Loading summary
Transcript107 lines
- [00:01]
A
Expedia and visit Scotland invite you to come Step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend. Walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today@expedia.com VisitScotland this
- [00:30]
B
is a very special episode of Instant Classics because we are welcoming our first guest on the show who got in touch with the podcast after she'd listened to our episode what's under the Toga? We're thrilled to be talking today to the best selling novelist, computer games writer, the thinker and top tier geek and nerd, Naomi Alderman.
- [00:57]
C
Naomi is the author of brilliant novels, including her first, a love story between two women set amid a Jewish Orthodox community in North London, which was adapted into a movie starring Rachel Weisz and more recently the Power, a novel that imagined what would happen to society if women suddenly developed a physical advantage over men, which which was adapted into a fantastic Amazon prime series. Her most recent novel was the Future, about a group of tech billionaires and what they get up to when they think the end of the world is upon them.
- [01:33]
B
These are real page turning novels that are also super smart and crackle with some big questions about power, about politics and about technology. Some of the ideas that came out of the future she's also addressed in a series of essays for the BBC the Third Information Crisis, which she has adapted into a new work of nonfiction published this autumn called Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today.
- [02:06]
C
Naomi is also a games writer and for example co created the running app Zombies Run, which gamifies slogging round the park. But the reason Naomi got in touch with Instant Classics is that alongside all of this she is a classic. She did her classics ba in her 40s with the open University and she's just finished her classics MA in her 50s. And recently she's been researching women wearing the toga in ancient Rome and when we touched on that in our episode on the toga, admitting we found it a little baffling. That's when Naomi wrote to us.
- [02:47]
B
Yes, she very politely didn't say we'd made a complete mess of it. So. So in this episode we hope that she's going to help us shed a bit more light on why and when women wore togas in Rome, as well as talking a bit about her work as a writer, why she decided to take on classics in a degree and how that feeds into her creative life in general. This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.
- [03:26]
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.
- [03:35]
B
Now, this episode is under the Toga Part two and improved with Naomi Alderman. Welcome, Naomi. It's brilliant to have you as our first guest.
- [03:59]
A
It's incredibly exciting to be here, I should say. As we record this. I have not yet received my final mark from my masters, so I think I'm due to receive it tomorrow. So I'm doing my viva today
- [04:16]
B
with
- [04:17]
A
professor of Classics, Mary Beard, and then we'll find out whether I actually pass tomorrow. Well, I think we'd be. My tutor said she would be quite surprised if I didn't pass, so I would be gobsmacked.
- [04:30]
B
But good, good.
- [04:32]
A
That's what I'm hoping. Otherwise, this would be a very embarrassing
- [04:35]
B
podcast for us to have done. Okay, so let's actually plunge in and talk to. Cause you got this master's dissertation with a brilliant title. Tell us the title.
- [04:48]
A
My title is.
- [04:49]
C
Yes.
- [04:49]
A
What it Feels like for a Girl. And I'm going to read the whole title here, which. So I've got to pull up my own dissertation in order to do that. What It Feels like for a Girl Were Toegate women from the late Roman Republic onward, disgraced, deviant, dominant, all or none of the above. So I can talk a little bit about how I came to this topic.
- [05:12]
B
I would love to know that because, I mean, some people might think it's quite niche.
- [05:19]
A
It is niche. But then I would say for a master's dissertation, you do want something where ideally you can read all of the sources and get to know them extremely well. So you have your one little, little area where you go, okay, I think I know as much about this as anybod.
- [05:37]
B
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. You know, and why did women wear the toga ever? Right. It's just one of those areas where you can. You can command and control.
- [05:48]
A
It's a brilliant, brilliant little, little area. So I was reading in the. In the reading in my Masters, for the taught portion, we read. I just. I think I read this one sentence in a book which said there are claims that a. Women. Women were women in ad. Adultery, caught in adultery, were forced to wear the toga as a punishment. And this just immediately set my little spider sense tingling. And I went.
