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Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal college deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30, terms at aka mscollegepc. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney.
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Let's go get ready for a new case. We're gonna crack this case and prove we're victorious Partners of all time.
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New friends.
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You are Gary the Snake and your last name the Snake Dream team in new habitats.
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Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
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You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly working at Zootopia 2. Now available on Disney. Rated PG.
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Where did the Romans stash their cash?
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B
What was a trip to the doctor like?
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Do people still speak Latin today?
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B
Was there a Jewish community in Roman Britain? Was there such a thing as feminism in the ancient world?
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C
Since launching Instant Classics four months ago, we've had lots of people write in with questions and suggestions for episodes. So Laura Gonzo is keen on hearing about Euripides, one of my favorites. Nick Arledge is urging us to look at the Athenian renegade and General Alcibiades. Nancy Bloom wants to do more on that great heroine of literature, Dido. And we really hope to get to some of these over the next months. But for this New Year's Day special, we're going to answer a few shorter questions that we are really fascinated by.
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B
This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories of still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.
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C
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 episode, Instant Answers. We've got some great questions. Would you like to kick off with our first question?
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B
Yeah. There was a wonderful question, set of questions, really, from Matt Twinborough, really, about money, banking, payments, salaries, infrastructure, projects in the ancient world. We're going to be coming back to some of these, I think, later. I think it would be great to have an episode on how the Romans paid for a big infrastructure project.
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C
Definitely.
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B
But some of them really rang a bell with me because they're things that I've always been curious about. If you've got a lot of money, where do you keep it in the ancient world I'm much better in this on the Roman world than I am on the Greek world. So I'm going to concentrate on that. If we've got a lot of cash, what do we do? We put it in the bank. There are several books written about Roman banks and banking and I think at first sight you think, oh, right, that's what the Romans did too. You know, they took the day's takings and they took it round to deposit in the bank. Now, I'm afraid nothing could be further from the truth. Roman banks were not where you deposited your cash. Bankers were really money lenders actually. They were crooks, sharks and moneylenders. They certainly didn't kind of take in people's takings. So what did you do with them? I mean, I think that the answer is horribly simple actually for most people, and we know this a bit from Pompeii, what you have is you have a big chest with a lock on it and hopefully you have a dog who's pretty fierce and barks loudly, kave kanem and you put kawaii kanem on your mosaic, beware of the dog at the front of your house. And you trust that that's scary enough to stop thieving now, you know, maybe, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But I think basically for most people it is, you know, you put the money under the mattress. The ancient equivalent we can see. I mean, there are what look like chests to keep your valuables in, in Pompeii, with pretty fearsome looking locks. But, you know, you also think we could probably have bashed into that chest with a, you know, with a big hammer if you really wanted to. But that for most people, that is what's going on now. I ought to add though that there is another option for the, for the very rich and that is putting your valuables, depositing them in a temple, in a temple to the gods. Now when we were looking at the Parthenon, in one of our early episodes, we mentioned that the valuables of state were stored in the back room of the Parthenon. It was a real treasury, actually. Now that is true for Roman temples too. And it looks as if they were good lockups. They had caretakers, warders, and it looked as if you could take around whether your cash or your jewels or whatever, you could take them to a temple. This is for the elite, it's not for, you know, the average person and they would be looked after. Now we know, we partly know that because there's a joke in the Roman satirist Juvenal about the temple of Castor, Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum. And the joke is that someone's actually broken into it and half inched some of the stuff. So, you know, we learn about the idea that the rich had used the temple of Castor as a safe deposit, really, when in fact that doesn't work out. I think there are one or two more options, but it's all very hazy. I mean, temples, I think are the big things. And you know, we said before when we were talking about the Parthenon that we think of them too much as purely religious buildings where people went to worship or whatever. And that really isn't the case. So we got people leaving their money there, their valuables. And also in the Roman Forum, which I think this kind of underlines the point. Also in the Roman Forum there's a temple of the God Saturn from Saturnalia. And the temple of Saturn in the Forum is the state treasury of Rome. The place where the state keeps its money is the temple of Saturn. And it's called the irarium, the treasury saturny. The Irarium Saturny. Because we're not just dealing with rich guys who've got rather too much cash at home to be saved. We're dealing with public money too. And that is amazing.
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C
So that's Irarium means kind of bronze house belonging to Saturn of Saturn temples.
