EP.237 - DAME MARY BEARD

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey, how are you doing podcasts?

Adam Buxton here, reporting to you from a cold, windy farm track in East Anglia.

It's just a few days before Christmas as I'm recording this.

4.15,

sun's already down.

Well, there's a little bit of light on the horizon.

It's quite a tasteful sunset, let me tell you.

You're dealing with the subtleties of the amber spectrum.

My best dog friend Rosie is not with me.

She was curled up on the sofa in the warm kitchen, and she really

looked very keen to stay there, so I took pity on her.

But if you'd like a tiny bit of Sonic Rosie time, this was the sound of her this morning running down the stairs for some breakfast.

Come on,

right, Waggy Tail.

Come get your stinky biscuits and meat.

Rosie on the stairs there, she says hello.

I don't know how excited she is about Christmas.

I'm very excited, although I do have quite a bit of work to do.

Between now and Christmas Day, when your festive podcast with myself and Joe Cornish will be plopping into your pod sack, that sounds revolting, I apologise, at midnight on Christmas Eve.

At least that's the plan.

Right now let's deal with the matter at hand and me telling you a little bit about podcast number 337 which is a little bit like a private tutorial with I was going to say one of the world's most famous classicists but let's just go for broke shall we?

I'm going to call her the world's most famous classicist.

She's a specialist in ancient Greek and Roman history.

ancient art and architecture.

She's a writer and broadcaster.

It's Professor Dame Dame Mary Beard.

Here's a few mainly career-based beard facts.

Mary was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Shropshire in the West Midlands of England.

She studied classics at Newnham College, Cambridge and after completing her PhD taught at King's College University in London before returning to Cambridge.

where she taught classics from the year 1984 to 2022.

She is also the author of more than 20 books on classical history, feminism, and academic life.

And in titles that include Pompeii, Women in Power, a Manifesto, and Laughter in Ancient Rome on joking, tickling, and cracking up,

Mary explores themes of power, identity, and the intersections between the ancient and modern worlds.

Her 2015 bestseller, SPQR, told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome.

and in 2023 Mary's book Emperor of Rome focused on the emperors who ruled the Roman Empire from Julius Caesar assassinated 44 BCE

to Alexander Severus assassinated when class anyone anyone that's right 235 CE

I have to confess to you that I'm not the greatest historian and it was reading Mary's book Emperor of Rome that really familiarized me for the first time time with the whole CE thing.

I was always a BC before Christ and AD Anno Domini man myself

but we try to move with the times BCE before common era CE common era to make it a bit less Jesusy.

Okay, you're all rolling your eyes at me but I only got the memo fairly recently about that one.

Anyway Emperor of Rome answers questions like what power did emperors actually have and was the Roman palace really so blood-stained?

Emperor of Rome, quoting from the blurb, goes directly to the heart of fantasies about what it was to be Roman.

I'm sure many of you remember that meme last year in 2023, asking my husband how often he thinks about the Roman Empire.

The answer to which shocked many people, turns out that men think about the Roman Empire loads.

I have to confess, I'm not one of them, but I really enjoyed reading Emperor of Rome.

My conversation with Mary was recorded face to face in London in April of this year, 2024, and Mary told me about the Roman version of social media, why shoes are important when talking about power, whether anyone in ancient Rome really died by drowning in rose petals.

and why apocryphal stories and outright lies can be as important a part of history as the truth of what actually happened.

Soon after I started the recorder running, I was telling Mary that our conversation would be edited and she made a passing mention of a time when one of her comments was taken out of context by a magazine and she got into some hot water and that led me to ask her about the response to comments she made in the London Review of Books in the days following 9-11, way back in 2001,

when she argued that the terrorist attacks in New York were not entirely unprovoked, but instead a reaction to what she described as America's history of imperialism and interventionism.

She later clarified those comments, emphasizing that she unequivocally condemned the attacks, but believed it was important to consider the broader context and causes.

And one of the people that disagreed with Mary on that occasion and wrote a response in the LRB was the late American poetry scholar and critic Marjorie Perloff, who I mentioned briefly.

Another of Mary's critics back then was the Irish writer Colm Tobine, who was on the podcast a few weeks back and he told me why he disagreed with Mary.

And coincidentally, my conversation with Column ended with some warm praise of Bob Dylan, which my conversation with Mary also does.

It all comes back to Bobble, so maybe Colm, Mary, and I should get stoned and go and see a complete unknown together on Christmas Day.

I'll be back at the end to say goodbye and share with you an uplifting film recommendation, which I have seen as well and love from friend of the podcast and writer on shows like Peep Show, Thick of It, and Succession, Jesse Armstrong.

But right now, this is a Ramble Chat remix by Anthony Brown.

Thanks, Anthony.

Here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's do the vat and have a ramble chat.