- [06:17]
C
I do.
- [06:17]
A
I. I just feel like I don't. I cannot imagine it. I Cannot, from everything that I know about Augustan Rome, imagine that you would put a woman in a toga, which is the male costume of august honour and virtue via, like the manly virtues. And that this would for a woman be a mark of disgrace. And particularly because when. So where I started thinking was, well, when I think about a woman, what the semiotics are, let's say, of a woman in a elite male costume. I think about Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo, I think about Diane Keaton wearing a beautiful men's suit. And I think to myself, just obviously we cannot read ourselves back into the past. But just as a first, like plausibility check, I go, marlene Dietrich and Diane Keaton there are very sexy. And it just made me want to go and look. And if there had been more evidence to say, yes, they definitely were forced to wear the toga, I would have went, oh, okay, Interesting.
- [07:29]
B
For me, it was great reading and thank you. It sorted a couple of things out for me, which I'd really been not handling very well, I think. I mean, because what you've got in ancient Rome is you've got two. Not mainly. I mean, we can come to the others later, but you've got mainly two classes of women who are said to have worn the toga. One is adulteresses who are said to have been forced to wear the toga, and then the other is prostitutes who are said to have worn the toga. What your thesis did brilliantly was show me that there's really not a jot of serious evidence that adulteresses were ever forced to wear the toga. I mean, why we've gone down that rabbit hole. Well, I can just about see there's some kind of misinterpretations and mistakes in bits of late Latin which push you in that direction.
- [08:31]
A
There are a couple of pieces of the quote unquote evidence. One which I was very pleased with myself about, is that there are two scholia, that is for people who are listening and don't know, that is marginal notes in the text made by later authors or little commentaries. One of them says adulterous women were dike bantur to wear the toga. Were said to wear the toga. And this we can certainly agree because it seems to have been a sexual insult. So to say that adulterous woman wore the toga was as if to say, oh, you're. You're. I don't know how we feel about language here, but you're just a whore. And then the second, which is almost identical, the Phrase in another scolion is that adulter is wearing Kogebantu to wear the toga, which is. Is can mean force. But listen, Mary and Charlotte, you all know this better than I. My understanding is kogebantua has more of a feeling of we're herded together. So rather than a word that you might tend to use. So I looked at this and I was like, a beetle has eaten this bit of scholia and somebody has done it. Or somebody was copying it down quickly and copied the words a bit wrong. Or somebody couldn't read something because it just. It doesn't make sense.
- [09:49]
B
Yes. So we've got this one little bit of late marginalia is that, you know, basically it's made a mistake. I think it is, you know, not all things that classical writers, late classical writers write down are true. And this is. This is the one bit of evidence. And 99.9% certainly it's just wrong.
- [10:12]
C
Right?
- [10:13]
B
So I think that. I think it's great to be able to get rid of the adulteresses out of this picture, but what then about the other class are the prostitutes? Now, what's up with prostitutes being said to wear the toga?
- [10:33]
A
Okay, so for that there is more evidence. There's a passage in Horace where he talks about a girl in a toga who might have as good a leg as a woman, who as a matron wearing her jewels, and she's showing her wares, displaying her wares openly in the marketplace.
- [10:56]
B
It is a particularly filthy bit of Horace. I have to, you know, healthy health warning here. I should say.
- [11:02]
C
I should just button and say, that's the first century CE poet of the Augustan age, Horace.
- [11:07]
A
Yes. And we should also say every single one of these references is filth. It's. I mean, this is another reason to choose this as a topic. It's hilarious. But I think there are a few references, and each one you go, oh, this is something very sexually illicit. And so by the end of my thesis, which we'll go into at some point, I have some, like, weird suggestions, but I don't think we can really know for sure. We can say Horace the poet is seeing an attractive girl in the marketplace selling herself openly and she's wearing a toga. And I don't think this. I don't think it's a joke that he's. She said it's not. Nothing in the text indicates that. So we can go, okay, something's going on.
