How Greece Shaped Rome

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Ancients – How Greece Shaped Rome

Podcast: The Ancients
Host: Tristan Hughes
Guests: Mary Beard, Charlotte Higgins
Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Overview

This episode features two leading classicists, Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins, in conversation with Tristan Hughes. The main theme is the multifaceted relationship between ancient Greece and Rome: their interactions, mutual influences, and the layers of mythology, literature, empire, and identity that intertwined their civilizations. The episode provides a nuanced analysis of how Greek culture shaped Rome, while also challenging simplistic binaries and assumptions about “the two classical civilizations.” The discussion delves into everything from Roman architecture and literature to moral anxieties over conquest, and explores how our modern understanding of “classics” is itself shaped by historical oversimplifications.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Foundations and Intertwined Origins

[04:07–05:24]

• The relationship between Greece and Rome is complex: Romans adored Greek culture but often held derogatory views about Greeks themselves.
• Both cultures did not exist in linear, separate timelines; rather, they developed alongside one another, sometimes vying for cultural prominence.
• The origins of Rome, as told in Virgil’s Aeneid, connect directly to Greek mythologies and expatriates (Aeneas, Evander), highlighting from the start the interconnectedness between Greek and Roman identity.

“You can't ever find a time when Rome and Greece weren't intertwined.” — Mary Beard [07:20]

2. Defining “Classical” and its Limits

[07:57–10:46]

• The concept of the “classical civilizations” is a modern construct and often excludes other influential ancient cultures (like the Etruscans and Phoenicians) that shaped both Greece and Rome.
• Greek and Latin literature continues to be read and debated across millennia, lending a sense of centrality, but the ancient Mediterranean was a multicultural, multilingual milieu.
• There is a danger in attributing all European culture as a direct, exclusive descendant of Greece and Rome.

“The world is already a mixed cultural world... It's from Britain to the Sahara, mate.” — Mary Beard [14:00]

3. Other Influences: Etruscans and Beyond

[11:39–14:46]

• The omission of non-Greek, non-Roman cultures in popular narratives is partly due to the dominance of literary traditions. Etruscans, for example, profoundly affected Rome but left little literature.
• Archaeology reveals the vibrant, overlapping cultures of pre-Roman Italy: Etruscans, Samnites, Lucanians, and others played critical roles.

“Archaeologists and historians have been working... on what the Etruscan debt to Rome was and what the Roman debt to Etruria was.” — Mary Beard [11:41]

4. Greek “Colonies” and Cultural Melting Pot

[15:02–18:44]

• Greek presence in southern Italy/Sicily (e.g., Paestum, Pompeii) predates Roman expansion, complicating the narrative of “Romanization.”
• These “colonies” were more akin to trading emporia and cultural blending, not outright takeovers.

“These are mixed cultural worlds.” — Mary Beard [15:25]

5. Why Did Rome Expand and Win?

[20:35–25:44]

• The reasons behind Rome’s rise are complex and unsolved; while the Romans were militaristic, so were all societies in the region. The key difference is that Rome simply kept winning.
• The ideology of imperial destiny (imperium sine fine) developed after Rome had already established its dominance, rather than serving as its blueprint.

“The real $64,000 question is why did Rome... become, in its terms, so successful?” — Mary Beard [20:44]
“I think that once they have been in a complicated way drawn into these conflicts... they retrospectively see a world dominating mission.” — Mary Beard [23:27]

6. Roman Anxieties about Wealth and Morality

[25:44–28:41]

• As Rome conquered Greece and acquired its art and wealth, Romans became deeply anxious about the effects on their “rugged” character.
• The year 146 BCE (sacking of Corinth and Carthage) marks both triumph and anxiety — with some Roman leaders expressing foreboding about the fate of Rome.

“Now they've become sort of billionaires.” — Charlotte Higgins [26:13]
“It's going to happen to us one day.” — Mary Beard paraphrasing Scipio Aemilianus at the sack of Carthage [26:43]

7. Greek Views of the Romans

[29:35–32:14]

• Greeks sometimes viewed the Romans as barbaric, but the reality under Roman rule was complex. Some Greeks resisted, others collaborated and integrated.
• Greek theatres were often adapted for Roman spectacles like gladiatorial games, indicating deep cultural blending.

“He’s giving you this extraordinary view of Greece as if the Romans weren’t there.” — Mary Beard on Pausanias [30:24]

8. The Role of Greek Mythology in Rome

[32:14–37:17]

• Roman fascination with Greek myth is evidenced by works like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the myths often serve different, more cosmopolitan or literary functions in Rome.
• Roman identity frequently defined itself both in relation to and distinction from Greek culture, sometimes playing up “ruggedness” to contrast with perceived Greek luxury.

“What Rome is doing is seeing what it is to use a mythical language outside place, as a cosmopolitan language.” — Mary Beard [34:02]

9. Rome’s Literary and Artistic Dialogue with Greece

[38:31–46:04]

• Virgil’s Aeneid is at once a homage to and a one-upping of Homer, blending the Iliad and Odyssey into a single national epic.
• Roman playwrights like Plautus and Terence closely adapted Greek comedies but filtered them through Roman experience (e.g., the treatment of slavery, social hierarchy).
• Roman architecture and sculpture drew on Greek precedents, but Rome “cosmopolitanized” the artistic vocabulary, making it international.

“He’s both offering a tribute to Homer... He’s also saying, up yours, Homer. Look, I can do better than this.” — Mary Beard on Virgil [41:29]
“One thing that Rome does is cosmopolitanize the Greek artistic heritage.” — Mary Beard [46:04]

10. Sorting Fact from Fiction: Gods, Language, and Influence

[49:22–54:50]

• The idea that Romans simply “borrowed” Greek gods is overly simplistic; both systems were highly local and syncretic.
• The Roman elite were near universally bilingual, fluently reading, writing, and speaking Greek as an essential feature of their cultural identity. This was less true in reverse for Greeks.