Bruce on your conversation, prototype, you're talking at

I remember you saying that after your 9-11 FRACA,

you made a point of answering almost all the emails that you got.

Yes, I did.

I'm fascinated by that.

Was that, how do you look back on that now?

I mean, that to me sounds like someone who is having a bit of a breakdown over

being challenged in that way and being upset that she was being misunderstood.

I don't think it was like that.

And I think it would be different now because, you know that was email.

You know if you said something controversial now

it would be the most horrendous Twitter storm.

You know it would all be social media and it was before that and I think people were still finding their way about what they how they dealt with email even.

And I think that

well I suppose I thought and I still think this whenever I get into this kind of trouble as I sometimes still do.

If you clearly upset a lot of people people with a tweet or a post, or in the case of 9-11, it was an article in the LRB.

And you didn't mean to, and you didn't really mean what they said you'd meant.

I mean, I think you have to fess up that you probably didn't put it right.

You know,

I mean, I still would stand by, I think, what I said about that.

And, you know, Archbishops of Canterbury have said much the same in the pulpit.

I think now that I probably said it too quickly, you know, that, you know, you should let a bit of space go before you intervene in a in what could be seen as a controversial way when it's a kind of international tragedy.

So

I think I got all bits of it wrong.

But if you do that, I think that gives you more obligation when somebody writes to you to take them seriously.

As long as they're sort of rational sounding.

Yeah.

I mean, I I can't now remember what the extremes of any of this were and maybe there were some that were, you know, I want to string you up or whatever whatever, that I just would have ignored.

But actually, I made,

I didn't make lifelong friends that way, but I've had decent conversations, good conversations, I think.

And occasionally, there are people when I speak in America who will show up my talks and come up afterwards and say, Do you remember I was the guy who wrote to you after 9-11?

Oh, really?

And, you know, you think this is, this is, this is fine.

You know, I feel feel quite warm to some of those people.

And I hope they feel a little bit warm to me.

Because there was a big variety of responses beneath the article.

Because this was a thing in the London Review of Books.

It was a series of, like, a load of letters from writers and academics with their responses to the attacks.

I mean, I think the other thing that, you know, when I look back on that now, you know, this was in a print newspaper.

when I gave my response to 9-11, it's not like doing it on social media.

Now, it wasn't instant, it took about 10 days to come out.

And I wrote it in the 48 hours afterwards.

And if you look back to what those immediate responses were to 9-11,

in the absolute couple of days afterwards, they were all over the place.

You know, I was on one side, but there were really kind of, people didn't quite know how to process it and i mean i remember now watching that famous question time

after 9-11

when the american ambassador was pretty well reduced to tears because the audience was saying stuff a lot more hostile than what i'd been saying about america and i i think now thinking back was that it took a week or so before people found a way of talking about it.

It was so kind of out of anything we'd experienced that

people

just didn't have the words, they didn't have the rhetoric to kind of have a constructive, any sort of constructive response.

And of course by the time my instant reaction appeared, people were beginning to see how you could talk about it.

So it stuck out, I think, more

than it would have done.

And, you know, I think you

of course you regret if people got upset and you didn't intend to upset them, you regret that you know that's um

and you know I still do and I think people were actually quite generous to me I mean you still find it dug out on Twitter every now and then but um yeah I mean I hope you don't mind me sort of asking you about it

but the as well as the direct emails that you got did you also respond to some of the people commenting below the like some of the comments that the paper got?

Do you know, I can't remember.

Right.

I remember the emails.

Yeah.

I was thinking about Marjorie Perloff.

Oh, Marjorie Perlov.

I've never met Marjorie Perloff.

So that wasn't one of the constructive

exchanges.

Okay, well.

Marjorie Perloff

was upset, particularly by the idea that the terrorists should be listened to in some way, or that people should try to understand the motivations of the terrorists.

She was saying, well, you know, you don't want to understand the motivations of Nazis, and we saw what happened when we tried to appease them.

No, and I see her point.

You know,

I don't think that her point is a stupid point at all.

That is not what I think.

But, you know, in things like this, it's probably a better idea to try to understand where the other person's coming from, you know, rather than just think that they are standing off stupidly.

And I think, you know, some of the, you know, modern social media responses would be better if we actually thought, well, I don't agree with that, but it's a fair point.

Yeah, that's not how social media works though it is not

that's a fair point is not a phrase often found on social media I mean it does it is there there are little nuanced discussions going on but they don't get traction

have you ever thought about getting off Twitter altogether um

no

what I did decide is that if Elon Musk you know, made Twitter impossible or started to charge everybody for it or pressed the button and sort of abolished it, you know, in a whim.

I wouldn't go on any other social media.

Right, okay.

You know, I thought, well, look, this has been, this is what I've done.

The profit loss account has been well on the profit side.

Honestly, I've made friends, I've learnt things, you know, I'm fine.

But would I start all over again?

