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- [00:00]
A
Well, this is a super special moment in the life of Instant chattix because on 16 April, Mary Beard's latest book is published. And I'm very happy for her and very proud of her. And her latest book is called Talking the Shock of the Old. And it's got the most wonderful cover, I have to say, a bright, cheery daffodil, yellow, full of modernity and vim, just like the author herself. And today, Mary and I are going to talk about some of the ideas, the provocations, the thoughts and the memories that suffuse this really fantastic new book. And what I would say, not that I'm in any way biased, is that it's really kind of vintage Mary, this book, it's got this sort of extraordinary, of course, extraordinary knowledge is a penetrating intelligence and argument, but all of that combined with a super down to earth approach and, and this very, very finely tuned bullshit detector that she has. And Mary, you do a fantastic job. I think of, you know, thinking about and expressing, you know, what is the point of thinking about and studying the classical world? So massive. Congratulations, Mary. And there's a lot of stuff in the book that I think really connects with what we're trying to do on the podcast, right? The sort of sense of bringing this stuff into our own world in a kind of down to earth way without a degree of classics required or a degree in classics required, I should say. So I can't really welcome you to the podcast, Mary, because it is in fact our podcast and your podcast, but I am going to congratulate you and I am going to make you introduce the podcast in our customary style.
- [01:53]
B
Okay then, Charlotte, I'm terribly flattered and I'm also braced for what is about to come. This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. And I'm Mary Beard.
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A
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, Mary's fabulous new book, Talking Classics.
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B
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
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A
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
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B
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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A
A rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions.
- [03:03]
B
From Empire, the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'M Anita Anand. And I'm William DuranPaul. In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitta to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong. We'll track his rise from a bookstore
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A
owner to a guerrilla commander.
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B
And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power.
- [03:28]
A
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
- [03:38]
B
as a sacred relic. Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.
- [03:45]
A
Okay, Mary, huge, huge, huge congratulations on the book. And you know, one of the things that I really love about it is that it's just like you, it's kind of incapable of pomposity, so it's talking about all this super smart stuff, but it kind of sounds like you talking in a way. And actually it does. It did derive right from a series of lectures that you get curious about how you go from a sort of rhetorical mode into something that sounds very conversational but is clearly, clearly there's a big difference between giving a lecture and making the shape of a book.
- [04:25]
B
Yeah. It came from three lectures I did at University of Chicago a couple of years ago and with bits from lectures I'd given at Edinburgh a bit earlier. And the Chicago lectures were really meant to say, how do we answer the question of why study the deep past? Why study the ancient world? What are the problems? What's in it for us? And it was really fun doing those because I think it's easy to not ask yourself that question. You've been in the teaching classic, the profession of classics for me, half a century and you have to make yourself stop and say, why am I doing this? And so the Chicago lectures were a great chance to do that. I think what really kind of I found terribly difficult to start with was the process of converting that into a book. And had it not been written in my contract that I had to make it a book, I probably would have said, nice lectures, let's go and do something else. But I had to make a book. And there was a sense in which I realized as I look back at my text and I looked at the snouts of it, when I looked at the snatches of it I could find online, there was something very kind of face to face about the lectures. If you're telling somebody why you do classics and what you think the point is, you're very much engaging with their reactions as you do it. You know, you're, you're seeing what goes down. Well, you're looking, you're looking at them in the eye and when they look puzzled, you're. You're expanding or slightly kind of shifting ground a bit. Even if the audience aren't saying something, it's still interactive because you're still engaging with them. Now, when you come to convert those lectures into plain text on the page, it can sound very dull because what you miss out is that face to face, eyeball to eyeball contact and certainly when you're dealing with a subject. But why I think it's worth studying the ancient world. It can read a bit finger waggingly, you know, it can, you know, see, this is what, this is what is interesting about classics. Listen to me, everybody. And it took me a long time to work out how to get over that and how to turn this from lectures that were quite personally interactive to a text for people to read without me being there. And what I eventually decided to do, and I hope it's worked, is is that in order to bring back the personal element into it, I put bits of autobiography in. It's a bits of memoir, because I didn't want it to sound like an ex cathedra statement of this is the manifesto for classics. I wanted it to sound like this is what's interested me. I can't speak for everybody, but I've done this for 50 years and as I look back on that, this is what get got me started. This is what I found exciting. So, you know, there is a bit, there is a bit of a first person singular in this and quite avowedly, because it's as much my personal engagement and what's got me going as it is more general things.