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B
I mean, they're not built for that. You know, nobody said let's put up a temple to Saturn and then we'll keep our money in it. But they are really good lockups with caretakers who can double up a bit as night watchmen, guards, etc. Etc. So I think that is, that's as far as I'm prepared to risk. I mean it's, I think it's, you know, it's private enterprise. You know, I bet there are people who say, oh look, I've got a great chest at home. You know, we'll, you know, if you pay me a bit, I'll keep your cash in it. I'm sure there must be all sorts of private arrangements, but that's really as far as we can go. We've got to, what we've got to do is we've got to kick bankers of the picture.
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C
So two things that strike me. One is that something I often think about in museums actually is just how persistent the technology of the key is. You know, you can, I mean, you've just been in Egypt, Mary, I bet you saw keys in the museums in Egypt and you can see you Know, you can go to a museum of ancient Roman or ancient Greek artifacts and see keys and they think they look pretty much like modern keys. It's a very, very, you know, obviously we do different things now around combinations, all sorts of things. But your straightforward kind of metal key doesn't look very different from an ancient one.
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B
But also we know that straightforward metal keys, you know, the locks can easily be picked. Right?
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C
Yeah.
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B
So, you know, I think it, you know, it puts off the casual chancer but it doesn't put off the, the determined criminal thief. And you can tell actually that people are worried about that because of what, you know, archaeologists tend to call rather euphemistically hordes. Right.
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C
I was going to ask about this.
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B
H O A R D S A lot of. Some of the most splendid collections of, of really precious objects, precious silver and precious gold are found because somebody at some point worried about them and possibly, you know, just before they were going to run away themselves, hoping to come back in due course. Some of those hoards, many of those hoards are actually because the person who was about to flee not didn't want to take their valuables with them, so buried them, buried them in the ground, covered them up and no doubt intended to a remember where they'd buried them and then come back and get them. You know, the second tree from the left at the edge of the forest kind of stuff. And we now have that precious stuff because the person either never came back or I think this would be likely in my case couldn't quite remember where they buried the. So we can see people presumably in crisis taking action to find somewhere they could hide it away.
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C
Yeah, and some of the most exciting and interesting and splendid kind of finds in Roman Britain, things like that. The set of silverware called the Mildenhall Treasure, which is in the British Museum are these so called hoards of buried. And lots of coin. Hoards of buried coins. I mean, I suppose could one have buried one's stuff for normal safekeeping? Does it have to have been in a point of total crisis?
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B
Yeah, I suppose they don't know that's possible. But I think it all fits this picture of largely itself help with what you do with your cash. There isn't, you know, unless you're going to kind of make use of the institution of the temple and that's top of the range elite solution. You're going to be hiding it, hiding it, locking it away, crossing your fingers and hoping it doesn't get nicked.
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C
And we can find it now thanks to the Metal detector or the plough. That's. Things tend to get discovered now.
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B
Yeah, no, that's right.
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C
Long lost cash. Yeah.
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B
But Charlotte, you've got one.
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C
Yes, well, this is a big question. Harriet Taylor works as a nurse and she's written in and she says that she'd love to hear more about medicine and healthcare in the ancient world, particularly around women's health and infancy, which is a. Which is a big subject and a meaty one. But we thought today we'd sort of think, you know, in a probably rather superficial way, but nonetheless, we sort of think a bit about women's health and midwifery in particular, because I think Harriet might be interested to know that there is a text, there is a book, isn't there, Mary, that tells you what qualities midwives should. Should have, ideally in the ancient world, which I think is kind of interesting.
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B
Yeah. It's by a man called A man Envy. Underline that, needless to say, a man called Serenus, writing very beginning of the second century ad, and it's a textbook on gynaecology. But in the midst of this, he does think a bit about. About midwifery and he talks a bit about the ideal midwife. Now, I don't think it tells us hugely much about midwifery skills because it says, interestingly, the midwife should be literate, suggesting that there's kind of this specialist knowledge she might want to access. She should have her wits about her. You hope so. Have a good memory. She should like hard work. She should be respectable, strong. And some people, he says, say that she should have long, slim fingers and short nails to do her job. Now, I assume that that's because she might need to really manhandle the patient, the woman, the woman giving birth and the baby.
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C
Get in there, get in.