No, I'm going to move on to something completely different.

Yeah.

But my tweets were, I mean, it's very interesting because the first days of Musk,

I think he's been a force for bad on Twitter.

I'm fed up with getting porn ads, which I didn't get before.

Right, I didn't realise that was before.

All the time.

The librarian at the Bodleian,

a guy called Richard Ovendon, who oversees one of the great libraries of the world, but is very savvy about different forms of knowledge and how you preserve it.

So it's not just manuscripts and books, he's interested in digital knowledge.

And he thought, just like I thought, I suppose, but I didn't see the implications, that Musk could just destroy this.

You could just push the button and the whole of Twitter would have gone.

And he thought, if that were to happen, this kind of huge amount of

the way people talk to each other, you know, in the early 21st century would disappear.

There was a librarianship issue.

in this,

you know, not just a kind of what is Musk going to do, but we would want this this preserved at least partially.

So he got some of his mates who he knew were active on Twitter and some academics and others to download all their tweets and send them to the bodily so that at least that kind of glimpse of what was going on in that particular medium would be preserved.

I thought, well, that's kind of important actually, because it was an important bit of culture.

What was the, I mean, to do an obvious segue, what was the Roman equivalent?

Was there any point at which ancient Rome started to try and make communication more democratic in a comparable way?

A comparable way, I think.

No, I mean, the Romans would have loved Twitter.

They would have been naturals at Twitter, I think.

But you see

some aspects

of Roman political culture which are not a million miles from it.

The obvious example of that is graffiti, which gets everywhere.

Clever little witty things scratched on walls, people replying.

It can look a bit like a Twitter argument.

But the thing that I think strikes me most is really, I'm afraid, goes to Trump.

And one of the things that was clearly absolutely central to

his rise and in him holding his position

is that he

managed to communicate directly with the people unmediated.

So he used Twitter to speak directly to everybody, not through traditional media, not being edited, not being

him and anybody who would want to read his tweets.

Yeah.

It was genuinely him

typing away in the middle of the night.

Yes, it was.

And Trump actually saw that

the new star political leader needed to speak directly to his popularity base.

Now, if you look for an ancient precedent to that, it's very similar to Julius Caesar.

Very similar indeed.

I mean, Julius Caesar wrote

works of autobiography, which are, since the mid-19th century, I think, have been, you know, the bane of schoolboys, mostly in the 19th century, boys, describing his, particularly his campaigns in Gaul.

No, there he was, I mean, you know, not far from committing genocide in Gaul.

But he wrote these commentaries called the Commentarii on his campaigns.

I think it is now fairly well argued,

it's not absolutely certain, but it's fairly well argued, that these,

we have them in written form, but

actually

Caesar used them by sending his subordinate officers to Rome, to street corners, with these accounts of what Caesar was up to and spoke from the street corner on the soapbox to the people round about.

And it was in some ways

the same tactic as Trump, that instead of Caesar going through the Senate and putting the report to the Senate and then it would be mediated outwards, what Caesar does is uses his officers' voices in Rome, talking the people directly, reading Caesar's words.

Right, standing on a corner saying, news from at Julius Caesar, there is a blue tick.

Exactly.

I think that's exactly what it was.

And it's,

you can, I think, trace the way

many populist leaders in world history have found that, you know, that way of doing what Trump did with Twitter or Caesar did with his subordinate soapbox.

The high-flying populist politician needs his support base to be directly in touch with him.

The good thing for Caesar, though, at Caesar with his blue tick, was that he wasn't really going to get any pushback on anything he said.

If people objected to any of it or had any comment, then they could pretty much stick it up their asses.

That is true, but he got pushed back in the end because he got daggers in his back.

He got stabbing pushback.

Yes, he got, you know, the ultimate pushback.

Yeah, he got the ultimate pushback.

Yeah, fair enough.

Was that the model for most emperors,

or were some emperors who behaved in an outrageous way, or what would have been considered even at the time to be outrageous,

were they populists in the same way that we think of populists now?

Was there a big support for kind of big, outrageous, I don't give a shit figures?

But in those terms, I think the answer's no.

But if you were to say, did every emperor have to be in some sense a populist?

And the answer is yes.

And you know, the emperor is very vulnerable.

He's living in the middle of a city of a million people.

You know, he's not locked up in the palace the whole time and burley bodyguards don't save you necessarily, they can help.

And one of the things that

every emperor thought about

was how to make sure that the people of the city were on their side.

And you do that.

I mean in our terms it would be looked on as bribery you do that by generosity the dividing line both then and now between generosity and bribery is a very fuzzy one so you see them giving you know this is all bretton circuses that you see them giving entertainments to the city population but you see them giving cash they actually give money and you find historians ancient historians writing about roman emperors um people like suetonius biographer of the first 12 emperors, you see them being quite acute at where the emperor crosses the line a bit.