- [08:02]
A
I think those parts are really affecting and you know, touching and moving and, and powerful because behind the person of immense knowledge and the kind of great professional classicist, of course there is the beating heart of a human being who was once a child, who, to whom something happened to sort of set these cogs whirring. And, you know, that's true for anyone with a kind of lifelong interest in a something or other. There will have been a moment or an event or something in childhood, generally speaking. And so tell me about what that was, Mary, because you talk about this in the book and it's incredibly an extraordinary moment, but in its way also incredibly humble encounter that you had with the ancient world.
- [08:52]
B
It was when I was five. We're back in 1960 when I'm five. We live in the deep countryside in Shropshire and my mum's a village schoolmistress and she thinks it's time I saw the capital city. So we went for a weekend to London.
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A
Not Cardiff. Oh, in Shropshire. You were actually on the English side of the world.
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B
On the English side. Charlotte.
- [09:16]
A
Sorry, why did I suddenly decide you were Welsh after all these years?
- [09:21]
B
No, I was very definitely on the English side of the border. So we went to London. We had all sorts of things planned, but one of the things was going to the British Museum and, you know, I was a ghoulish 5 year old like most 5 year olds are. I wanted to see the Egyptian mummies. My mummy said to me, if we're going to go and see the dead Egyptians, and you can, you can hear the school mistress in this, can't you? We're going to go and see the dead Egyptians, we ought to find out about Egyptian life as well. Right. So we found once we'd seen the mummies, the gallery devoted really to Egyptian everyday life. You know, this is, you know, this is back in the day and this is not a child friendly gallery and a 5 year old can't actually see into most of the cases.
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A
Too high.
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B
Yeah, just too high, you know. And at some point my mum says, oh, she didn't say wow, but now she would have said wow. At the back of that case there's a piece of 4,000 year old Egyptian bread. Right. I thought, oh my God, you know, that was an eye opening moment. Yeah, because we've been seeing these very grand things, these very precious things, these very monumental things in the museum. But this was, this was something that people ate, this was part of domestic daily life and I thought, I want to see that, you know, I want to see that 4,000 year old bread. But of course, back in the case, I certainly can't see it. My mum tries to lift me up, but it's all terribly awkward at that point. A bloke comes by who I sort of remember as being terribly old, but I expect was sort of pushing 40 probably, and he put his hands in his pocket and he must have been a curator because he got keys out of his pocket, he unlocked, he asked me what I wanted to see and I said, that bread. He got the keys out of the pocket, he reached into the case, he got the bread out and he held it in front of my nose, you know, about 2 inches. I mean, it was the most amazing kind of sort of close to time travel moment that I'd ever had. You know, I was just, you know, inches away from this everyday object which Kind of linked me in some ways with these people who were so remote I couldn't even be able to contemplate how far ago they were. And it was wondrous. It was amazing, it was humbling. And I never forgot it. And also I think I never forgot his example because not only was the bread amazing, but what he did was really important. He opened the case for a little kid, right. And said, well, welcome to the ancient world was what he was saying. And cases can be open. Things don't always remain on the other side of the glass. And for me that became quite important. Moral, actually about studying the ancient world. You've got to let other people in too.
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A
Amazing. And I just think there are so many things in that story, one of which actually is that quite often, particularly not just for children, but also for adults, sometimes the most, the most revelatory and touching moment when you're encountering the very old is not the kind of the gold of Tutankhamun. It is the piece of bread. And it's the paw print, it's the Roman dog's paw print in the tile, the terracotta tile that hasn't been fired yet. Or the kind of the scratched piece of graffiti in the amphora or whatever. It's this sort of glimpse of ordinary imprint of human life. And the idea that bread could survive.
- [13:18]
B
No, that's right. I mean, I think I say in the book somewhere, it's kind of. What's so moving is that it's. You're coming across people in antiquity when they're not expecting you to be looking at them. You know, this is not the great literature which says, you know, I am writing for all time. Read me and I have lasted 2000 years or I will. This is people, you know, you catch them with their pants down, basically.
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A
Yeah, we talked about that in our Graffiti episodes, a couple of episodes about exactly that thing. And it. Yeah, that kind of seizure of this sort of particular moment.
- [13:51]
B
But I want to know what your moment is because, I mean, you say that almost everybody who's got into something has, has got a moment which, which kind of directed them. Now, what was it? Did you have one?