“Elite Romans live in a bilingual culture... The culture of the elite in the Roman world, from the second century at least, is essentially bilingual.” — Mary Beard [52:19]

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On received wisdom:
  • “We always think of Greece as coming before Rome in some sort of nice, simple chronological development. But actually... there are two cultures going through history hand in hand, jockeying for position...” — Mary Beard [04:07]
• On empire and self-image:
  • “Julius Caesar is a genocidal maniac. Right. But the structure of this is much more complicated.” — Mary Beard [25:03]
  • “The Greeks were goodies... the Romans were bullies, didn’t think, and built bridges and conquered people. Well, that kind of binary division... really gets in the way.” — Mary Beard [27:30]
• On Greek/Roman mutual perceptions:
  • “You can still see the places in quite a lot of traditional Greek theatres where they put up railings to help the crowd be safe from the wild beasts that they’re now displaying in the theater.” — Mary Beard [31:28]
• On art and architecture:
  • “Roman temple architecture goes back... long before they had conquered or come into very close touch with the Greek world. … That sense of temple architecture is already part of the Roman repertoire.” — Mary Beard [46:04]
• On language:
  • “Cicero and co are reading Greek... it’s much more of a cultural mix.” — Mary Beard [53:48]

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Important Timestamps by Topic

• [04:07] — Greek and Roman mutual perception and intertwined beginnings
• [07:57] — The “classical civilizations” and ongoing cultural debates
• [11:39] — The influence and obscured role of Etruria and other cultures
• [15:02] — Trade and Greek/Italian cultural “melting pot”
• [20:35] — Why Rome expanded and “won”
• [25:44] — Roman anxieties about moral decline and Greek art
• [29:59] — Greek perspectives on Roman conquest
• [32:14] — The function of Greek myth in Roman culture
• [38:31] — Virgil’s Aeneid as homage and competition
• [46:04] — Greek and Roman architecture, sculpture, and their transformation
• [49:22] — Myths of gods and syncretism
• [52:19] — Greek language in the Roman elite

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Tone and Style

True to the engaging, conversational, and sometimes irreverent spirit of the speakers, the episode delivers deep insights with memorable wit. Mary Beard offers pithy, often provocative analysis, while Charlotte Higgins provides rich literary and cultural context. Their banter and depth make ancient history lively, never dry.

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Conclusion

This episode demonstrates that the story of Greece and Rome is one of entanglement, negotiation, rivalry, and absorption rather than simple succession or replacement. The classical world emerges here not as a linear inheritance, but a contested, blended, and ongoing conversation—one whose myths, literature, and anxieties still echo in our culture today.

“But that’s from Britain to the Sahara, mate.” — Mary Beard [14:00]

Listeners are encouraged to think beyond binaries and to recognize the vast, multicultural world of antiquity that Greek and Roman civilizations inhabited—and to check out Beard and Higgins’s new podcast, Instant Classics, for further explorations of these themes.

Transcript

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[Tristan]

Hey guys, Tristan here and I have an exciting announcement. The Ancients will be returning to the London POD Festival. Now, last year tickets, they sold out at record speed. So this time we've been upgraded, we've got a bigger room. And you, you can be there too on Friday 5th September at 7pm at King's Place. Now, I've invited friend of the podcast, the fabulous Dr. Eve MacDonald to join me on stage where we will be exploring the gripping story of ancient Carthage. Carthage, the Phoenician city that became a superpower, an empire that rivaled Rome for control in the Western Mediterranean and ultimately had a terrible, traumatic demise. Of course, the Ancients is nothing without you. So we want you to be there in the audience taking part and asking us your burning questions. Tickets for the festival always sell fast, so book yourself a seat now at www.kingsplace.co.uk or click the link in the show notes of this episode. The team and I cannot wait to see you there. Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. I'm all right here. As September begins, the end of summer holidays, back to school, back to work. And we have here for you today. We've got a pretty big subject, if I might say so myself. It's all about Greece and Rome, the interactions between these two countries. Classical civilizations with none other than Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins. It was a joy to listen to both of them talk about this massive topic. Yes, we can't cover everything about Greece and Rome in one interview. However, the quality of these guests, of both of them, well, it's clear to see they're here to Promote their new podcast together. Instant classics. We absolutely couldn't turn down the opportunity to interview them both on this subject. I. I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go. Greece and Rome, the two classical civilizations that often dominate thinking about the ancient world here in the West. To this day, we can see influences from their art, their architecture, their mythology, language, and so on. The stories from ancient Greece and Rome remain as popular and varied as ever. But how did the Greeks and Romans, how did they interact with each other? What did they think about each other and their cultures? This is an introduction to the interconnected world of Greece and Rome in the ancient Mediterranean with Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins. Mary, Charlotte, it is such a pleasure to have you both on the podcast today.

[Mary Beard]

It's a pleasure.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Thank you so much.

[Tristan]

Is it fair to say when the Romans were looking at the Greeks? It's quite a complex relationship. I mean, their admiration of the culture, but not so much the people in many cases.

[Mary Beard]

Well, I'm glad you said that, Tristan, because I think that we often imagine that it's quite simple that, you know, the Romans were totally dependent on Greece for culture, but thought that they were smelly, perfumed, homoerotic bastards. And that is really. That's a simple dichotomy which they managed to hold in their heads at the same time. And that's not entirely wrong, if people have got that impression. I think it's not wrong. It's just that, you know, these two cultures are just so intertwined with one another from the very beginning. I mean, you know, we always think of Greece as coming before Rome in some sort of nice, simple chronological development. But actually, the notional mythical foundation of rome in the 8th century is almost exactly at the same period as the mythical first celebration of the Olympic Games. And there are two cultures going through history hand in hand, jockeying for position in some way. You can tell that from the myth?