So there are wonderful stories about Caligula.

Not just did he give money away, every emperor gave money away.

He got up on the roof of a building in the Roman Forum, the political centre of Rome, and he threw money at people.

Now, in a sense,

as often, those stories about bad emperors are stories not about them just being totally transgressive, but about them going too far in the way that every emperor had to go.

So throwing cash is just, in a sense, the kind of, you know, the final crossing of the line.

It's a bit trashy.

It's a bit trashy.

And of course, Caligula was later murdered.

But it's,

you see,

you see them very well aware about the relationship between the ruler and the people.

The other way that that happens, and again, it has resonances for us, is that

there was a very, very strong idea that the emperor should be accessible to the people.

Now, in most cases, I suspect this is more myth than reality.

But the brand, the Roman imperial brand, was the emperor is there for anybody.

And there's a great story about the emperor Hadrian, who was off in the country doing something.

And an old peasant woman comes up to him and says, Excuse me, Emperor, you know, I've got a...

And he just turns around and says, look, I'm just far too busy.

Sorry, far too busy.

And she said, if you're too busy for me, you're too busy to be emperor.

And, you know.

hits the nail on the head.

Yeah.

And so the idea that the emperor is both populist in the sense of

more generous to the people than anyone else can be,

but also that he's there for you.

And, you know, the idea is, again, you know, how often this really happened and how often it's, well, it's a bit like celebrity gossip, isn't it?

How true it actually is, we're not certain.

But there are, you know, there are wonderful stories about emperors joking with the people that are supposed to be, and the emperor's supposed to be able to take a joke and, you know, sit down be the common man

and also be there with the people and

this goes quite against our own

common image of the emperor far removed from the people um you know sitting in the palace and eating stuffed doormice and having sex in the swimming pool that kind of stuff There's a wonderful, another wonderful story about Hadrian is that he went to the public baths one day.

Now, how often the Emperor went to the the public baths?

I think it's probably about as often as Rishi Sunak fills up his car with petrol, you know.

But you do it occasionally.

It's a kind of photo op.

Hadrian goes to the baths and over in the corner, he sees a man rubbing his back against the wall.

And he remembers this guy.

He'd met him before.

been on military service with him and he says well you know what's what are you doing and the guy says you see I haven't got the money to have a slave, so I've got no one who will rub me down or scrape the oil off my skin after I've oiled myself.

So I have to rub against the wall.

So Hadrian, very kind of generous bloke, he says, I'm going to give you some slaves.

And I'm not just going to give you some slaves.

I'm going to give you money for their upkeep because slaves are expensive.

Fly me.

Great.

So a victory for Hadrian there.

You know,

he's noticed.

Could have just given him a back scratcher.

Could Could have just given him back.

Well, you know, you're almost there because the next time Hadrian goes to the baths, there's a whole line of guys rubbing their backs against the wall.

Yeah.

And Hadrian's a wily old thing and says, I suggest you try rubbing each other down.

Yeah.

And a whole new pastime was created.

A whole new pastime was created.

But the emperor, in that kind of

little sort of combination of stories on the same theme,

the Emperor is both seen to be generous, to be caring, but not an idiot.

Yeah, don't take the piss, guys.

He's saying don't take the piss.

Now, when I was reading Emperor of Rome, and at the very beginning you start by talking about Elagabalus

and him drowning his dinner guests in petals.

So I was thinking, question one,

how, I mean, I appreciate you make it clear there was a lot of petals,

but how, that's loads, how did they die?

No, well, I think this is one of the occasions where you see that these anecdotes, these extreme anecdotes, take

bits of Roman emperors' behaviour, well-known bits.

But in the case of someone like Elagabalus, a pretty unknown third century emperor, but known more than anything else for being completely excessive.

Teen emperor.

Yeah, he's a teenager.

Yeah, and it is just what happens.

You get a teenager on the throne.

And the stories that collect around them are about how they never know where to stop, how they sort of are doing the right thing, but so kind of dramatically magnified that it becomes dangerous, actually.

Now,

The story is a very simple one, that Elagablus has invited his mates to dinner and he does does what other emperors do, and

we've got reason to suppose this was truly part of the imperial kind of entertainment ritual: that

the ceiling of the dining room is fixed up so that it can open, and wow, what could be better?

petals fall out of it, or sometimes scent falls out of it, so that the guests get

showered

with perfume or petals, sometimes fruit, which is a bit

hard on the head.

But what happens with Elagabalus,

there are so many petals that the poor old guests die, right?

They're smothered, they drown, they drown in petals.

Now, if you ask me, do I think that's true?

You know, do I really think that'd happen?

All the things that you go through your head about this doesn't really add up, does it?

All those things, you know, go through my head too.

You know, how many petals would you need to actually smother these guests?

So, you know, if I was betting on this, I'd say it never really happened.