- [14:04]
A
I mean, I don't think I have an origin story that is so, so beautifully self contained as that. But I have, I have two things. One is that on the bookshelves of my brother, so I had two much older brothers, and on the bookshelf of my eldest brother. Bookshelf, you know, this bookshelf that belonged to my brothers, which I was constantly thieving from. Because it had more interesting and older books there was. And I can sort of, I can see it now this, because I permanently stole it. This incredibly beautiful 1960s book of stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey. And they're beautifully illustrated. I cannot say that when I first opened this book that I was pouring over the text, but I was definitely poring over the images and it had, it had a kind of really long lasting impact on me. And it was. In other words, it became something about like the inner world of the imagination and these gods and goddesses and Athena in her amazing. You know, actually, I mean, we've done an episode on Athena and we did touch on this sort of idea that as a wee girl, you know, reading this stuff through the medium of stories written for children, you know, Athena's fantastic. I mean, she turns out not to be the feminist hero we want her to be, if you, you know, coming at her from a sort of more informed angle. But as a kid, you know, there she is flying, wearing her armor, being super clever and smart the whole time. So there was definitely that. But also I did have. I remember I was a very lucky child, as my mother never ceased to remind me, which I think was a very good thing. Like now she would be saying, check your privilege. At the time, she just told me how lucky I was every day, which was at the time tedious. And now I just think, thank you. I was taken to Crete when I was about maybe 10 or 11 and we went to Knossos and there was a lady who took us round the museum at Heraklion and she was amazing. And she spotted, though, like, was the youngest, a small group of English tourists probably. I was the tiny child. You know, she made me the, like the addressee of more or less everything she was saying is how I remember it. Like at the end she gave me, she put in, she bought me postcards and gave them to me. You know, there is like these moments where an adult gives a shit. Sorry, we love to swear more on this podcast, but we can't because we get a funny rating. And then, anyway, just imagine us swearing now, somebody who gave more than twopence about a kid. And that is, those are foundational moments.
- [17:02]
B
I mean, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that, you know, what you're saying before is that that child remains with you forever. You don't forget. And you know, and as you pointed out, actually some of our favorite childhood moments we're still doing on this point podcast, you know, and they, they're still there. I mean, it was very funny when I. The publisher said I had to have an author photo, you know, on the back or the back flap.
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A
I love your author photo because I
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B
thought, oh, no, do I have to? So I decided to. To use one. That was a photo that was taken when I was, I think, 17 or 18. Yes, that's right. An archaeological excavation. And I thought that's a, you know, and I say something kind of, you know, taken a while back or something. I say in the caption. And. But there's a kind of point to that, that in some ways, and this is partly a story about one's engagement with a subject, it's partly a story about getting old. You know, you're still that kid. You know, there's. There's. That kid is still there somehow. And I, you know, I look at that author photo and I think, you know, this book in some ways is about that kid thinking things through, you know, almost half a century later, but it's still her.
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A
That's just fantastic. I love it. And the. I mean, one of the themes that runs through the book, I think, and I think this sort of comes out of what we've just been talking about, is that you can. One does experience these moments of feeling incredibly close to. To the world of a very long time ago. You know, that seeing that bread, the bread has somehow survived. The bread is not entirely unlike the bread that you and I eat. A bit stale in this case. You can feel incredibly. You can feel. You can reach out and touch the classical world. And yet, of course. And this is, of course, the true becomes, I think, truer the more you study it, like, the more distant it also becomes from you. So. And that's something we've talked about quite a lot on the podcast, that this, that when we're thinking about classics, we're often in tension, that we're existing in some form of tension between the idea that you can reach out and touch it and the knowledge that we are so far from their politics, their. Their. Their assumptions, their. Everything to do with their lives.
- [19:40]
B
That's what gives it the intellectual edge, I think. I mean, because, you know, if. If the Greeks and Romans or whoever, anybody from the past, if they really were just like us, it wouldn't be a very interesting subject, actually. We'd just be rediscovering ourselves back then.
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A
And togas.