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B
I'm afraid. Get in there. I think it's, you know, this may be a pretty male view of midwifery. I mean, I'm not sure that they're all likely to be literate. One suspicion is that most. Most midwifery skills were passed from woman to woman, that they were kind of. They were traditional skills, that not all midwives were. They were not all professional midwives. They were women who acted as midwife for their friends or for their village or for their street when it was needed. And there certainly isn't any midwifery training, qualifications, apart from what's happening within the community.
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C
I think. I suppose one thing to say is that, you know, we think that women's health is a little bit underserved. In the modern world, to put it mildly. I think that effect may have been somewhat magnified in the Asian world. There's a set of writings from ancient Greece written in the 5th and 4th century called the Hippocratic Writings. I mean, collected together in the modern world as the Hippocratic writings, thought to
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B
go back to Hippocrates, the famous Greek doctor, but probably don't.
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C
Yeah, some may have been written by someone called Hippocrates. We don't really know. Hippocrates was the sort of famous doctor of the island of Kos. So these writings are called Hippocratic, they're medical writings and they have a lot of, you know, you can get a Penguin translation. And they're quite a good read if you want a bit of an eye opener about ancient medicine and theories of healthcare. But there's a very funny. I find it quite an amusing little tiny bit about midwifery, which I think is accepted that midwifery is a kind of women's business. But you can kind of hear the female point of view just edging through this very male text in one section where it says, you cannot disregard what women say about childbearing, for they are talking about what they know and are always inquiring about. No kidding. And it says they could not be persuaded either by word or deed, that they do not know rather more than the doctor does about what is happening in their own bodies. And then it goes on to say that these. These women, they do have very strong ideas about, you know, when babies come to term and when the most miscarriages are. And it kind of grudgingly accepts that they may be correct. But there were some pretty wild theories about the women's. Women's bodies altogether in the Hippocratic writings.
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B
When you say wild, I mean, it is a kind of lesson in misogyny, really, from start to finish. The Hippocratic corpus, isn't it?
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C
It totally is. There's a whole thing about. I mean, what. What is sort of, you know, famously awful bit is. Is around how women who haven't had sex are much more liable to disease and illness and sickness than women who've had sex and babies. Because, you know, women who haven't had a husband, you know, are sort of notoriously good, go insane. It's because the theory is the blood, the female's blood has collected somehow dangerously in the womb and intercourse helps the womb flow. Helps the blood and the womb kind of flow out, creating some kind of equilibrium which is part of the job of the menstrual period. And it's extremely dangerous when women fill up with blood.
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B
It is quite funny, isn't it, because you've got these male writers basically wanting to tell us that women don't understand their own bodies, but then they come up with the most extraordinary theories which show for a fact that they didn't understand the female body either. I mean, and such really what we take for granted is absolutely basic things like how long a normal pregnancy is, is, you know, some people think it's nine months, but many don't think that there's eight month pregnancies. And the idea of how you, I mean, contraception, the, the really extraordinary methods suggested for, you know, how to prevent pregnancy, you know, basically tie a spider's web round your left little toe kind of stuff. It's all in there in this really quite hyped scientific, ancient scientific literature. I also think that it's quite nice when you see a bit more of what happens on the ground. I mean, in some ways there's this whole scientific kind of speculation bit that you get in, particularly in the Hippocratic corpus. How does all this work? But you know, archeology does come to the rescue a bit and doesn't seem to have much to do with that because one of the most vivid things that I've ever looked at in, again, it's in the Naples Museum, found in Pompeii is a gynecological speculum which looks almost identical to a modern gynecological speculum for examining a woman internally. So somebody is doing that in a way that would be reasonably familiar to us. And there's the marvelous kind of doctors, more general doctors kits too that go along with that with lots of kind of things which are clearly used for prodding and poking and looking down and looking into people's orifices of all sorts.
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C
I think there's lovely evidence of a real life kind of very familiar to me as my father was a surgeon and my mother was a nurse. There's a wonderful tombstone in Ostia which was the port of ancient Rome. And ancient Ostia is a wonderful place to visit just outside Rome. Now because this port was silted up, the city was abandoned and now has sort of been left with really wonderful, you know, remains of an ancient city.