- [11:52]
B
One bit that I really loved and I hadn't seen before was the Idea of. Okay, why might a prostitute wear a toga? Well, very, very convenient garment if you want a bit of quick sex around the corner. Because, you know, you don't. You don't have to unbutton anything. You could just open it. Right. I thought so. Practicality there. And I mean, I found myself thinking,
- [12:22]
A
ah, yeah, I mean, for that reason alone. And there's. Okay, so. So I'll, I'll talk about another good piece of evidence. I think it's interesting. So in the. Marshall, the satirist has a little line where he says, this woman is known to be an adulteress, yet you send her gifts of beautiful gowns. If you want to send her an appropriate present, what should you send her? A toga. All right, so we need to be a little bit attentive to the literary qualities of Marshall here, where people who have not been so attentive have read that and gone, oh, because an adulteress is forced to wear a toga and get. No, that is exactly what it does not mean. Because Marshal is funny and his, his joke is always a surprise at the end of the satire. So he's got another. He's got another satire where he says, oh, why is this man marrying this very unattractive woman? What is it about her? She coughs and tussit. So this is. She's. She's ill and she's going to die and he'll inherit her money. So the idea that you would say a woman who is an adulteress is sent a toga, which is because it's the punishment for adultery. It's not funny. It's not funny. So that in itself, I think, is some evidence that wearing of a toga in a woman is understood as a ribald joke about her. It's understood to mean you're something sexually. That is a bit of an insult.
- [13:56]
B
What, I still wondered, leaving aside my. The flash of light which showed me that a toga was a very convenient garment for quick sex.
- [14:08]
A
Well, it was.
- [14:10]
B
What I wondered. I wasn't certain where to draw the line between the idea that prostitutes sometimes did. I'm sure there's enough evidence for this. Sometimes did wear the toga, or whether it was a kind of, you know, metaphor for the toga. Whether you talked about people of, you know, what would you say? Easy virtue in emerging commas, Women of easy virtue were women who wore togas. Not that they really did, but that was a kind of a brilliant image. It's like, you know, oh, I remember my mum used to say, ages ago, you know, oh, she's a woman who wears the trousers. And it wasn't meaning easy virtue, it was meaning being in control. But it was that. That kind of what's effectively imaginative cross dressing is about the imagination rather than reality. Right.
- [15:14]
A
I mean, it's incredibly juicy and we do not have enough evidence to 100% know for sure. So all we can do is sketch out what the possibilities are. So we can say, let's use our intuition a little bit and think about Augustan Rome. This context, the sort of from about the year zero to about the year 200, roughly, is where we're looking. And we say, okay, this is a time of tremendous power. Rome is confident. It's the dominant. I mean, the dominant power in the world is to understate it. Right. Rome is the only place, as far as they're concerned, that exists in the world. And a toga indicates the status of the elite, of the elite within that world. So there is a playfulness. If a sex worker is selling herself in the marketplace wearing that elite male costume, surely there's a. I mean, this. I don't know, I go a little bit beyond now what I said in this section. But surely to me, I look at, I hear about that and I go, yeah, that's a. There's this. There's a sexiness to presenting yourself in this way. Maybe a woman looks like a young man and so she's presenting herself as an elite young man, which, as we know in Roman society, certainly absolutely no problem whatsoever with gay sex between men. The disgrace would be if you were known to enjoy receiving rather than penetrating. Am I allowed to say that?
- [16:54]
C
You sure are, yeah.
- [16:56]
A
Great. So there's something there about almost a society that is confident enough in itself for sex workers to be able to play with the images of power and invite a client into that playfulness.
- [17:16]
C
It's a definitely. It's a really seductive argument, actually, that you lay out. And one of the things that's really enjoyable about it, your MA thesis is dissertation, is how many cultural references you bring in. So I love that you talk about Marlene Dietrich and you talk about Sarah Waters novel Tipping the Velvet, which involves a sex worker who wears drag. Male drag.
- [17:41]
B
Right.
