk that's southbankcentre.co.uk.