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B
I mean it isn't quite as vivid as Pompeii, but it's not far behind if you, if you're looking for a
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C
nice, much less visited. It's really great to visit. It's a lovely place to visit just outside Rome. But There's a beautiful tomb there, Mary. Isn't there too, a doctor called Marcus Ulpius Amerimnus and his wife Scribonia Attica, who was. So we've got a doctor and a midwife and she's the person who set up this quite lavish tomb. So they must have been pretty prosperous. And there's a beautiful relief of herself, Scribonia, delivering a baby. So there's a mother being supported on a stool or on a sort of birthing chair, and Scribonia, or the midwife herself, kind of poised to catch the baby. The baby's on the point of being born. And then on the other side, a sort of section, another relief for Marcus, who's in the middle of some kind of procedure, but his surgical equipment and is sort of laid out next to him. You know, you get the sense that they did very well and perhaps. I don't know, their names suggest they had some kind of Greek origin, that the Scribonia named her mother Scribonia Kallitike, which means kind of good luck or lovely luck or something like that. But it's a Greek name, you know, I don't know. I'm speculating, you know, much more about all this stuff, Mary. But does it feel like they were originally slave? Are they free? They don't say they're free.
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B
They're almost certainly by their ancestry is a slave ancestry. Whether they were ever slaves, I think is much less clear. But there's a. They certainly had a servile in quotes ancestry. And they're also. It's interesting that they're of Greek origin because whereas our kind of stereotype of the medic, you know, actually would be perhaps a bit like your dad, Charlotte, you know, you know, surgeon in a suit, kind of the. The stereotype of the doctor in. In ancient Rome is probably someone from. Of servile, of slave origin, but also Greek. That. It's the. It's a kind of skill that Romans often thought came from the Greek world. And this pair in Ostia really, really fit into that.
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C
Yeah, it's a lovely thing and you can look it up on the Internet and we'll put it in the show notes. But it's a very vivid. It's a very vivid and much sort of friendlier and more practical vision of women's healthcare than the text of the Hippocratic doctors.
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B
Yeah, that's what's interesting that, you know, there's these two strands of how we know about ancient medicine, whether it's midwifery or not, and they don't really seem to meet. There's the academic speculation of the male doctors and then there's what happens on the ground with the instruments and the commemoration of the practitioners. The latter, happily, is a lot more friendly than the slightly uncomfortable speculation of. Of the guys.
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C
Let's take a break and take another couple of questions in a minute, Mary, shall we? We've got. We've got some really good ones coming up.
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B
Okay, well, we're back with some more questions and I'm going to kick off part two with one from John Bevan, who wrote to say that he'd recently read in. In the Spanish newspaper El Pais about the Curculus Latinus matridensis, a group of Latin lovers who regularly get together in Madrid to practice their spoken Latin.
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C
Latin lovers in that sense, Mary, rather than Latin lovers.
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B
Oh, yes, sorry. Yes, absolutely right. Charlotte, thanks for the clarification. Anita, is any chance you, like, dig a bit more into this phenomenon? You know, why do people do this? And he says, do either of you, Mary and Charlotte, speak Latin or ancient Greek? If not, do you wish you did? Again, this is a really juicy subject because I'm going to come clean at the very beginning of the answer to this, which is to say, I mean, I suppose I could do. I could string some words together in Latin and Ancient Greek, but the idea of saying that I could hold a fluent conversation, no way. And I actually don't feel. I don't feel embarrassed by that, partly because I think one of the things which always appealed to me, like when I was at high school, actually what really appealed to me about Latin and Greek was that you didn't have to speak it, that you spent all that time in the French lessons or the German lessons saying, you know, could I, you know, could you tell me the quickest way to the train station, please? So Latin Greek were relief from that. So I'm not one of those people who lusts after being able to hold a conversation. That said, for decades, I mean, really going back, well, really into the late 19th century, there have been people in the modern world. I mean, I'm not talking about going back so far when Latin was a kind of lingua franca in Europe, but. But once you'd become a school subject, late 19th century, there always have been people who've wanted to revive the capacity to speak it. And there have been people who actually think not just that that's a kind of cute thing to do, but that it's partly because of people like me, really who say, oh, I just like reading Latin, that we don't know Latin well enough, that if we actually learnt and taught Latin as if it was a living language, our command of it would be so much better. And there were movements in the UK in the 1930s about the direct method of teaching Latin in particular, which meant speaking it. And you'd have lessons where you'd all have to say, when the teacher came in, salve magistra. A kind of sense that you really could get kids into it by treating it as if it was a living language. I mean, I go back to my old prejudices, honestly, I say, look, it isn't, you know, it really isn't a living language and just sort of pretending that it is doesn't get us very far. But there is something. I mean, we have to say there is something a bit odd about the way that we traditionally now learn Latin. Well, as you were saying, Charlotte, you start off doing some very simple sentences which you learn to read. Meteller is in the garden and then the bat of an eyelid and you're reading the ancient equivalent of James Joyce. And that Rose, kind of. It is a very weird literate culture.