[Tristan]

Well, I was going to say the mythology, yes. Charlotte, is it really interesting, looking at the Roman attitudes towards Greek mythology, given how. How much they love of it, and then they almost add on top of it as well.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah. And I think if you look at the very origin story of Rome, that in itself is really, really interesting. So in Virgil's Aeneid, the great national epic, as you know, of Rome, that tells the story of Aeneas crossing the sea as a refugee from the flaming ruins of Troy, having been defeated by the Greeks at the siege of Troy, eventually making his way to Italy, eventually making landfall, finding his way to the future site of Rome, which will be founded many generations later by Romulus and Remus, or by Romulus, but there's somebody already there. And the person who's already there on the site of the future Rome is someone from Arcadia in Greece, another refugee called Evander. And Evander actually gives, in a very sort of head spinning, temporal dissonance kind of a way, gives Aeneas a sort of guide to what will be the future sites of Rome. And it's a kind of wonderful piece of poetic time machine travel, because to Virgil's readers, the places that are being described would have been urban and busy. But from the point of view of Evander, showing Aeneas what's going on, this is a kind of rural and craggy and mountainous and bushy and forested. And in a funny way, of course, now to the modern reader, it's somewhat reverted to that because some of these sites are now kind of grassy and relatively sort of pastoral again, lying in ruins once more. So, yeah, it's like the Romans can't really place their origins as Roman. All the myths of Rome's foundation are myths of people coming from the outside. Either they're Greeks, in the case of Evander, or they are characters from Homer, the greatest Greek poet of them all.

[Mary Beard]

That really sets the scene for the rest of the negotiations, you see between Greek culture and Roman culture that you can't ever find a time when Rome and Greece weren't intertwined.

[Tristan]

So we're going to explore various aspects of Greek culture and the influence on Rome that we have, but also, of course, Roman attitudes towards Greeks themselves. And some really exciting examples to explore with ancient Greece and ancient Rome. They are labeled the two classical civilizations. But why, why do we define them as the classical civilizations?

[Mary Beard]

How long have you got, Tristan? And I think, you know, that's something which is very much up in the air right now, because when people look at how and what we study from the ancient world, they do say, well, why do you read Homer and not the Epic of Gilgamesh? Why do you bound off ancient Greece and ancient Rome as if ancient Greece and ancient Rome was the peninsula of Italy and mainland Greece, you know, it isn't and never has been, you know, and I think that the boundaries are bound to be fuzzy. One thing that classics as conventionally defined, the literature of Greece and Rome, one thing that that's got going for it is the sense that it's kind of. Some of it has, but most of it has never been lost. And an awful lot of European culture has debated with those particular texts. I mean, you might Say, I couldn't prove this, but I think it to be true that there hasn't been a day since Virgil put his pen down and died in, what was it, 19 B.C. when someone somewhere has not been reading the Aeneid. Now that, that gives you a claim. I think what one's got to be clear about is, well, first the writers that we're talking about of Greek and Roman writers being so central to later cultures, they're not just coming from Italy, they're coming from North Africa, they're coming from Spain, they're coming from Syria. This world is already a mixed cultural world. And I think one's always got to be very careful here not to make it think that Greece and Rome or Greek and Latin were the only shows in town or are the only shows in town. I mean, there is a real danger of thinking of European culture as a direct descendant of Greek and Roman culture. Well, in part it is, but that's not all there is to it.

[Charlotte Higgins]

So.

[Mary Beard]

And I think people have rightly been questioning a bit of that though. You know, I still think there's the idea that people have been reading the Aeneid for 2000 years continuously. You know, makes it, gives it something special to me.

[Tristan]

Do you think it also, when exploring kind of Greek influences on Rome maybe, is that too streamlined? Because does that give in almost to this idea that there weren't other cultures there at the same time, like the Phoenician culture and the Etruscans and so on and so forth. They're all influencing each other in the world at that time. We just focus on the Greek and Roman influences.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, I'd absolutely agree. There's much more of a melange than you would first want to think. And also the Greek speaking world was so much bigger, right, than the little bit of the Balkans sticking out. Greek speaking culture was in Syria, Greek speaking culture was in Egypt. And it's not as if Greece stops and Rome takes over. You know, when Greece becomes absorbed into the, the Roman imperial world, it's not. Greek literature doesn't stop in its tracks. You know, the vast wealth of Greek thought and Greek literature that's being produced under the Roman Empire and, you know, looking east I think is really profitable at that point. You know, that a lot of that is happening well east of Greece and Rome and you know, that kind of shifting focus I think also helps us try and just avoid the rather limiting idea that, yeah, these two geographical places, Italy and Greece, were where it was at, that's not how it was.

[Mary Beard]

And we are To a large extent, and I've just fallen victim to that. The literary tradition has tended to dominate. That's to say, you're absolutely right to mention Etruria, and it's absolutely clear. And, you know, archaeologists and historians have been working the century is actually on what Etruria stood for, what the Etruscan debt to Rome was and what the Roman debt to Etruria was. The fact is, we don't have Etruscan literature that we can read.

[Charlotte Higgins]

No, we've just got very fascinating inscriptions that we haven't got enough vocabulary. I really love what I love about the battle to decipher the Etruscan languages. It can't be done because we can know the grammar, but we can't know the vocab because we don't have enough of it. So there are all these nice funerary, you know, epitaphs and things that you can kind of more or less read, but there are just bits of vocabulary that are indecipherable. But, yeah, and the Etruscans, with their use of Greek mythology and how that kind of works in the end with the Roman world, all of that is very tantalizing and very fascinating. They seem to have favorite myths, don't they? The Etruscans, Mary. You know, they really like. You see the sort of recurring carvings of particular stories on tombstones, and they clearly somehow using these to serve their own symbolic purposes. But it's quite hard to. It's quite hard to figure out what they might be. It's a fascinating connection both to Greece and to Rome.

[Mary Beard]

I mean, I think it's in some ways quite important to resist the caricature, that people who are interested in the classics are only interested in mainland Greece, peninsula, Italy. Because actually, as I said before, Latin literature and Greek literature is produced all around and outside the Mediterranean basin. And I think one of the things that's very interesting is that if you look at the kind of the classic Latin authors, very few of them come from Rome itself. And you get huge traditions of literature in Latin from North Africa. Now, we've somehow tended to bundle it together and to call it Roman, which is in part. There's no doubt that in part it sees itself as Roman. It's working within a Roman tradition, but it's coming from the continent of Africa. And classicists have tended, I think, to forget that their shorthand. And it is a shorthand of saying, oh, Greek and Latin, Greece and Rome, that comes across as if we're not interested in Syria. Well, some of the most interesting ancient Literature comes in Greek from Syria. And I think we've been our own worst enemies, partly because we have used that as a shorthand and people have thought, oh, what do classicists study? Study Greece and Rome. Well, yes, but that's from Britain to the Sahara, mate.