But what it's doing, what that anecdote does, and the way it gets repeated, is it's kind of homing in on people's fear of emperors.

And there is a very, very strong and important message in that story, which is

when the emperor looks as if he's at his most generous,

he's actually his most dangerous.

You know, this is killing with kindness, literally.

So, many of the kind of extraordinary anecdotes that you get about these guys, you know, whether

Nero locking people in the theatre so they couldn't get out while he was performing, and the liar.

And so,

women gave birth in front of Nero's performance.

Because they couldn't get out of the theatre.

Because they couldn't get out of the theatre because the doors have been locked and men, you know, pretending to be dead so they could be carried out.

If you want to sit down and say, look,

how many of these things do we think were true?

Well,

maybe some, maybe some are exaggerated, but literally true, I would say not very many.

However, I think that they are hugely important tales in thinking about how people thought about emperors and about the whole sort of

thought world of the Romans when they were confronting one-man rule and autocracy.

And I think they're not wholly different

from our own celebrity or royal gossip.

You know, we know that what we read in some of the tabloids is probably not really true.

I mean, might have an element of truth, but it's been incredibly embellished.

Yes, I'm thinking of Mariah Carey now.

All the legends surrounding, well, she was another petal person.

Yes.

She liked, so we're told, to have petals scattered in her hotel rooms and would get very angry if they weren't.

Yes.

But that's probably bollocks.

Yeah, it's probably bollocks, but it tells us not to mess with Mariah.

Yeah, and it tells us about what we think, those of us who tell the story or read the story or say, I'm not sure I believe that.

It still tells us about how we think people

who have more money than we could ever possibly have, what would they do?

There's sort of stories about us, you know, who would I sleep with if I could sleep with anybody in the world?

And that's what people project onto Roman emperors and also onto some modern celeb stars.

There are kind of similarities all the way along the line, I think, between modern

images of power and ancient ones.

I mean, you know, even the little anecdotes that we sometimes tell

are very similar to some ancient ones.

There's another thing that Elegabalis is supposed to have done or not done is that he never wore the same pair of shoes twice.

Now,

I'm old enough to remember Imelda Marcos, the wife of the dictator of the Philippines, who, you know, after her death, it was supposed that her cupboards were open and there were 3,000 pairs of shoes.

So shoes become a wonderful emblem.

Footwear excess

both was and still is a fantastic marker of what the

most extravagant person in power does.

And you can actually identify yourself in opposition to that as well with shoes.

Because I remember I interviewed Werner Herzog, the director, and he's very proud of the fact that he only

have one pair of shoes.

Yes, that's right.

Yes, that's.

And they're a wonderful bit of

dress

for debating and playing with because

they're absolutely essential within at least modern Western culture, particularly when it's cold and wet and snowy.

Sure.

They are functional.

They get bashed around, you know,

and yet there's also this kind of image of

the shoe extravagance.

I've got pearls on the soles of my shoes.

So they're a fantastic mix of total functionality, the Werner-Herzog line, you know, why do you need more than one pair?

They're doing a job, aren't they?

And the idea that the clearest mark

of luxury is to turn that functional object into something which is almost non-functional.

You know, you can't walk around with pearls or diamonds on the soles of my shoes.

Yes.

And for my dad and people of his generation, he was always like, well, you can tell a lot about a person by their shoes.

Shoes.

Yes.

He would always say.

And so you've got to polish those shoes.

You've got to.

He was absolutely appalled by the attitude of me and my brother and sister to our shoes.

How can you go around?

He would get so embarrassed if we were in a restaurant or something and our shoes were not shining.

No, it is, they are the most kind of

interestingly signifying bits of clothing.

Going back, though, to tales of apocryphal things or not apocryphal things,

how do you then deal with that?

And I'm interested to know in the actual nuts and bolts, and sorry if this is a very dry question, but when you are sat there writing your books, how does it work?

You're presumably reading a great deal of stuff.

Do you consider a story worth retelling if you've read it in several different sources?

Are you sort of joining up facts from one book to another and filling in gaps?

How does it work?

I'm looking for patterns I suppose.

I mean I've changed my view over my career.

I mean I think that when I was young I was taught that my job was to look for what really happened.

So if I was confronted with an anecdote like smothering guests to death with rose petals, that the historian provided reasons why that might or might not have happened and the kind of reasons that we don't think that you need too many rose petals to do it, and it's totally implausible, whatever.

And

you kind of ended up going through the things that ancient writers said and either giving them a tick or a cross.

Now, the problem about that is that very few

things get

a complete double tick.

And I got more and more frustrated by the fact that

so much rich

literary evidence survives from the Roman world and the Greek world.

You know, it's simply not true that we don't know much about the ancient world.

We know a huge amount.

But I kind of realised that the way I'd been taught to handle this meant kind of getting rid of a lot of it by saying, look, that's not true.