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C
Like you, Mary, I learned Latin and Greek as purely languages to read. And the idea. I don't think I could. I mean, maybe it wouldn't be that hard to learn to speak some phrases of Latin and Greek, but it's just so alien to the way I was taught. And you were taught. We were taught in the same way. And yeah, you go from simplicity, you fast forward right into incredibly difficult literature quite quickly. It's a very strange and, in a way, kind of remarkable and magical thing. But I do have a lot of sympathy with the Direct Method, as it's called, and that's probably what John's Spanish group are doing. And there's a current revival of it around Oxford University, and some of the people involved in that is called the Latinitas Project, talk about how it kind of demystifies the language and makes it more fun and familiar for learners. And I think they would argue that it's takes the elitism aspect down a notch because it becomes something that's familiar and in use and you can immerse yourself in it. I'm intrigued by that, actually. I'm intrigued by it and I wonder, in the sort of alternative history of my learning Latin and Greek, what kind of difference it would have made if it had been a language that you were not. Not just experiencing, that you were properly using, that you were properly using. I mean, I remember one of the things that we had to do, and I'm sure you had to do at your university, Mary, was to do what is known as prose composition or verse composition, which is really translating chunks of literary English. And that could be, you know, that's either prose or bit of Shakespeare into Latin or Greek. Something that I found staggeringly difficult, I have to say. And this was. And it's not surprising because it is staggeringly difficult to translate Shakespeare into ancient Greek. I mean, for heaven's sake. But I found that also sort of terrify. I found it terrifying. And that sort of terrifying aspect. I wonder if that could. That would have been dialed down if you'd just been immersed in it in a more friendly way. Yeah.
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B
Because all that composition of Latin, and there was, you know, there were essays, the whole tradition of writing essays in Latin, it was all written. There was no oral aspect to it at all in the standard curriculum. And, you know, I think if you look at the history of Latin over the last 1500 years, and it is. I mean, there has been a drift towards removing any orality. And so you can go back to the Renaissance and you can see that Latin is the lingua franca of Europe. People are speaking it. I mean, there are universities are teaching in it because it's a shared language. But as time goes on, as Latin ceases to have that role, it becomes more and more a literary fetish. But in the end, I kind of think that's just a. I do think it's a bit perverse. You know, nobody does speak Latin. We don't need to speak Latin. And what's great about ancient literature is it's literature reluctantly, because I'd like to be all behind this. I think, give me the words on the page, please.
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C
And I'm not going to be learning to speak Latin or Greek anytime soon. I've got modern languages that I need to learn, and I'm working on my Ukrainian, which is a long haul, I can tell you that. So that's where I am with my spoken languages right now. Okay, let's have another question. I've got one from Darren Ezekiel, who we met in person, or I met in person because he came to our event, our live event that we did in the Roman amphitheatre in London, and he writes to us. I was taught at my Jewish school that British Jewish history started with the Norman conquest in 1066. However, given the diversity of Roman Britain and London, is there any evidence of a Jewish community or individual Jews in Roman Britain? So I Think this is a really, really interesting question. Mary and I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole, and I think my starting point for this is it is to me unthinkable that there were no Jewish people in Roman Britain. Roman Britain was on the northwestern edge of a large and very, very connected empire for 400 years, of which Judea was also a part, and also many Jewish communities in different parts of the eastern Mediterranean. Britain, we know from all kinds of evidence of tombstones, in particular, had many people from the east, from places like Syria, who lived and died here. It had an army that was full of different people from very different places. There were people from the River Tigris. Tigris who were up in the River Tyne. There were detachments of Syrian archers. I mean, so there's a connectivity in all kinds of ways. So the idea that there weren't any Jews in Britain until 1066, to me, is unthinkable. However, there is very little evidence of, you know, there's very little concrete evidence that you can point to and say, here was the Jewish temple here of the Jewish people. So, on the other hand, as we know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And I think, you know, one has to be kind of. It throws. This question to me is fascinating because it throws up all kinds of questions about the nature of evidence and what absence and what erasure and know what generations of archaeologists looking at Roman Britain might have been looking for. And they weren't looking for evidence of Jewish people, by and large, to be honest, particularly in the early 20th century, there was a big focus on people actively looking for evidence of Christianity, because that was a fascinating thing, that Christianity. There was Christianity in Roman Britain, you know, way before the traditional date for the conversion of the British in the Anglo Saxon period. So there is this sort of prehistory of Christianity which is very interesting, and people were attracted towards that. There's not much in the academic literature on this question, but there are a couple of. There are a couple of articles and there's one quite recent one which I did find really fascinating, and it's focused on one very specific tombstone which is in the Hunterian Museum, which is part of the University of Glasgow. It's a great museum. That museum holds a lot of material from the Antonine Wall. It was some kind of border post or a defensive wall that was built in about 140 CE, running between the very narrowest part of the British mainland, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde, so north of Hadrian's Wall.