- [19:58]
B
Yeah, just, just, just in togas, just, you know, a few distinctive differences. Of course, part of the fact is we do have. There is a community between us and Them, you know, we eat, we sleep, we, you know, we bake bread, you know, we make love, we go to the lavatory and all those kind of things that we share huge amounts of humanity with people further away than we can even imagine. And yet we also know that they're weird and alien and close to incomprehensible. And I always feel that I haven't somehow quite got my point over when people say, particularly after I've done a TV program or something, and they'll say, oh, you know, that was amazing. You know, what did I discover? I discovered the Greeks or the Romans just like us. And I think if that was the lesson they got, I didn't get it quite right because they are both just like us, and they're both living in a world whose rules and assumptions, whose idea of just being a person is quite different. The example I mentioned in the book, and I think we might have referred to this in the podcast, is most people in the ancient world didn't know what they looked like. There were mirrors for the rich, but they were polished metal. You know, we know what you get out of a reflection in polished metal, or they looked in a puddle or a pond. And it is. That is so incomprehensibly different from us because the person whose face we recognize more than anybody else is our own. And that's become. It kind of intensified after Covid, you know, because we've spent so much time on, you know, zoom and other things. We ask you to spend. Spend half my day looking at myself in my laptop screen and to go back to a world in which I was the one person whose face I didn't recognize. And that would have been true really, up till 16th century Venice. I guess when you get mirror glass in our sense, that just, that's a world I find almost incomprehensible. I can do other things which are incomprehensible. I can think about how the ancients thought about the human body or the reliance on slavery or the idea of, you know, not understanding. I'm putting understanding in quotes that the Earth went round the sun and the way the world worked. I think all those big things, but it's those little things that just unseat that sense that the ancients are really, are familiar. And the, you know, the excitement for me and what. I mean, this sounds a bit kind of. Yeah, this sounds a bit old academically, I think. But, you know, what's kept me going is never quite getting my head around what the, you know, what the past was, what it was like what it would have been like to be there. And I mean it's puzzlement and wonder, but also it makes me think differently about myself. I mean, this when you're looking at classics, as we've said this many times in the podcast, you know, we're not just trying to uncover the ancient world. The ancient world is helping us look at ourselves a bit differently, take a different perspective. It's asking the question, or we are making it ask the question of what would it be like not to be me? What would it be like if I didn't think like I do?
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A
Which I would say is one of the most pressing questions of the contemporary world. And the kind of the action of understanding that not everyone thinks like you, whether that person is, you know, in the Revolutionary Guard in Iran or a person voting differently from you down the street. You know, frankly, I think that is something that you can practice. I think you can actually practice that via the thinking about the ancient world where the stakes are much lower because they are all dead and gone. It doesn't actually matter, but it really does matter if you, if it does matter for us to try and imagine what it is to think differently in our contemporary world.
- [24:32]
B
And I think that that's what fiction and the humanities in general do. I mean, it's not only classics. Classics is a very prevalen part of that imagining how it would be like not to be me because it's so long away. None of us have got skin in the game really in the ancient world and we actually know so much about it. But if there is a real essentialness to modern culture, the modern democratic process, you name it, and I'm not over claiming here, I think it is that ability to learn through other people of what it would be like not to be me that. Well, if you want to know what happens when people don't understand that there might be different ways of seeing things, well, go to X and you know, read social media and read the exchanges where very rarely is there any glimmer of a sense that people might think differently and you might not want to change your mind and think like them. You're lost if you don't see that they have reasons for thinking as they do. And I think the ancient classical world, but there, of course there are others. The ancient classical world is a great laboratory actually for understanding what it would be like to be different.
- [25:59]
A
Yes, partly because the various classical writers start to show us how to flex those empathetic muscles. I mean the great, the father of history, Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE about the wars that had taken place between the Greeks and the Persians, but also via that, doing sort of early ethnography in other peoples, thinking about, you know, what it is to be a Persian and especially what it is to be an Egyptian and really sort of early relativism, in a sense. He's saying, well, we do things like this and they do things like this. But he doesn't actually say our way is better. He's like, he's looking at the world. He's discovered the world is bigger than just the Greeks. And he is observing that people do things differently there. And that is a really important thing to know.
- [27:01]
B
Yes. And I think in, you know, there's, I mean, I think it's one of the most important things to know. And I think that in some ways, you know, when people moan, as people do a lot, you know, governments moaning, the poverty of political debate, I think they ought to watch themselves before they start saving money by cutting the humanities. Because it is in subjects like classics, not only classics, that people learn those recognitions and those skills of argument, that sense of difference that makes responsible political debate happen. Right. And I, you know, I feel confident at making that claim. I'm not saying it's only classics that does it. You know, learning about the Middle Ages or reading philosophy, you also get to that point. But it's what, it's what the humanities are for.
- [28:05]
A
Yeah, I agree.
- [28:12]
B
Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics Book Club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
- [28:32]
A
We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.