That couldn't possibly be the case.

He couldn't possibly have done that.

And I suppose over the last...

30 years or so, I've become more and more interested in how important lies and fictions are to history just as much as what is really bona fide true and so what I'm always trying to think is about

why would anybody want to tell that story forget about whether it's true or not what's the point of the story what's it telling us either about the teller or about the person it's told about

and

That's quite liberating and it opens up a different avenue into history.

I mean, I I think that there's many stories there are about Nero's acting habits.

They're a good case of that.

The locking the theatre door, nobody can escape.

The emperor kind of thinks of himself as an actor and people are forced to listen to him or to watch him.

They're forced to applaud.

And if you're caught going to sleep, that's dangerous.

Don't go to sleep.

And it's all wildly over the top.

Some of it may be a bit true.

Why were they so interested in that?

And eventually it dawned on me that what's that issue there in the idea of Nero acting or not acting or forcing us to watch him is the question of is the emperor actually

just an actor anyway?

You know, that the difference between an emperor and someone who is playing the part of being an emperor is minuscule.

And the fantasy is,

so what if the emperor really is

nothing more than an actor?

So I came to see that those apparently kind of silly, sometimes lurid stories about what Nero did on the stage, but actually about

how you might fantasize about imperial power being no more than play acting.

Right, subversive fantasies.

Because what was the process for creating an emperor?

How did someone like Elagabalus

arrive at that position?

It's a big mixture.

I mean, I think that we tend to look at modern royal families or medieval royal families and we imagine a fixed process of succession.

Primogeniture.

Basically, eldest son.

And if you haven't got a son, well, eldest daughter, then, or you kind of go to the cousins.

And that we have this vision that you can, as we do, you know, say he is fourth in the line of succession, you know, and that you can plot it.

And there isn't any doubt about, you know, we know that if he's still alive, William is going to be the next king.

It's quite a convenient system.

The problem about it is that if the firstborn son happens to be completely useless, you get him as king anyway.

So, as a way, you're trading certainty, system,

predictability

against the possibility that the guy is useless.

Now, Rome doesn't have a system of primogeniture, it doesn't have it in really in any sphere.

I mean, in terms of, for example, the bequeathing of property, that kind of stuff.

It's much more fluid than we are, and there are advantages in that.

You get a wider choice.

Now, that's not to say that any Tom Dicken Harry in the Roman terms could hope to be emperor, but within the court circle, within the circle of the aristocracy, there's much more possibility for making an interesting and inspired choice.

The downside of this system, it's a Roman system, is that everybody's always jockeying for position because succession is never fixed and you're always trying to make a good impression, to make sure that you get over your rivals to come to the emperor's eye, to suggest that maybe it should be me, and the favoured candidates then get

you know, metaphorically or literally literally stabbed in the back because of the rivals clustering around them.

And when it actually comes to the moment when the emperor dies, it's all a bit improvised.

I mean, what you've got to do is you've got, if you're in Rome, give some money to the people quick, give some money to the soldiers quick, because you don't want an army uprising.

And you kind of butter up the Senate, you buy off the others, and you just hope it works.

Right.

But is there a formal process where everyone sits around and says, well, we've made our decision, we've heard what you all have to say.

It's going to be Elagabalus, even though he's a teenager and a petal murderer.

We think he's the guy for the job.

And he's got the soldiers behind him, and mum's very well connected.

Right, so mum was well connected, was it?

In this case, mum was well connected.

So he had a mommager who was pulling the strings.

Yes, although one always has to be careful.

That is certainly what Roman writers would would say, look to mum.

And they said that about Nero's mum.

There's always a touch of misogyny in that, I think.

If you don't quite know how somebody managed to be the guy that was eventually proclaimed

scheming woman is always a good way of explaining it.

Yeah.

And then I'm interested to know about the actual books that you're looking at and the actual sources.

Have you ever been in a position to look at things that no one has translated before or no one has investigated, for example?

You certainly have to read things for which there are no decent translations.

There's very few things for which there's no translation whatsoever.

But one of the most extraordinary writers in the ancient world and you know should be much, much better known, is the second century doctor writing in Greek called Galen.

Oh yeah.

I wanted to ask you about

he is you know if you say oh let's go through the household names of ancient authors, you'd have to go a very long way before anyone said Galen.

Aelius Galenus.

That's right.

Galenus.

Everybody calls him Galen.

He is responsible, directly responsible, for 10%

of all surviving literature in ancient Greek.

Wow.

You know, so, you know, rollover, Plato, Euripides, Homer, right?

Galen wrote more than all of you combined.

And it is,

some of it is pretty hardcore medical stuff, you know.

How does the heart work?

This kind of thing.

And you can perhaps see why it wasn't the most attractive to translate, although it had a very big role in the Islamic medical tradition.

And some of it, some of Galen now only survives in Arabic translation.