[Tristan]

You know, and I hope you don't mind, as a bit of context, how far back can we go with interactions between the Romans and Greek culture? I'm not asking for a specific date. I know that's not going to be possible. But do we have any rough idea when it begins?

[Mary Beard]

Well, I think forever, you know, honestly, I mean, that's what Charlotte's. The story of Evander saying, that's what they thought. And you look, where does the. Where do some of the earliest written records of Greece come from? What we call Greece? I mean, I. In Greek, it comes from the peninsula of Italy. Right? Yeah.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Go to the museum on Eschia.

[Mary Beard]

Yeah.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Isn't that right? Is that what you're thinking of, Mary?

[Mary Beard]

Yeah, absolutely. You know, Greeks colonized that. Colonized is a euphemism, really, I think. I don't know what the people who were there before would have said about his Greek colonization, but Sicily and southern Italy are Greek areas. We now think of, particularly the peninsula of Italy, Pompeii, we think of as a Roman town. Well, well, it is in 79 CE when it's destroyed, it's kind of Roman, but its story goes through Oscan. It goes. There's Greek. These are mixed cultural worlds.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Do we not say founded trading emporia for those Greek colonies? They're not like proper colonies, are they?

[Mary Beard]

No, no, sorry. When I say colonies, it kind of, you know, it reeks British Empire. It isn't like that. But still, having a trading emporium on your back doorstep might not always have been fun.

[Tristan]

But at the same time, if you go to a place like Paestum today in southern Italy, and you see those magnificent Greek temples or the beautiful wall paintings that they've got, doesn't that emphasize the prominence of Greek culture and how the Greeks were interacting with many other Italian cultures, including the Romans, you know, for centuries before the rise of the Roman Empire, that contact is there. And one of the main areas is in southern Italy itself.

[Mary Beard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And if you go to the museum at Paestum, you get a sense of all the other non Roman, but Italian communities and peoples there were knocking around at that time. You know, most of which are a complete. You know, when I remember going to the museum at Pacedon for the first time, most of them were a complete surprise to me. And who were these people? The Samartians and the Lacanians? Isn't that a branch of psychotherapy? But yes, I mean, kind of fascinating with wonderful frescoes and art and tomb paintings, but very sort of Greek looking and yet not Greek looking. But this is all going into the Italian and future Roman pot. Yeah.

[Mary Beard]

And one of the things you might say is that leaving aside what I've already said about the sort of general Mediterranean melting pot, you could say that one of the effects of Roman success in Italy is it makes it much harder to see the other Italian cultures that were bubbling around as Rome was rising to power. Rome has in a sense blotted out certainly the written languages, the other italic written languages. Etruria is a bit different because Rome had a kind of a wonderfully fantasy relationship with Etruria. I mean, it certainly had a military power relationship with Etruria. But you can see when you read Roman writers puzzling about where their culture comes from, one of their go to points is always, ah, comes from Etruria. Where do the gladiators come from? Comes from Etruria. Right. And so there's a sense that Rome is projecting in part its own origins onto the Etruscans. True or not.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, I love that. It's obviously very stylish to claim Etruscan ancestry like Maecenas Virgil claimed to be for Etruscan stock.

[Mary Beard]

Cool. Really cool. You know.

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[Mary Beard]

Hey prime members, you can listen to this show ad free on Amazon Music.

[Tristan]

Download the Amazon music app today. Do we get any sense as to why over time, if the Romans and Greeks have this relationship in Italy and these other Italian cultures as well, why Rome does ultimately keep expanding and feel a need to finally to take control of so much of what was the Greek world?

[Mary Beard]

Well, if we could answer that question succinctly, you know, we'd have made a mint, right? Because I think people have been particularly fascinated by why the Roman Empire fell in the end. But the real $64,000 question is why did Rome, which was actually a kind of, okay, bog standard culture in the middle of a bog in central Italy, why was it that it became, in its terms, so successful? I mean, we might want to put it differently from that, that seeing it very much from a Roman point of view. And that is really, you know, that is a huge and unsolved question. And I think it is very easy to fall back on the ideas of the Romans being uniquely militaristic. Well, they're pretty militaristic, that's for sure. But one thing we can tell from the archaeology of these other cultures in what becomes Roman Italy is everybody in the ancient world is militaristic. There isn't some kind of nice Asterix magic potion, calm, peaceful, charming civilization that somehow gets toppled and slashed by Roman violence. It's a question not so much of why Rome expands, but why Rome wins. Because we are in a world in which the only way of solving a dispute is by violence. And when you're in that kind of world, if you keep on winning, you keep on getting bigger. Now, it's certainly pretty clear that as that goes on, sure, Romans see an economic advantage in that they can see that they benefit from being the biggest imperial show in town. And it's certainly the case that retrospectively they begin to justify that with a kind of sense of mission that you can see reflected in the Aeneid. But how it starts is really one of, I think, the big problems of ancient history.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And Mary, I'm fascinated by what you just said, because I was thinking about the sort of, the rhetoric, the sense of mission, the kind of feeling that this is our destiny, imperium sine fine, you know, empire without end. And I'm interested that you sort of implying that that ideology is bolted onto the fact of having already effectively done it. I was thinking maybe it ought to have come first in some way. Or is that just, is that just one of those? Again, you cannot, you can't, you can't sort of de. Untangle those two things.