- [17:41]
A
A woman in male drag. I mean, this is also true when you look back through history, there are many instances of women wearing male dragons drag. And in each instance, across history, as far as I can tell, there's a kind of general puzzlement. What was this about? Maybe she was forced into it. So obviously Sarah Waters would point out to us that this is often a way of saying that you are lesbian and that that's also potentially something that was going on. We can't know. We can't know. All I can do is say these are some possibilities to expand our ideas of what might have been going on. But it might have been, yeah, you're gonna see a lesbian scene with this. If you're going to a sex worker who's wearing a toga, then you probably see her doing something fun with another girl. That could have been.
- [18:30]
C
I also enjoyed Naomi, the way you brought in. At a certain point, you mentioned that you come from a community, an Orthodox Jewish community, where forms of dress for women are kind of mandated or strongly advised. And you kind of know that world of policing women, if I can use that rather freighted term, if you don't mind or controlling, in a sense, women's clothing, how did that inform things for you? Right.
- [18:59]
A
So it's incredibly interesting to notice. And I think this is one of the beautiful things about studying classics. You have to notice where your instincts come from. Because we're always working with the lacunae, the holes as well as the text. And so it's really important to be able to say, I think I have these instincts because I come from the Orthodox Jewish community, where the Orthodox Jewish community has very strict rules about what respectable women wear. So there must be a skirt that goes well below the knee. Your elbows must be covered. Can't see the collarbone. These are very well accepted rules. A married woman must always cover her hair. The Orthodox Jewish world, I mean, it's funny, when I say to Orthodox Jewish people, oh, and people say that adulterous women were forced to wear the toga, they laugh at me. Because it's sort of obvious in that world that the last thing you do if you're concerned with respectability is to make laws about what non respectable women should wear.
- [20:02]
B
I thought that was a really great bit in your dissertation, that actually mostly. And I think we can think of this outside the Orthodox Jewish community, that the idea that you force people who have done wrong to wear something that will mark them out as wrongdoers, that very widely the laws of respectability and fashion clothe the respectable in a particular uniform, not the non respectable. And I just thought, right, that was a kind of light bulb moment for me.
- [20:47]
C
That's a really smart point. And I think on that note, let's take a quick break here. And after the break, we'll talk to Naomi a little bit more about why on earth in the middle of this amazing best selling literary career, she's taken a bunch of time to do not one, but two degrees in our favorite subject, Classics.
- [21:14]
A
Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now.
- [21:17]
B
How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink?
- [21:19]
A
Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or a white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits.
- [21:26]
B
Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.
- [21:29]
C
Naomi, why did you decide to study Classics?
- [21:33]
B
Can I just add to Charlotte? Had you ever done any at school or was this something really new?
- [21:38]
A
No, I did Latin A level, so I was already. I was quite into it, I mean, and I then did PPE at Oxford for my first degree.
- [21:50]
C
That's philosophy, politics and economics.
- [21:53]
A
So I did Latin A level. I loved it. My language skills were never. They're fine, but always slow. And I think I felt that, I don't know, I look back now and I go, why did I not do it for my first degree? But I didn't. But I was always. I was just enticed by it. I felt I really, really loved Ovid when I studied him.
- [22:22]
C
This is the poet. This is the author of the Metamorphosis of first century ce. Great poet of love, love elegy and the mythological epic the Metamorphosis. Fantastic, playful, enjoyable poet.
- [22:36]
A
Yes. And on another occasion, we can do an hour on was Ovid a woman hater or a feminist or both or neither?
- [22:43]
B
I think that's a great topic. $64,000 question, you know, is he sending up misogynists or is he a misogynist?