But you also get

most,

if you can kind of beam down into bits of this,

you can pull out sorts of nuggets that people haven't really ever pulled out before, or at least have never kind of become widely known.

Because Galen was actually the sort of top doctor,

Dr.

Michael Mosley sort of figure, I think, to Roman emperors and the imperial family.

Gut health.

Was that what he is doing?

He is very keen on gut health.

And

he describes his imperial imperial patients and what he did to them and there's a wonderful bit where the emperor Marcus Aurelius, you know, the one who's still so popular because of his meditations,

surviving, you know, still a bestseller Marcus Aurelius.

Marcus Aurelius has got some terrible tummy problem and his junior doctors who've been treating him think he's going to die.

So in the end it's like getting the consultant in.

They telephone Galen and he comes rushing around to the palace to see what's going on and discovers that the junior doctors have been treating the emperor with porridge or some version of porridge which has really gummed him up.

You know, he's gummed up anyway.

And then they give him more sort of sticky sludge to eat.

So Galen says, no, no, I've got to stop that.

And he prescribes an anal suppository, which works a treat.

Marcus Aurelius recovers.

And it is so far as I know, though other people might know better, the earliest reference to an anal suppository in at least Western medical literature.

Right.

And do we know what the content of the suppository was?

What was he sticking up there?

We do know because we know a bit of it because he also has a cheaper version to be taken by mouse.

I can't remember exactly what goes into this suppository, but it's really absolutely top of the range private medicine stuff.

It's going to be sort of herbs though, isn't it?

Yes, yes.

When you go to Rome, how often do you go to Rome?

Well, I've started going again.

COVID just interrupted that for me.

I mean, I used to go several times a year.

It's a very good place to work.

You know, I didn't just go to eat the pasture or see the archaeological sites.

There are wonderful libraries in Rome you can work in.

I've gone several times in the last year or so.

Where are your favourite places to go?

If someone listening to this has never been to Rome before?

I can tell you where not to go and I can tell you where I like.

Yeah, great.

I find the Vatican.

Everybody wants to go and see the Vatican.

I find that absolutely dreadful.

I have never been to the Vatican except in the middle of a vast queue, kind of being pushed around.

You can't...

The Sistine Chapel is wonderful, but seeing it with 500 other people, I tell you it's no fun.

So I try to keep away from the really big hotspots like that.

I like going to the sites or the museums just a little bit off the beaten track because they have wonderful things in them.

But you can kind of see them and you can sit down and you're not surrounded by everybody else trying to photograph the same object and one of my favourite museums is the so-called Palazzo Massimo Museum which is quite near the central station so it's very convenient.

It has in it

one of the most famous and glorious works of all Roman art

the painted so-called garden room of the Empress Livia.

It's been removed from its site and put into the museum.

It's a dining room on a villa owned, we believe, by the Empress Livia.

But the walls were painted as if you were in a garden.

And there are flowers and birds and leaves, bees.

And you go into this room and it's kind of just the garden, this fake garden envelops you.

And you think, you know, how could they do it?

It's just amazing.

Now you can usually see it almost on your own, you know?

Really?

Do you have to book for that place now?

You used to be able, you used to have to book, but now you can, I mean, you can buy the ticket online, but I have never seen it full.

And there is another wonderful museum called the Centrale Monte Martini Museum, which is a bit less central.

I'll put links to these.

Yeah.

That would be great because this is a museum which is

in an old power station.

And there is the most

eye-watering Roman sculpture all arranged in front of these great turbines and the juxtaposition is just absolutely amazing and it's got you know a whole lot of just really surprising things in it and again not many people there I mean most people are the school parties who've been brought to see the turbines not not the sculpture yes it's Rome's first power station oh those are great recommendations.

I wanted to ask you to conclude then about Bob Dylan.

One of my favorites.

Yeah, because I heard you on Desert Island Discs, and that was the first track that came up.

It made me quite emotional hearing It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, you know, which I've heard many, many times,

but maybe I hadn't heard it for a while.

And suddenly it was like, oh, yeah, but he's so good, isn't he?

He's so good.

And I chose it for all sorts of reasons on Desert Island Discs.

Partly, I had a very eccentric old teacher at my school who

was absolutely convinced in the virtue of poetry as language and as words and as recited.

And he had a very amazing, for the 1970s, very capacious version of poetry.

So, yeah, we did bits of Wordsworth, we did, you know, whatever, and learnt them all by heart.

But we also learnt Bob Dylan because he thought, and he's later been, as it were, joined by many others, he thought Bob Dylan was a great poet.

And I remember we had to learn the carpet to is moving under you and it's all over now, baby blue.

And so, you know, I kind of, that was, I learned that as an English lesson when I was 16 or 17.

You know, that's where it kind of enters the soul.

But then, as I think I've already said on Desert Island Discs,

it's something that the whole family liked.