[Mary Beard]

You can't untangle it, I think, I mean, I can't prove that what I've said is correct, that essentially you get the sense of destiny follows the fact. Partly because we don't have any literature from Rome before 300 or so. And it is entirely possible, I think it's implausible, but it's entirely possible that somehow at a certain point the Romans set out to say, right, okay guys, it's world conquest for us. Right? That isn't likely. But I think that once they have been in a complicated way drawn into these conflicts, that they, they're determined to win and they do win, that they then they retrospectively see a world dominating mission which drives them on, you know, and I don't think it's nice, but I think that you see in, I mean, you can see in the Aeneid all the complexities of that. You know, there we have some of the biggest, most straightforward claims to Roman power. You know, imperium sine fine empire or command or control without end. And yet it's also an epic poem which repeatedly challenges the very nature of Roman imperialism. You know, so in the end, well, you know, the final scenes of the Aeneid, we see the great hero Aeneas basically committing a war crime in pursuit of Roman victory. So I think it's always on the balance. There they are saying the whole thing's gone downhill in 146bc because we've just conquered the Mediterranean. Now we think the Roman Empire becomes worried and fragile, you know, centuries after that. The idea of Romans worrying about the very nature of what empire is something that we don't like to think, because we do like the Romans to be cardboard cut out villains and they do some pretty cardboard cut out villainous things. You know, that's absolutely. You know, Julius Caesar is a genocidal maniac. Right. But the structure of this is much more complicated.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, I think there's that other moralistic aspect of where Greece and Rome intertwined that I think you're edging towards there, Mary. Where Rome was incredibly anxious about its own moral decline. And its moral decline was so closely linked to the idea that it had acquired a huge amount of wealth and a large amount of that wealth. And Tristan, I think you were probably about to make this exact same point, so forgive me.

[Tristan]

No, I'm very happy for you to say it, Charlotte. Absolutely. This is great.

[Charlotte Higgins]

It's to do with emptying out the great wealth of Greece and acquiring wagon loads of art and what, you know, the Romans then become incredibly anxious about what that means for their supposedly rugged, militaristic Farmer, like, you know, humble psyche. Now they've become sort of billionaires.

[Mary Beard]

Yes.

[Tristan]

And just so people know, so 146. That's when they brutally sack Corinth, isn't it?

[Mary Beard]

Corinth and Carthage. Same.

[Tristan]

Same year.

[Mary Beard]

Same year. They're so brilliantly timed, you know, the same year. And it's when Polybius, the historian of the rise of. The Greek historian of the rise of Rome, is there at the sack of Carthage and he sees Scipio Aemilianus the Conqueror, the extremely brutal conqueror, crying. And we have a slightly fragmentary, but we have that eyewitness account. And Polybius rather dimly says to Scipio, why are you crying? You just won. It's been the most ghastly victory. Really brutal. And Scipio basically says, it's going to happen to us one day. Now, actually, I think there's something slightly. Nah. About Scipio's tears. Right. I think, you know, this is.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Eye roll. Sorry.

[Mary Beard]

Yeah, kind of. You know, there is a. There's an eye roll moment there. I'm sure people are getting the impression, listening to this, that, you know, that I'm trying to defend the Romans. I'm not trying to defend the Romans. I say, I think they're genocidal maniacs, some of them. And I think that an awful lot of people. Let's try with Alexander the Great for another genocidal maniac, if we will. There's lots of them about in the ancient world. I think what I'm objecting to is the idea that Romans aren't making this a problem. They aren't thinking about it because we have. And I think this is where I thought Charlotte was leading. We have also grown up from, you know. Well, I. Well, certainly I. What I learned at school was, you know, somehow the Greeks were goodies and they were nice and they did things like philosophy and the theater, and the Romans were bullies, didn't think, and built bridges and conquered people. Well, you know, that kind of binary division between Greece and Rome is something which really gets in the way of our understanding either the Greeks or the Romans. Look at what the Athenian empire did, guys. If you want massacres, you have a few there.

[Charlotte Higgins]

I guess what I was guessing towards more was that we think of that. Another received opinion about the Romans is that they were decadent. Right. And that they were too rich for their own good. But that was a Roman idea about themselves and that owning a lot of stuff and being very wealthy, affecting the course of history and affecting the kind of moral fiber of the people kind of relates to this period of immense conquest to east and this and the kind of acquisition of all things Greek. So I do think that's a really interesting intervention in the Romans thinking about themselves is very tied up with their relationship with the wealthy East. The kind of great art of Greece, the corrupting. The horrifically corrupting nature of these people, that they have these blameless people who they've conquered. Yeah, well, semi blameless.

[Tristan]

Do we know much about how the Greeks viewed the Romans? Did they just see them as barbarians who ultimately, you know, came from the west and took over, as you say, imperium sine fine at the end. But, like, do you get that sense that the Greeks, from their perspective, see the Romans as, you know, these outsiders coming in and being inferior to themselves?

[Mary Beard]

Some certainly do. And if you look at Pausanias's guide to Greece, it's a complicated work, but you could compare it to a modern tourist guidebook. He goes around from place to place describing what you see in the history of these towns. He's writing the second century ce. One of the things that's really striking about it is that he doesn't mention Roman things.

[Tristan]

Interesting.

[Mary Beard]

He kind of. He gives you. I mean, there are a few exceptions, but basically he is giving you this extraordinary view of Greece as if the Romans weren't there. And that, I think, is, you know, there's a very strong ideology of kind of whiting out the Romans in that respect. But I think that for all the, you know, the number of people who are like Pausanias, Grecian, under Roman rule is full of Roman collaborators. And people say things like. Or I hear them say, go to Greek sides. The Romans like gladiators, but the Greeks would have nothing to do with gladiators. You don't find amphitheaters where you could have gladiatorial spectacle in the Greek east, because the Greeks were still kind of committed to culture, not to bloodthirstiness. No, what you find is that they convert their theaters so you can have gladiatorial displays in them. And you can still see the places in quite a lot of traditional Greek theatres where they put up railings to help the crowd be safe from the wild beasts that they're now displaying in the theater. So it's like every conquering colonial power, there are some rebels, there are some resisters, there are some people who don't mind, and there are some people who are very happy to go along with this, and they become senators and consuls in Rome, they're friends of Roman emperors and Roman emperors are coming from this part of the world. So it's not a kind of Greeks versus Romans culture, I don't think, even though it's convenient for us to, to sometimes think of it like that.