- [28:51]
B
All details are on our website, instantclassicspod.com
- [28:58]
A
now, Mary, but why from there, from the little girl looking inside the case at the British Museum, did it land on classics? Because it could have, you know, if you think about that encounter, you could now be an Egyptologist, you could now be a historian of any period of medieval England, as it were. That could have led in a number of directions. So why did it lead to Greece and Rome, or particularly to Rome in your case?
- [29:27]
B
Happenstance, in a way. I mean, you're right. That story ought to be the story at the beginning of a life in Egyptology. And it isn't right. They didn't offer hieroglyphs at my school, but they did offer Latin. Right. So I did Latin and Greek at school, but I think more importantly, I was living in Shropshire. The biggest nearby heritage site was Roxeter, Roman city, Vericomium. And, you know, back in the day, back in the late 60s, early 70s, archaeology was much less professionalized than it is now. And if you were a keen 14 year old, 15 year old, not only could you visit the local museum and look at, you know, the Roman squadies, tombstones, but you could go on an excavation. There is something, you know, a bit like the bread. There's something mind blowingly exciting about troweling through this, you know, nondescript mud, basically. And then you come across, you know, just a piece of pottery or maybe a coin that, you know, on a Roman site, on a kind of small, rather euphemistically called villa, you know, old Roman farm house, you know, that you're the first person to put your hand on that since it was dropped 2,000 years ago. And it's another version of the ability to, you know, to touch and get close to the past, which was, for me, really exciting. Now, this is probably making me look much too single minded because the other excitement of going on archaeological excavation was living in tents with a lot of other young people and going to boys and beer, boys and beer, even though one wasn't quite old enough to consume it legally in the local publisher. So it was, you know, there was an exciting social life too, which was part of the hook for me for archaeology. I'm going to confess, I was living at home. I've got a half brother, but basically an only child with my two parents and going out and living under canvas in the summer, doing something as wholesome as archeology. You couldn't possibly deny her that. And having some, you know, good late night raves was, you know, the combination was, was almost, you know, it's unmissable.
- [32:04]
A
So there was late night raving. Let's just wind back late night raving on the archaeological site of Roxeter.
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B
Yeah, yeah, there was.
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A
By the way, dear listeners, it is actually rather spellbinding, that site, and I highly recommend a visit. It's really a beautiful spot in deep countryside and it's got this immense, very impressive, immense high Roman wall that miraculously stood, well, not miraculously stood the test of time for various reasons and factoid, Wilfred Owen excavated there as a young man and it's in A Shropshire Lad by A.E. housman. It comes up. So it's a very, very atmospheric and storied place, isn't it?
- [32:52]
B
I'm sad in a way. I see all the reasons for it, but I'm sad in a way that archaeology doesn't. Now, excavations don't usually employ untrained teenagers and I see all the reasons why they want archaeology undergraduates and archaeology graduates to excavate with the kind of skill that you have if you've done archaeology at college. But for me and other people, it was mind changing about how we looked at the past, how we got our hands dirty in the past. And I think that a lot of the book wants to try and say, look, you got to get dirty in the past. You've got to look at the messy bits because you can't just. Or you miss out a huge amount if you just look at the columns and the statues and the, and the posh bits. You know, the ancient world is. Yeah. Which I. Yeah, I love. Yes, but, but there's all. There's also. There's also the messy bits. And you know, I think that very many professional classicists or people, you know, I think Charlotte is a semi professional classicist because, you know, she brings classics to, you know, arts and culture now. But an awful lot of us have gone into it the kind of, the messy way. I was interested that Charlotte had, you know, had, you know, been enticed by a book. But I don't think very many people actually have their eyes open to the ancient world by, you know, even reading, you know, my favorite work of literature now, the Odyssey. I think they get into it through gladiator movies, Asterix the Ghoul, and going to a place where, you know, as you say, God gives you some postcards and says, you know, this is it, this is real life in Knossos.
- [34:47]
A
There's a lovely bit in the book where you quote the poet Louis McNeese, who wrote this extraordinary poem called Autumn Journal in 1938. And it's a long book length poem which I have in front of me, which is a remarkable read on many levels, actually, partly because he was writing in kind of real time in 1938 and he was writing. It is diaristic and it is writing through the sense of the Spanish Civil War. The oncoming, you know, the Second World War is sort of waiting in the wings and there's a sort of sense of foreboding and dread around that. But Louis McNeese was a classicist and Louis McNeice writes in this poem really beautifully about what it is to do classics and you quote him and he writes and how can one imagine oneself among them? I do not know. It was all so unimaginably different and all so long ago, which is so just kind of what we've been discussing. But there's another bit which I think really does connect very strongly with you, which is also wonderful, which I'm going to take the liberty of reading is when I should remember the paragons of Hellas. I think instead of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists, the careless athletes and the fancy boys, the hair splitters, the pedants, the hard boiled sceptics and the agora and the noise of the demagogues and the quacks and the women pouring libations over graves and the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta. And lastly I think of the slaves.