- [22:51]
A
For me, I read the Heroides and I thought, what? Modern? So this is a book where Ovid tells the stories of mythology from the Roman world purely from the perspective of women. And I thought, who has done that in my world? Who has sat down, you know, and rewritten the stories of our mythology purely from the women's perspectives? And I thought, no one, no one's done that. So I always had a real love for Ovid. And growing up an Orthodox Jew, I had. My Hebrew is very good. I went to a primary school where we did half the lessons a day in Hebrew. I could read the Bible easily in biblical Hebrew. And it gives you such an understanding of the world and a mastery of, you know, coming from a fundamentalist community, which, to be fair, the community I come from is not as fundamentalist as many. But coming from that world, just to be able to have that mastery of the text gives you a real power and understanding of everything that's happening around you. And, you know, you hear people say this thing, people say online, oh, how often do you think about the Roman Empire as if it's a joke?
- [24:12]
B
Not very.
- [24:14]
C
I think about it more often than is comfortable, but there we go.
- [24:17]
A
All the time. It just. Listen, as a Jewish person, I look at the existence of the Pope in Rome speaking Latin and I go, do you not understand? We're still living inside the Roman Empire to some degree, like we're still within that. This is the reason that people speak Spanish in Latin America is because of the Romance languages from the Roman Empire. So I had, I think, always felt like I wanted to go back and learn more. And I started with a course. I did an Ancient Greek course with the Open University and I loved it so much and again felt the world just opening up to me in this wonderful way. I feel that I've gone From perhaps knowing 2000 years of history to suddenly I now have. So I did classics and I did a module in archeology as well. And now I feel like I have a year span that I can take in. And for my work, that's incredibly helpful.
- [25:29]
C
Well, this is one thing that I was desperate to talk to you about because the. I think it's really super. I mean, for me, with my interests and my interests in the deep past and in archaeology as well, reading the Power particularly was a massive pleasure because just to give listeners who haven't read it a tiny, tiny foretaste of it is written from the perspective of the future. It begins with this wonderful correspondence between an older, let's say archaeologist or historian, ancient historian, talking patronizingly to a younger one. And they are discussing an event or a series of events or a civilization collapse that happened maybe a couple of thousand years ago. And we gradually learn that this civilization collapse happens in roughly our own, you know, our own time. And they're writing from the perspective of the future. And throughout the book, there are wonderful little archaeological illustrations depicting objects maybe from our own time. Particularly enjoyable is artifacts that contain the bitten fruit motif, which we gradually figure out is Apple, as in Apple computers. And it's so deft. I mean, it's using archaeology in the service of science fiction, which is a fantastic thing to do.
- [26:58]
B
And also it's raising that question of what are we going to look like when we are the remote past rather than the present? And I think that's, in some ways that's something that always bubbles under the surface of. Of studying the ancient world. How will we appear to those who come after us?
- [27:22]
A
Right, Absolutely. I mean, I think science Fiction is the same thing as archaeology. All right, I'm going to try and unpack that a bit. But for one thing, I think the further back in time you can look, the more you're able to look forward. I think looking backwards we can understand when we read Homer, let's say, and it took me a long time to really get, I felt, into the mindset of Homer. It took a long time to just understand what the value system was there, why people were talking about the things they were talking about. And then once I finally clicked into it, I felt like, okay, I can see the ways in which Homeric heroes are just like modern people, and I can see all the ways in which they are totally different. And then you can extrapolate forward and go, okay, in 10,000 years from now, 5,000 years from now, there will definitely still be jealousy, there will be a desire for revenge. These things are absolutely universal. We can move backwards and see them, we can look forward and see them, but the structures and systems that, the ways that our morality works, the things that we think are important in life, all these can be totally different.
- [28:39]
B
I think that. Absolutely right. And I think it's, you know, that's really what the intellectual kind of, I want to say fun, but the kind of intellectual payoff for studying the past is, that kind of strange tightrope that you have to balance between thinking that these people are just like us, which in some ways they are, and they are completely foreign, which in some ways they are. And the historian of any sort of, you know, literary, cultural, political historians, always, I mean, poised between those two alternatives, you never quite know what you're looking at. Are you looking at the foreign or are you looking at the familiar?
- [29:24]
C
Right.