[Tristan]

If you don't mind, I'm going to ask about mythology now, having been to places like Pompeii so many times and the beautiful paintings that adorn so many walls of the villas and so on. Charlotte, do we know much about that Roman obsession and why they were so fascinated and how they incorporated it into their lives?

[Charlotte Higgins]

Well, the most wonderful and famous and rightly celebrated compendium of Greek myth was by a Roman as Ovid's Metamorphosis, which is one of the great epic poems of antiquity. Absolutely extraordinary poem. Yeah. I mean, it's a wholesale. I'm no expert in this, I have to say. I haven't really thought about the way, you know, the different function that myths imported from Greece play for Rome. Mary, you'll back me up or tell me I'm wrong, but there certainly is a different function, right? I mean, if you're talking about origin myths of Thebes, in Thebes, you know, the story of, I don't know, Kasmas or something, you know, you, you are, you're, you're in a sort of mythological world where place is as important as character and, you know, the whole kind of intertwining of Greek civic life with their stories about where their individual founders came from, the stories that relate to very, very specific places and very, very specific rituals and religious rites. If you think about, I don't know, the myth of Demeter as it relates to Eleusis or whatever, in the hands of Ovid. Actually that to me is performing a much more literary function, which isn't to say that it doesn't have some kind of religious impact. And I am going to hand over here, before I get myself into deep water to one of the great experts in Roman religion who luckily we have with us.

[Mary Beard]

Mary, what you see in Roman, in the use of what we call Greek may in Rome is a kind of cosmopolitanism. I mean, I think Charlotte's absolutely right that the sense of the locality of stories in the classical Greek world is very strong. This is the Theban story, this is the Athenian story. Now you find a bit of that in Rome. Of course you do. You know, Romulus and Remus are a Roman story. But I think that, I mean, you can see the, you can see the kind of Ovidian turn in using in Latin Greek mythology in two ways. You can say on the one hand, and I think this is what I was taught when I was an undergraduate, Rome is just very impoverished when it came to its own myth. So what they had to do was they had to borrow the Greek ones. Or you can say, look, what Rome is doing is seeing what it is to use a mythical language outside place as a cosmopolitan language with which, and in which we can talk to each other. Now, I think there's a huge amount of doubt about how far you have under underlying this. In Italy, you have similar stories that then kind of get attached onto their Greek equivalents. But I think we're living here in a world in which it would make no sense to most Romans to say, we shouldn't talk about that. That's Greek. We're living in a world in which this is part of a kind of common. A common currency. Now, they can also, because I think this is. They've got some fast footwork here. They can talk about the communality, in a way, of other Greco Roman, imperial mixed culture. They can also do what you referred to a bit ago, Tristan, about saying, well, look, we're rugged Romans. We're told we don't have any of that namby pamby stuff. We are kind of rugged and we have battlefield songs and whatever. Now, to some extent, I can't prove this either, but it seems to me that the myth of the rugged Roman is actually a consequence of their further integration with the Greek world. How do you say, you know, people are asking, how do you say, oh, we're different? And so you get people like Cato the Elder in the third century saying, yes, because, you know, we don't, you know, and then you can, you know, we don't have luxury. We are very simple and plain and rugged and, you know, and we don't shave under our arms or whatever, you know, all the kind of awful things that Greeks are supposed to do. So all this cultural embeddedness goes together with. It's part of the same process that symbiosis is part of the same process of being able to say, no, but we're different. And I'm sure that's going on in the Greek world too.

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[Tristan]

You mentioned earlier Virgil's Aeneid, that epic tale is the creation of that almost in competition to the epics of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad. And once again, yes, the Roman alignment with Greek you can see there, but also to show that they are different and they've got something even more extraordinary.

[Charlotte Higgins]

If I might say, in competition with. In homage to topping off, surpassing, talking to, loving, hating all of those things. Yeah, I mean, the first line of Virgil's Aeneid is very telling. Armor wirumque cano I sing of arms and a man, which if you know your Iliad and Odyssey, as Virgil's audience almost certainly would have done, that is like a. Is like a mashup of the first line of the Iliad and the first line of the Odyssey. So the first the Iliad begins. Men in Aedathea sing to me of rage goddess. And then the Odyssey starts. Andra moy enapamuza sing to me about a man. So the Virgil's kind of doing. I'm going to tell you, or my muse, you're going to tell me about a man and a load of battles. It's not one or the other. It's both going to do the Iliad and the Odyssey in one poem, which it then of course proceeds to do in a curious way, because Aeneas drifts over the sea, has encounters with sexy women who he's behaved very badly towards. Much worse than Odysseus, I would say, leading to, you know, poor Dido taking her own life, and then lands up in Italy, where he fights a rather brutal war against the people who were already there. Not Evander, but the Rutulians. So it's an Iliad and Odyssey combination and it says so much that I suppose on the one hand that you have to that your origin epic has to relate to Homer, because Homer's there like Mount Everest and it has to be spoken to. But on the other hand, that you have the sheer audacity, guts and confidence to go, well, we're going to do the Roman version of this and it's going to be both poems in one, and it's going to be a national epic in the way, of course, that the Iliad and the Odyssey just aren't pursuing any kind of national ideology. But the. The Aeneid absolutely is. It's the most extraordinary statement of Roman ness. But the reason it's good and not a kind of dreadful piece of national propaganda is that it's also simultaneously undercutting itself at various points, you know, making it, you know, on the surface level, a great statement of Roman imperial expansion, but sort of denying itself that status all the time as well. I mean, it's the most brilliant poem. So, yes, well done, Virgil. You did manage to stand alongside the Iliad and the Odyssey.

[Mary Beard]

In some ways, I think of him as being, well, this is what you said, Charlotte, isn't it? He's both offering a tribute to Homer. This is impossible without seeing it as a tribute to Homer. He's also saying, up yours, Homer. Look, I can do better than this. You know, two poems in one, you know, 12 books. It's the Iliad and the Odyssey. How about that? No one's done that before.