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B
Hadrian's Wall is much more famous, the Antonine Wall, which was really a bank, I think. I mean, it was a bit of
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C
a wall, but it's in the bank.
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B
Yeah. Bit less impressive than Hadrian's Wall, but the Antonine Wall later and further north,
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C
and there's all sorts of really interesting finds from around the. Really extraordinary inscriptions and beautiful mileposts on tombstone. Anyway, there is a tombstone that was found in Kirkintilloch, which is just outside Glasgow, and it is erected by somebody called Salmanes or Salamanes, to his son salmanes, also aged 15. And that name, Salmanes is. It is a Semitic name. It doesn't mean, as you know, Darren, as Darren will know, it doesn't mean necessarily that the person was Jewish, but it's a Semitic name, meaning that the person came from the sort of broad neck of the woods of Syria, probably Ish. And it has some interesting decoration on it, this tombstone. It has fronds of palms on it. Now, one researcher has looked at those fronds of palms and thought, well, they could actually be menorahs. It's possible. It's possible. So I guess this is not at all conclusive, but it does. And I'd like to hear your view on this, Mary, once you focus your thoughts on this question and look again at a piece of evidence like this particular tombstone with this particular name and this particular decoration that has been interpreted as fronds of palm, that actually does look quite menorah, like, I think it makes one. It raises lots of questions about how we interpret evidence.
- [39:33]
B
Yeah. And it's an illustration, really, of the kind of the old archaeological truth, which is that in most cases you. You only find what you look for. Now, occasionally that can be upset by extraordinary discoveries, but by and large, that the archaeologist or the classicist or the historian poses the questions that they're in their head in a way, not looking or often not being open to saying. Well, maybe there's a completely different view of this. It's the questions that you want to ask of the ancient evidence that determine the answer as much as the evidence itself is what am I wanting to find, what am I wanting to uncover? And this is an absolutely classic case of that. Just occasionally there are nice surprises. I remember one of the things that is most struck me from Pompeii, where you couldn't, in this case, also about Jewish community. You couldn't deny it. It was. There's a whole lot of material from Pompeii that relates to the production of garum, which is that kind of rotten fish sauce that the Romans put on everything. And one of the guys in Pompeii clearly got very big house garum producer got big on producing rotten fish sauce. There was one, I think it was a kind of amphora of it and it said on the outside. I can't remember the Latin now, but it's in English. It said kosher garum. This was presumably garum made with guaranteed no shellfish. And there was just one case where he thought, oh, right, there is in Pompeii a Jewish community who is, you know, who is a big enough concern that people will be making this rotten fish sauce especially for the Jewish market.
- [41:38]
C
Fascinating. And we just don't have. We don't have that kind of clincher type thing in Roman Britain. And to be honest, I would be surprised if we ever did find evidence of a community in the sense that we might think about the Jewish community and, you know, with its institutions. But the idea that there weren't Jewish families or Jewish individuals, there must have been.
- [42:05]
B
We now have to come to our last question and it's a question we've had loads and loads of comments and questions which related to our episode about Athena, the goddess Athena. Dani Small asks if Athena is a kind of feminist anti mascot, as we were arguing in our Athena episode, which of the Greek or Roman deities would fit best as a feminist icon? What's the true answer to that?