- [29:24]
A
I love it. I mean, this comes, this is the question about the women wearing the toga, where you go, okay, how useful are my instincts about the modern world? How useful are the references? I have some use, maybe, but not all use. How, how much can I place myself empathetically into the past? How much am I making up? And I mean, I love to talk about Roman and Greek attitudes towards gay sex. I mean, just for fun, but, but because I think it's so radical to today to say no human beings who are biologically identical to us lived in a way where if you were in love with your wife, that was fine, but like, not necessarily expected, you know, and also perfectly fine to be in love as a, as a, as an older man with a 15 year old boy or a 16 year old boy. And that was totally that Was a sort of normal. And in some. In many ways, maybe more normal than being desperately, madly, passionately in love with your wife as a ancient Greek man. Because a woman is not really a person.
- [30:32]
C
Yeah. I think it's such a. That's. That's getting to me towards the heart of why classics is an interesting thing to do. I mean, it doesn't have to be classics. It could be the study of all kinds of other civilizations. But for us, it's classics that does that. That particular thing of showing you that there are many, many ways to live as a human being and that we haven't necessarily got, you know, the way we have. We police and we decide is the right way is not necessarily the only way.
- [31:01]
B
It makes you look at yourself from somebody else's standpoint.
- [31:05]
C
Exactly. It makes the present weird.
- [31:07]
A
It's a tool of defamiliarization, which is. Which is. That is the tool of science fiction. Science fiction says, let's defamiliarize the world that we're in. Let's pretend that the world that we're in is the weird one and the world that we're going to is the normal one. I love it. I just. It feels like you can live a hundred lifetimes that way. And just. Just to understand the basic. The. The enormous breadth of human possibility, rather than saying, oh, this way that we live is the only way that you can ever live. I find it really horrifying when the past is somehow whitewashed to make it look more like the present. And when we are trying to somehow make all cultures have a McDonald's and, you know, every. Every is the same where you just go, no. The important thing is for us to really understand that there are almost infinite ways to be a human.
- [32:05]
C
When you touched before Naomi on the scholia. The scholia, these marginal comments made by early commentators on early versions of the text. So kind of people writing in antiquity about stuff that they were reading, basically. And you point out that a lot of stuff that we think about or that is generally thought about the toga and women wearing the toga comes from this one possible kind of mystery.
- [32:32]
A
It's three letters. Freaks.
- [32:33]
C
Three sort of local freaks. It is always, I think, fascinating to be reminded on what slender pillars a lot of what we think we know about the past rests and how much there is that we just simply don't know. And I was thinking about you as someone, you know, with a huge fictional imagination and how you might use that on the surface of history. Thinking about history and filling out these gaps. I Mean, that's a slightly perilous thing to do because. But you need historical imagination in order to, in order to, in order to capture the past.
- [33:14]
A
Right, right. So my dad is a historian. My dad is, he's got a, an MA and a DPhil and a D Lit now from Oxford in history. And he's been an academic all my life. All my life. He was going to archives to work on. He's a Victorianist and an expert in political history of the 19th and 20th centuries. I grew up with him going to archives when I was a child. And what I feel about my work is that a novelist can go where a historian has to stand at the, at the door and novelists can enter the room. So this is, you know, what Hilary Mantel says about writing, writing her historical fiction. You find out everything you possibly can, even onto what the wallpaper looked like, but nobody can tell you the part. There are so many parts missing that almost the parts that are missing are the whole of it. And it's just held together with a very fine lacework of facts. And I love it. You know, there are these questions where you say, okay, well, what was this person thinking as they made that decision? A historian maybe can find a letter that they wrote or a diary entry that they made. Otherwise it's a novelist has to go in and go, this is what I think.
- [34:37]
B
I think also, and I'm reading your dissertation made me think about the kind of the role of the writer within the study of classics. I mean, one of the things you're doing is absolutely that you're seeing where the gaps are and you're saying, you know, how can I fill them, you know, and how, how justified are any of my fill ins into that very gappy picture? And that's one thing. But I think also there's that thing where a creative writer really has got something to contribute in classics, that when you look at these texts, I mean, when they're not gappy, when they're like Horace and they do survive, you're thinking about how they are writing. I think in a way that's quite different from many people who study the classics from a solely academic point point of view.