[Tristan]

And do you always get. It sounds like kind of Roman one upping, isn't it, on the ancient Greek versions? And do you see that seeping through in other fields as well? My mind keeps taking me back to, let's say, ancient drama and maybe the comedies of Aristophanes, which presumably were still in circulation in the time of the Romans. But would there be someone like. Like a Plautus, a Roman playwright, or someone who would see those works and then think, right, we'll do a bit similar, but almost one up. It show how Roman comedy is a bit different, but in our opinion, it's slightly better and yet you can still see the echoes of an ancient Greek equivalent in Aristophanes and so on.

[Mary Beard]

We're kind of woefully underserved in terms of what survives of centuries of Roman comic production. But Ploddus and Terence are looking back, sometimes explicitly and sometimes close to translations of the new comedy post Aristophanic Comedy in Athens, of people like Menander, par excellence, Menander. But one of the things that I find so extraordinary about them is the way that what they are doing, they're a kind of. It is A bit like Virgil. They're a kind of. Is a bit like postmodernism. They're a post culture. They're using very directly the. Some of the earlier Athenian models, but they're kind of seeing it through a Roman lens. And, you know, one of the particular ways you can see in the comedies of Plautus and Terence is the way they're looking at slavery is very interesting. Now, Athens was a slave society as much as, in a sense, in the same way that Rome was. But Terence, it is very likely that one of our major comedians that survived in the 2nd century in Rome had himself been a slave. And so you are using the kind of basic building blocks of some of this Athenian culture to tell a different story. And, you know, there's, you know, one of the most famous plays is Daughters Amphitrio, where what he's doing is he's thinking about how to turn the absolutely classic ceremony of the Roman militaristic triumphal procession into a comedy. So there are kind of complicated and wry comments on their own culture as well as being. Looking back, I think if you look.

[Charlotte Higgins]

At Latin lyric poetry as well, there's such an interesting relationship between people like Horace and Ovid in their lyric mode with, you know, Greek precursors, let's say Sappho, in whose meter, the Sapphic meter, they were terribly fond of writing and in that sort of wonderful sort of family of Roman lyric love poetry that one might think of, you know, Catullus Propertius, Horace, Ovid. When Ovid gets to writing love lyric, he sort of sets himself up as almost an anti. That love, as exemplified by this inheritance of Greek lyric love poetry, is almost kind of ideologically opposed to the militaristic virtues that are so. So characteristically Roman. So he talks about. I can't remember the quote because it is probably about 30 years since I've.

[Mary Beard]

Written this in detail, but Militate Omnisimans.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Thank you.

[Mary Beard]

Every lover's a soldier in the warfare.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Of love, turning all those Roman virtues on their head and situating them perhaps in this sort of much more Greekish tradition.

[Tristan]

I'm sure people will be clamoring, talking about, well, what about their temple architecture? What about their statues? Is there a clear kind of post 146 bringing it over? And then the Romans deciding, oh, this is really nice, but I'm going to make my own Roman sculptors and Roman architects will make their own additions, tweaks, improvements to it over time. Do you get that sense again?

[Mary Beard]

Well, Roman temple architecture goes back in a form that is Very similar to what you see later, long before they had conquered or come into very close touch with the Greek world. You look at the early Capitoline temple in Rome, going back to the, the era of the Roman kings, before even the Roman Republic, and you see something which is a bit different from Greece, but essentially that sense of temple architecture is, is already part of the Roman repertoire. Yes, it changes and it changes in all kinds of ways. It changes in terms of material. I mean, one of the things that, where the Greek world kick starts, a big change in Rome is in the use of marble. I mean, if we went back to Rome in 100 BCE, you know, it's all in local stone and it, you know, it might have been brightly painted, but it is not. There's no. And even underneath the paint, there's no gleaming marble. Now, Roman moralists like the elder Pliny, the one who foolishly died in the eruption of Vesuvius, he sees this in moralistic terms, you know, the use of marble columns. But it's in some ways that material changes Rome's architectural style. And they start by using Greek marble, but by the reign of Augustus, the end of the first century bc, they're massively exploiting marble quarries at Carrara in the peninsula of Italy. So, you know, if you say now, I don't think you can say Romans only used marble because they borrowed it from Greece, but it is part of their conversation with the Greek world, or it's certainly something that changes what Rome looks like. And certain bits of Roman, that certain bits of Greek civic planning, in a sense, give the city of Rome the kind of conventional image we have of it. Now, whether they get that from the mainland of Greece or whether they get it from further down the Italian peninsula is quite another matter. I think similarly with. It is a bit like you think about sculpture. Most of our, quote, Greek sculpture is discovered in what we call Roman copies, right. Like an awful lot of Athenian pottery, real Athenian pottery was discovered in Etruscan tombs, right. You know, so another example of that backwards and forwards. But I think that it's a bit the same as what we were talking about with Ovid and myth, that one thing that Rome does is cosmopolitanize the Greek artistic heritage. Now they do that, you know, a bit like Homer, a bit like Virgil and Homer, by kind of saying, but by genuflecting to the great wonders of Greek wealth, by stealing quite a lot of it, buying up other bits, it's not, you know, this isn't a nice process, but what they're doing is they Change it into a. Into a new international, cosmopolitan, artistic vocabulary for good or. For good or ill. You know, there's. You know, so you can go and find loads of statues that all look much the same. Well, I quite like that.

[Tristan]

It absolutely is. We haven't got too much time, but I have a couple more big questions to ask you as I've got you both here, and ones that our audience have been clamoring for. One of them is kind of sorting fact from fiction when it comes to Greek gods and goddesses versus Roman gods and goddesses, which comes up again and again. You're sighing at that, Mary. I know, but is it. Is it much more than a simple case of the Romans just burying the Greek gods?