- [36:30]
B
What strikes me about that now is that it is so up to the minute. He is writing, you know, in the 30s and he has his mind on the underbelly of the ancient world, you know, and we tend to have an image of how people have studied classics which says, oh, for most of most of history they have only been interested, you know, in the generals, in the posh blokes, in the great art, in the great literature. And we kind of enlightened ones of the 21st century, you know, we've seen that there's another side to the classical world. McNeese was already saying it's the people you meet in the marketplace that we're interested in, not just the glories of Hellas. And I mean, I think he's a good taker down of our kind of self satisfaction that we are looking at classics in a new way, in all kinds of ways. We can look at it in new ways and of course we do. And every generation brings, bring, brings new assumptions and new techniques and whatever. But back there in the 30s there is McNiece saying don't forget the slaves. And yeah, and when I, I read
- [37:55]
A
the women and the fancy, fancy voice,
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B
we have to say, I mean I, I don't want to kind of not
- [38:01]
A
the term we would, we would employ but.
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B
And I don't want to rain on Magnese's parade, but he was, he was quite a difficult guy. I mean this poem is amazing. He was for a while, I mean he studied classics at Oxford, he did teach classics in universities both in the UK and the United States briefly. He was by all accounts, despite this wonderful poetry, a completely rubbish lecturer, really boring and he was also pretty high maintenance in all kinds of ways.
- [38:40]
A
Had a spot of problem with the alcohol, I think, which exacerbated during his life, unfortunately.
- [38:46]
B
But he ended up coming back from the United States to the uk and he worked for the BBC on the third program for some time. And although I think Charlotte gently hints that the poetry doesn't sustain the brilliance, you know, he was responsible in the third program, what we now call BBC's Radio 3, you know, for talks and plays, often engaging with the classical world, that he did his bit actually for making classics accessible.
- [39:21]
A
Speaking of the 30s, actually, I mean, he was clearly, you know, he was writing that at a time of enormous political ferment and bad things were very much about to happen. That runs through that poem like a stick of rock. But there's another kind of extraordinary moment in your book that I'm completely fascinated by. And it does relate again to the rise of fascism and indeed to the uses and abuses of classics by fascism, which is something that we. We have to think about today, because the far right instrumentalizes classics and the idea of Western civilization and that all good things having their origin in Greece and Rome. And these are not ideas that either you or I agree with. But there's a sort of remarkable description in your book of the moment when Hitler is given a tour round Rome by Mussolini. And this little classical tour is led by an actual classicist who wrote an account of it which is not published in English. It's in Italian. I haven't read it yet, but I will read it because I can read Italian. But tell me more, because I'm so fascinated by the existence of this text.
- [40:43]
B
It's amazing. And it's a kind of fly on the wall account of Hitler's tour of Rome with Mussolini. Mussolini, they've got politics to discuss. But Mussolini has been heavily investing in the late 30s, and this is in 1938, I think Mussolini's been heavily investing in the classical heritage of Rome and in his own kind of notional fictitious ancestry going back to Julius Caesar and the Emperor Augustus. And so he's wanting to show that off to Hitler too. And he just had excavated what we can now visit, thanks in a sense, to Mussolini, Augustus's altar of peace, which still stands next to the Tiber, he has to have a guide because Mussolini can't do the. The tour guiding himself. He probably doesn't know enough. So some of his staff pick on this guy called Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, who's a young university lecturer in Pisa. I think, and they ask him to show Hitler. Rand, with Mussolini often in tow. Now, Bianchi Bandinelli is a pretty well known lefty anti fascist, though he doesn't put his head much above the parapet. But he's on the fringe of clearly anti fascist circles in Florence, actually, and it's never quite clear why they choose him. Some people say he had friends actually in the Fascist administration who were a bit worried that he was going to get into trouble. So they thought if they made him the guide, it would sort of protect him. Probably the simple reason is that he knew German, because he spoke German fluently. I think his mother was German. And he gives an account both of the trip around Rome and of his own ambivalences about this when he asked the question repeatedly in this quite short but several pages of description, why did he do it? You know, he's now writing post war. Why did he take this job? Should he have. Should he have just. He could have killed them, he said he could have killed Hitler. Probably Mussolini too. And he goes through all these, all these reasons that, you know, that we all go through. What, what would happen, you know, what. What would happen to my family if I'd done that? Would it have done any good anyway?