- [35:43]
A
I was actually quite surprised, and don't be offended, I was quite surprised when I went to learn my, as they say about Dinette, my little square of ivory, just these few pieces of text about women in togas. I was quite surprised by how little literary feeling for the text I saw in the notes. So when I say, look, Marshall is funny and therefore if he said this, it's a joke. You cannot just ploddingly treat this as if Marshall is giving you an interesting piece of historical fact here.
- [36:26]
B
That's absolutely spot on. And it reminds me of the one word I really, really hate in classical scholarship. Or two words, I suppose, the sources. You know, so. Because that suggests, you know, that we now look at these ancient writers solely from the point of view and what they. They can tell us about what we want to know. Right. So do the sources say that? What do you find in the sources? And, you know, when I was teaching undergraduates, I was always wanting to cross out. When you used to actually write on essays, I used to wanted to cross out the word the sources and say ancient writers, because otherwise it looks as if all the only point of being Horace or Sulpicia or Tacitus was to service us in some way. And it kind of gets the priorities wrong. You have to say, what are they saying? Not what can we get out of them.
- [37:31]
A
Yes. Given that they didn't know we were coming, what were they actually up to for themselves and for the people around them who were their imagined readers? I think for Ovid sometimes, this is one of the reasons I love him. For Ovid, you can see him, I think sometimes looking at the future, you can just see him going in the same way that you see Shakespeare saying, so long live this. Yes. Where you see him going, I think my verse is going to last forever. And I'm talking to history.
- [38:02]
C
Yeah.
- [38:02]
B
And Thucydides, another. A possession for all time. His history is a possession for all time. And yet we also know that Thucydides couldn't possibly have known what a possession for all time was. Right.
- [38:14]
C
Yeah, exactly. That's the Greek historian just cutting in again with my sad little, sad little explanations.
- [38:23]
B
So.
- [38:23]
A
Yes.
- [38:23]
C
Or Horace again, with his build, you know, talking about his poetry is building a monument mightier than bronze.
- [38:32]
A
Sometimes they need. Sometimes. I mean, this is a whole separate podcast. But I think when Ovid is writing his poetry from exile, he's writing with one eye on us, going, I don't believe Augustus is going to do anything, but I do believe that history will judge him for not bringing me home. But anyway, that's just my. That's my little theory.
- [38:53]
C
It's wonderful. And when you think of it like that, it's both remarkably arrogant. And it turned out totally spot on. I bet there were loads of poets writing. I am writing poems for eternity, and we have absolutely none of them. And they've all been lost into the sands of time.
- [39:09]
A
I mean, this is a great question. If you could bring something back, what would you like to bring back? Like if you could reach back and they can just. Tomorrow they'll find a full 20 pages in Oxyrhynchus for you.
- [39:22]
B
I've got the instant answer to that. I'm going to go for the memoirs of the Emperor Nero's mother, Agrippina, because we know she wrote her autobiography and we know that some writers had seen it because they refer back to it. But the idea of seeing what Nero's mum had to say, that's what I'd like to know.
- [39:51]
C
For me it's a no brainer. It's like the remaining eight and a half rolls or whatever it was of Sappho. Because I think, I mean, we want all of that. We've only got fragments of Sappho, but she was very prolific and I think if we had that, it would not only be. We would have a load of amazing poetry, but also it would open up so much more about later Latin literature because they were all obsessed by her and they're referring to her.
- [40:14]
B
But we'd lose the wonderful fragmentariness of it.