[Mary Beard]

Yes, it is more than that. Right. Why I sighed is because you have to kind of. There's a lot of layers to unpick. And part of the problem with that view that the Romans just borrowed the Greek gods is that we think the Greek gods are like. We think the Greek gods are, and that the Romans got them. And there was Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and there was Zeus, the king of the gods, and there was Aphrodite, the goddess of love. And as Charlotte kind of was. Was gesturing to before, I think the idea that every temple in the Greek world that was dedicated to Aphrodite had a different Aphrodite, you know, that. That the gods and goddesses of the Greek world were essentially local. Right. You know, so it's Athena, Parthenos or whatever. They have specific identities and they're a complex system of power relations and representation which we've completely sort of undercut by saying, oh, what's Athena, the goddess of wisdom? Right. Well, also handicraft and sailing and being clever and, you know, all those kind of other things. Now, sorry to harp on the same theme, but I think in some ways what Rome does is actually give them a more transferable image. But it's not that Romans didn't have gods and goddesses before, you know, and one of the things they invested a lot of effort in was saying, well, we've got this God. How does that work in relation to what the Greeks have? And that's part of the terribly complicated system of Roman polytheism, where you can have more gods and more goddesses and. And you can marry them up and you can put them together in what becomes a huge intellectual challenge, but is fantastically interesting. You know, that's why people like Barrow in the first century sit down and try and sort it out and they can't because the Romans are just. It's too complicated.

[Tristan]

And lastly, I must also ask about the prominence of ancient Greek in the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic, thinking of if all the works are survived and prominent Romans sometimes sending off their kids to places like Rhodes and other places in the Greek world to learn philosophy and so on. Do we know why and just how important learning Greek becomes for the Romans, or at least for the Roman elite?

[Mary Beard]

I guess elite Romans live in a bilingual culture. You get a few kind of mad boys who'll say, well, I'm not going to learn Greek because it's, you know, it goes along with all that sort of that feeble, perfumed, depilated kind of culture that we have over there. So you can get a few kind of extremist outliers. But the culture of the elite in the Roman world, from the second century at least, is essentially bilingual. The culture of the Greek world is less bilingual, actually, that, by and large, the Eastern Mediterranean remains a pretty. Not entirely, because I think the same would go for the elite, if not quite to the same extent. But the Greek world essentially goes on speaking Greek and people imagine that when the Romans come along, the Greeks have to give up speaking Greek and have to start speaking Latin. Well, that might be the case for some of the western provinces where, as in Britain, for example, the elite in Britain might see that learning Latin. Tacitus, the historian of the early empire and the biographer of the Agricola, the governor of Roman Britain, is very clear about how the elite latch onto Latin.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And dinner parties.

[Mary Beard]

And dinner parties. You know, you go to the Greek world now and you look at a Greek site, there are a few Latin documents, mostly. Look at the inscriptions all around you. They're all written in Greek. So it really differs from place to place. But Cicero and co are reading Greek now. They also see that there's a reason for translating things into Latin. Quite. Whoever the audience might be, they don't think that everybody is going to read Plato in Greek, Greek, and you get the Odyssey translated into Latin. So it's not as if everybody sitting in Rome was jabbering away in Greek when they fancied it most. I mean, the, the elite writers that we know. But again, it's much more of a cultural mix, I think. And I think there are people in the Greek world who kind of can, who do say, look, the Romans are a load of bullies and conquering bastards. And, you know, there is a perspective in which that's absolutely true.

[Tristan]

Bullies, bastards and building bridges. But as you say that's one version of the story. Mary, Charlotte, this has been such a wonderful and wide ranging chat on the story of the Greeks and the Romans and their interactions together. You are both here, of course, to promote your brand new podcast, Instant Classics. Tell us a bit about this and its breathtaking appearance on the podcast world. The podcast stage.

[Mary Beard]

We are mere minnows compared with you guys. Yeah, you know, new boys on the block. New girls on the block.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, Mary, we're supposed to. We're supposed to be fighting the patriarchy.

[Mary Beard]

Okay, yes, sorry, I forgot. Yes, New girls on the block. She's.

[Charlotte Higgins]

No, we're really excited about having a lot of fun with it and we're going to be picking a fresh topic every week. We'll be looking at Greece and Rome. It will be history, but not only history, because we want to kind of encompass, you know, the idea that these are big cultures with literature and architecture and philosophy and, you know, many, many aspects. And at moments, although, I mean, not invariably, but there will be moments when we will want to try and connect the modern world with the ancient world in ways that we hope are sophisticated rather than just sort of too crude. But that sort of part of the point is that obviously Mary is one of the, well, you know, perhaps the world's most renowned classicist. And I studied classics at university, but I'm a journalist. I write about culture for the Guardian, so I've got most of my head in the contemporary world with a strong interest in classics that I've pursued through writing books and so on. And Mary's sort of the other way around. And that we will connect in the middle, that we'll talk about really interesting things in the classics, but with an eye to what's happening now. And we're also doing an amazing book club which is reading the Odyssey together, which we really hope people will join us in. Tristan, you have to join us. Tristan.

[Tristan]

Well, here there's a new film coming out, so. Big film next year, all about it.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yes, Christopher Nolan's Odyssey that has not escaped or noticed. But our book club's going to be even bigger. Fantastic.

[Tristan]

And Charlotte, let's not also forget that you've written some fantastic books on Greek mythology in ancient Greece, as well as.

[Mary Beard]

Being a journalist, and she knows more about ancient weaving than anybody I know.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Can't be true.

[Tristan]

Well, this is a wonderful way to finish our chat today. I'm really grateful for you both taking the time out of your busy schedules to do this. It just goes me to say, Mary, Charlotte, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Oh, thank you, Tristan. It's been a joy.

[Mary Beard]

Thank you.

[Tristan]

Well, there you go. There was Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins giving you an introduction to the interconnected world of Greece and Rome. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, of course, Mary and Charlotte are promoting their new podcast, Instant Classics, and I think this episode gives you a great idea of just how well these two work together. No wonder they are co hosts. So yes, go and check out Instant Classics too. Thank you for listening to this episode. Please follow the Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, where we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you [e-mail] subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.