- [43:38]
A
Does he talk about how Hitler reacted to being shown the sites of ancient Rome and like, what points Mussolini was trying to convey to him?
- [43:46]
B
He does, you know, once he's gone through the. The breast beating, there's a lot of breast beating in it, but rather, I think, kind of understandable breast beating. He says at one point, you know, questioning his own position. He says, I think perhaps I was a theoretical anti fascist, not a practical anti fascist thing. They go. Many academics, you know, many of us are theoretical antifascists. But he also describes what they see and there are kind of. They're a mixture of chilling and hilarious moments. And, you know, there is something ludicrous about the nastiness of it and the chilliness of it. And Hitler clearly knows a lot more about the ancient world than Mussolini does. And Mussolini at one point says, we know the names of no architects from the ancient world, from the ancient Roman world. And Hitler says, sorry, we do. Vitruvius is one of the architects whose names we know. But there's a wonderful moment when they come to look at some early Christian sarcophagi coffins. And Hitler basically says, well, I wouldn't have these on display. The early Christians were the first Bolsheviks. I'd be getting rid of these. He says. And at which point Bianchi Bandinelli notes that Mussolini stays strikingly quiet because Mussolini has just done his concordat with the Pope and the last thing he wants to do is to come out vociferously against the Christian Church. But it's but for the chilling, ludicrous, utterly terrifying day to day nature of Fascist dictatorship. It's a brilliant account from someone who's observing it at close quarters.
- [45:40]
A
Fascinating. And of course, Mussolini did so much to create the landscape of Rome that we know now in terms of the way the antiquities sort of stand alone. And he built the big road that winds around the Palatine, didn't he? And the capital. So there is this sense that Mussolini is super invested in the remains of Rome and claiming a kind of connection.
- [46:08]
B
We can't see Rome without seeing it through Mussolini's eyes. Now is the bottom line. Whatever we think of him, the ancient Rome that we now see is in very large part reconstructed by Mussolini.
- [46:20]
A
Yeah, which is a chilling thought in itself and always worth bearing in mind, you know, these beautiful things that we, if we're lucky enough to go to Rome, you know, what we see is not, as it were there by chance, the sort of environment, the urban fabric around it has been created to a very large extent. But this leads me to a kind of big and much wider question, I suppose, which is, you know, bearing in mind that, I mean, and this is a charge laid at the door of Classics increasingly, but bearing in mind that Classics has been used in one way or another to bolster fascism. In this particular case, it has been used to bolster ideas around imperialism, colonialism, you know, slavery, you know, the sort of idea, you know, that the master of the Oxford College that I went to, a guy called Benjamin JOWETT in the 19th century, you know, made this argument that classicists were supremely well qualified to administer the British Empire. You know, there's this enormous baggage of classics as a discipline being used to bolster some, you know, ideas that neither you or I would have any time for, but do lead some people to think that the study of classics is sort of, is tarred by this brush, is kind of polluted by this. So what do you personally do with that?
- [47:52]
B
I think setting out to support or defend on those terms is a hiding to nothing. You'd have to have your eyes shut to not notice that Classics had been used to bolster regimes that many of us, most of us, in some cases classes, find utterly abhorrent. It has, you know, and, you know, classicists who don't have their eyes open to that, I think are being irresponsible. I think for me though, the point is that it has become, I think recently increasingly fashionable certainly within the classics profession to see the unacceptable things in many people's terms, that Classics has promoted or been used to legitimate rather than the other side of the story. I mean, you mention Benjamin Jowett using the idea that Classics and classicists were the natural supporters and servants of empire in the case of the British Empire is true. What we also ought to remember is that, you know, the Manchester Guardian, the descendants of which you work on as a newspaper, the editors of the Manchester Guardian, were hoovering up classicists from Oxford and Cambridge to denounce empire in their newspaper, which was the most vocal anti imperialist newspaper of the late 19th century.
- [49:25]
A
You know, true, but we were also founded on cotton and you were looking cotton and you know, we were bound up with our.