You know, you you know, my husband, a bit older than me, he loves Bob Dylan.

Our kids love Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan is somebody that,

again, crosses the generations.

It sounds pretty timeless.

That was the thing that struck me.

It was like, yeah, this is good to go for whichever age you're.

And I think, you know, there's long car journeys.

There's a lot of things that one part of the family could never stomach.

You know, you know, please turn the opera off, dad, you know.

But Bob Dylan kind of fits for everyone.

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Continue.

Hey, welcome back, podcasts.

That was Mary Beard talking to me there.

Thank you so much to Mary for making the time to come and give me a private tutorial.

Really appreciated it.

And I highly recommend her book, Emperor of Rome.

There's a link in the description, as well as links to a few other bits and pieces that we talked about, those museums that she recommended.

There's a link to the London Review of Books where you can find Mary's diary piece that she wrote after 9-11 and all the responses to it,

including the one from Marjorie Perloff and Column Tobin.

Wow, it's really got quite inclement out here.

The sun is gone

and there's just about enough light to see by, but it's just very dark, grey,

and raining.

And I'm glad for Rosie that I didn't make her come out in this.

I'm looking forward to going home, getting some tea.

But before I do that,

here is an uplifting film recommendation from friend of the podcast, Jesse Armstrong.

Hi, Adam.

My recommendation is for Turn Every Page.

It's a documentary about the relationship between biographer Robert Carrow, author of the as yet unfinished multi-volume biography of LBJ that every serious person has to pretend to have read, and Bob Gottlieb, the super editor to everyone from Joseph Heller to Tony Morrison.

I don't re-watch films much, but this one I like very much.

I watched it with my fellow writer Tony Roach in New York City when we were having a particularly tense time making succession, and it felt like a sort of consoling and charming film about

growing older, about collaboration and about the grind grind that you have to go through sometimes for creative work which we hear less about than flashes of inspiration.

It also ends as Tony noted with one of the lowest stakes chase scenes in history as the author and the editor both in their 90s conduct a slow-motion hunt for the appropriate pencil.

Hope you like it too.

Thank you very much Jesse.

Put a link in the description to the trailer for Turn Every Page

about Robert Carrow and Robert Gottlieb.

and I think that you would find it interesting even if you hadn't read any of Robert Carrow's books

but I guess it would be particularly interesting if you had.

The big one from Robert Carrow they talk about at the beginning of the documentary,

the one that made his name was the power broker Robert Moses and the fall of New York.

which chronicles the rise of urban planner Robert Moses and his transformation of New York's landscape.

However, Caro's Magnum Opus is that multi-volume series, The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

And I heard Rory Stewart talking about it.

In fact, I'll tell you where I heard him talking about it.

It was in an on-stage discussion with Mary Beard.

And I've put a link to that conversation about power that

Mary Beard and Rory Stewart had.

And at one point, Rory Stewart says, oh, I would recommend everybody read Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson.

And I thought, okay, I'll take that challenge.

I looked up just the audio books.

I thought, well, you know, let's not go crazy here.

I can listen to the audiobook while I'm doing other things.

But just the first volume of the audiobook is over 40 hours long.

So it's going to take you a long time if you really want to munch through the whole lot.

But I've almost finished the first volume and

there's been some great times.

There's been some slightly more dense than I would prefer times about some of the technicalities of policy making and bill passing etc

but there's also so many amazing sections where Robert Carro talks about the Texas hill country

where LBJ grew up, what the land was like.

He talks about the actual soil and the composition of the land and how it changed when people began farming there.

And that might sound a bit dry, but it's not.

It's just, it's like an adventure story.

And his descriptions of the conditions in which people grew up around those times, people with no electricity, right up until the early 30s.

up in the Texas hill country, what their lives were actually like.

Grinding, back-breaking work

that

particularly the women had to undertake as part of their daily lives it's quite amazing so

if you've got a spare 40 plus hours for volume one

and

another 200 for the rest dive in but if you're on a bit more of a budget time-wise I think you'd really enjoy turn every page

okay I'm being heavily rained on now I don't know if you can hear

but I'm gonna head back.

Thank you so much once again to Mary Beard.

Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for all his production support and conversation editing.

Thanks very much to everyone at ACAST for keeping the show on the road.

Thanks to Helen Green for her beautiful artwork.

Thanks most especially to you, Podcats.

Hope you enjoyed this one.

Thank you very much for coming back.

And I mean I'm a little damp.

but I don't think the dampness will come through the headphones.

I hope not anyway, if I reach over and give you a bit of a hug.

Good to see you.

All right,

until Christmas Day, if you're joining myself and Joe for some stupid live waffle from the Royal Festival Hall.

And if you're not joining us for that, well, I'll see you in 2025.

But

whatever you're up to,

go carefully, take care, and for what it's worth, I love you.

Bye.

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