- [40:17]
A
Now, you mustn't fall in love with the fragmentariness. You're not allowed to fall in love with the whiteness of the statues. You've got to say, this is. We're only entering into a partial. All right, I'm going to do mine. I have a few, but if I could just pick one. I want the satyr play that goes with the Oresteia. And this is a literary wish. So the Oresteia is the only complete set of three Greek tragic plays we have that work together as a three, and we can see how they play on each other and the themes return. But we know that each of these Greek tragic plays also had a sort of phallic comedy at the end. And I just. I'm desperate to know what you put at the end of the Oresteia, where you are, what comes next. Because as we know from everything we've ever read, the last chapter of a novel is actually very important in order to understanding how the whole thing fits together. So, yes, that's one of my favourite games.
- [41:27]
C
So, Naomi, just to finish off our conversation, and really, in a way, our entire conversation has been about this question, but I'm going to put you on the spot and see whether you can, you can answer it in the kind of direct way is, you know, why is classics such an exciting thing to do now?
- [41:46]
A
I mean, I Think we are living through. And this is my thought, from studying classics, we are living through a seismic shift in human society. You may say to me, naomi, people could have said this at any point since the year.
- [42:02]
B
The year 2000, the year zero or earlier,
- [42:06]
A
it seems to me. Certainly when I was studying the classics and we started out, they set us a little bit of Walter Ong, who is. He has a book called Orality and Literacy, where he talks about what happens when cultures move from being oral cultures to being cultures that are based on the written words that have phonetic script. And then I read a short section of this. My brain went on fire. I went to find the rest of it. He is writing about the ways that we are psychologically changed by the technologies around us. I then went to read Eric Havelock, who writes about. He has a book called the Muse Learns to Write, which is about how the invention of philosophy in ancient Greece is dependent on the invention of writing. And at that point I thought, oh, okay, I really need to know everything about this, because that is the only way to understand what we are living through. It's the only way to understand what the Internet is, where the future might be going. It is the only way to get out of this mindset of all changes. This technological change is wonderful, Pollyanna. Or it's all terrible. No, it's all killing us all, and it's a disaster. And just to have a sense of the large span of history, of the things that will always be true of human beings and the ways in which we are radically changed by the society and the technology, the cultures that we happen to live around, fundamentally, I mean, I know this is very personal. I find it incredibly comforting. I find the knowledge of how many different ways humans have lived and how many things we've been through find it really reassuring. It's very easy to feel that if a way of life that you grew up with is going away, that everything is over. This is a terrible disaster. Instead of saying, ah, this is always happening. Change is the only constant.
- [44:19]
B
Somebody has struggled with this before, you know, and seeing those early Greek and Roman writers actually facing that kind of sense of, what is it to argue in text, you know, what is a text? And it's seismic, the kind of revolution that's going on then. And I too, find that quite comforting.
- [44:48]
A
Yeah, I think there's a tendency to treat people from the past as if they weren't real compared to us. And the more you read classical work, the more you can absolutely see they are 100% real. They are Just like us, if we think it is bad to live in the world of Elon Musk, how you imagine what it was like to live in the world of Caligula. And I find that actually tremendously reassuring. You know, there's also a tendency to feel that we're living through whatever we're living through is the worst it's ever been. And go, no, no, it's been a lot worse than this. On that incredibly uplifting point, I find that quite uplifting. I really do. I find it.
- [45:27]
B
It's been worse than this.
- [45:28]
A
It's been worse than this. And people still wrote literature and loved their children and read fiction and went for walks and enjoyed a nice piece of cheese. And all of these things have been happening for thousands of years and no particular bad ruler has ever been able to stop it.
- [45:45]
C
Well, that is, I think, an uplifting point. And I just want to thank you so much, Nomi, for being our first ever guest on Instant Classics. Thank you so much for getting in touch with us.
- [45:57]
A
A real honour as ever.
- [45:59]
C
We want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions, and so if you have them, please do send them to us at instant classics and podmail.com or on our social media at stantclassicspod.
- [46:16]
B
Bye Bye.
- [46:23]
A
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage. To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler. Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world, yet he started life in a muddy provincial village. A rebel son who hated his father survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions from Empire. The Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand. And I'm William DuranPole. In this six part series series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong. 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. Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.