- [49:32]
B
But every, everybody is bound up in different ways and there's no single answer here. And you know, I think that there is many classicists critiquing empire, whatever their relationship to slavery. There are many classicists critiquing empire, particularly in the Guardian, and you know, almost as many as there were defending it quite literally. But, you know, you just have to say Classics itself, the ancient world doesn't have a politics. It does not intrinsically have a politics. It can be used politically and it's been used politically on all kinds of different sides. I mean, the proto gay rights movement of the late 19th century, for example, found its legitimation in the classical world, particularly in the world of 5th and 4th century Athens. The campaigns for universal male suffrage in the early 19th century, they in the United Kingdom were legitimated through appeals to Athenian democracy. For example, Karl Marx, Karl Marx was a classicist. His PhD, his PhD on Lucretius, you know, and he said, look, the French Revolution was fought in Roman dress and in Roman language. And it goes without saying in a way that the American Revolution was fought in Roman dress too. Now, I don't think, you know, you have to be careful. I don't think you can do a sort of profit loss account here. And there is absolutely no point in saying no Classics has supported more bad things than good things. And of course we're not very good always at knowing which we think the bad things and the good things are, and that depends. But I think that the point for me is that Classics is a language, a visual language, a literary language, a verbal language that has constantly been available for us to argue about ourselves. And, and it's been an argument on both sides. We've mentioned earlier that the idea that the sense that classical architecture is a conservative form. Well, go back to the 18th century and you find the most radical revolutionary classical architects adopting a classical form. And in the 20th century, the kind of, you know, the high priest or the devil of modernism, you know, Le Corbusier, he went to Athens and he spent three weeks measuring up the Parthenon because he saw, not in columns, but he saw in the idea of classical form something hugely important for creating a new architecture. So I just think it's not a question of saying, oh, bad, bare good there. It's seeing that. That the rhetoric of the ancient world has remained available for us to talk to ourselves about ourselves and to back up what we want to do.
- [52:51]
A
Yeah, And I think. Just one last question, Mary, which connects with that is this idea of loving the like, do you love the classics, Mary? I mean, like, you know, it's such a weird question in a way, unpack it. Because it's not like you love ancient Rome, is it? Admiss it. You do love thinking about ancient Rome. So that's quite different.
- [53:14]
B
I mean, I think that people often say to me, oh, you spent all your working life on this. You know, you must really love the Romans. And you think, what? You know, no, I don't love the Romans. There are things, absolutely deplorable things in Roman culture that you can possibly set out or agree to love. And I think there's something a little tiny bit patronizing in the use of that word love, you know, because people don't go up to a virologist, say, or. And say, oh, you were all your life on virology. You must love viruses. You know, no, virologists study viruses because they're unfailingly interesting and important, you know, and I don't work on the ancient world because I love it in the way that I might love a hobby. I work on it because thinking about the classical world is eye opening. It's destabilizing. It makes you think again about yourself, not just about the ancient world. And it upsets your certainties, helps you see different perspectives. And, you know, a lot of what the ancients did was very horrible. And, you know, there is no way that I want to. To kind of to pretend that isn't the case. But they continue to challenge me and to. To make me rethink things and to engage me sometimes in real irritation at them, but it's still engagement. And I think that's the same for you, isn't it?
- [54:50]
A
Yeah, no, no, no. Totally, totally. I think it's an just. It's an endlessly fascinating world for me and it's endlessly generative, I'd say. I mean, I maybe, you know, probably have a slightly different relationship because I'm an amateur. Well, I've written books and so on. It's a different relationship from spending eight hours a day professionally engaged in it. So it's a world for me that. Where the imagination is able to go as well. You know, it's. It's a big inner world for me and it makes the world bigger than if I was only thinking about the things that engage me in my day to day job. It's about expanding sensibility, expanding knowledge. You know, it's an expansive. It's an expansive world. And I think, you know, that is one reason that your book, Mary Talking Classics, is great, because it is a book that allows us the chance and the opportunity to expand the boundaries of what we think the world consists of. So congratulations.
- [56:04]
B
Well, I wish I'd spoken to you earlier because if I had, I would have asked to borrow that phrase. Classics makes the world bigger and it would have been on the front cover. So maybe one day.
- [56:16]
A
Thank you for the paperback.
- [56:18]
B
Thank you, Charlotte.
- [56:19]
A
Oh, it's been great talking to you about your book, Mary. Really nice. Yeah, 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 Classicspod. Bye.
- [56:41]
B
Bye.