- [42:41]
C
That is a tricky question, isn't it, Mary? Because I think it's a bit of a stretch in any direction. A bit of a stretch. But since Danny asked the question, my rather perverse answer to this was, I think, Dionysus. Why not Dionysus? And I have a particular reason for saying Dionysus, Mary, is that he had, at least in myth and in reality, to an extent, he had a band of female followers. And this is very clear in Euripides amazing play, the Bacchae, written in the 5th century BCE, the God Dionysus appears as a character. And the chorus of dancers and singers in the play is made up of his female followers. And these female followers have left their homes and are encouraging other women in Greece to leave their homes, leave behind their domestic responsibilities, leave behind their husbands, their weaving and their children, and to go up to the top of Mount Kithairon, the mountain outside Thebes, and to just leave it all behind and to disport themselves, singing, dancing, drinking and performing some rather potentially rather unpleasant ritual act involving ripping animals apart and generally whooping it up. Whooping it up. Having a bit of, you know, it's like Glastonbury, but with added animal sacrifice and torture.
- [44:23]
B
I mean, I think you're in danger here of becoming too persuasive. Because I have to remind listeners, I have to remind them that this didn't actually end well. And in Euripides famous play, the Bacchae, which really focuses on Dionysus and his female followers, one of the female followers ends up cutting the head off from her own son.
- [44:57]
C
Right.
- [44:58]
B
Well, I don't know. Feminist icon, you know.
- [45:02]
C
Okay.
- [45:05]
B
I mean, only up to a point. And you could say. You could say, well, look at all those 1960s, 70s bits of feminism. You know, Valerie Solanas, you know, the Society for Cutting Up Men. You know, maybe it is in that kind of sense a feminist icon.
- [45:21]
C
I think the thing about the thing. It's a sort of thing about the unloosening of domestic. I mean, look, I'm obviously kidding, and I don't think it's a kind of feminist ideal to go to the mountainside and rip any animals up. And, you know. But there is something about this for me, Mary, you know, I want to push my point home a bit more. It's about the sort of the possibility of unloosening all those ties that connect you to domestic servitude. And to that extent, to that extent Dionysus is about. It is. He is about that. He's about the freeing from responsibility. And there is something feminist about that.
- [46:03]
B
I think that's true up to a point. And I suppose. I mean, to go back to some of the ways we've been thinking about these deities and before, in a way, I think there is a sort of pairing between Dionysus, the God of kind of liberatoryness, and let's say Hestia, the goddess of the hearth in Greek, or Vesta is her Latin equivalent, where you see the image of the woman as actually specifically, very boringly, in some way tied to the home. And I think it's not as if either of those things kind of represent individual ways of, you know, of being female, but as a pair, you know, Dionysus versus Hestia, you can see them clashing in their version of what it is to be a woman. Hestia is one of the world's most boring deities of all time, I assure you. But if you put her together with Dionysus, you kind of see the different extremes of female behavior.
- [47:24]
C
I mean, I think in the end, the answer probably to the question, Danny, is that we're struggling to find. We're struggling to find a feminist icon among the Olympian among the Olympian panoply of gods we did think about. I mean Artemis crossed my mind, right. She's another one of those virgin goddesses who doesn't hang around having any truck with men. She's very independent. She's the sort of hunter goddess. She helps women in childbirth. Coming back to our question around women's health. So she's there for women in that sense but she's a bit of a bruiser and really she is, she is the goddess who if somebody dies suddenly, it's generally because Artemis has knocked her off with one of her arrows and that's a bit unpleasant.
- [48:12]
B
And also if you, you know there's. Artemis is not a role model. And if you go to another of Euripides plays Euripides Hippolytus, which again I hope we'll be coming to you find there a truly horrific story of what happens if you go down. If you're a man in this case, if you go down the Artemis route, if you reject all kind of sense of quotes, proper end quotes, sexuality. So basically everything in some ways, if you extract it from the whole pantheon, everything is kind of an anti role model, really.
- [48:54]
C
Sorry, darling, sorry.
- [49:01]
B
We've tried, we've tried. We just want to finish by saying that we will be doing more of these Q and A sessions, instant answers. So please send in questions and every now and then we'll devote a session to answering some of them and also send in some episode ideas because they're really great and there have been some wonderful ones and you know, in fact one of our next episodes is going to be from the idea of a listener because we're going to be looking at spying spies and spying. So see you again.
- [49:41]
C
Bye bye. As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classics Pod Bye Bye.
- [50:07]
D
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [50:13]
E
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
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D
Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
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E
A rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of
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D
titanic proportions from Empire, the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
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E
And I'm William Duranpool.
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In this, in this six part series we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
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E
We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
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D
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