Renowned Roman and Greek classicist Mary Beard and I trade small talk in her cute kitchen – her cabinets are the azure blue of a Cretan sky. She makes the coffee while I try desperately to mask a burgeoning crisis of intellectual confidence.
“Milk?” she says with a smile, proffering not a carton but a glass bottle – how very ancient. Meanwhile, I am beginning to fret that this celebrity Cambridge don, one of Britain’s foremost public thinkers, may soon realise that her inquisitor is really an idiot.
This crisis of confidence has arisen because I am no expert on classics, yet here I am, grinning across the table at one of the world’s top experts in the field. Rome to me is primarily a Ryanair getaway. I learned my only Greek while ordering beer by a Kefalonian pool.
The prodding little pangs of neurosis had started earlier, stepping off the train in the university city of Cambridge, an hour or so north of London. Beard (71) no longer teaches at the prestigious institution, but she is a fellow emerita and still lives nearby.
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A whiff of intellectualism hangs in the Cambridge air. Everybody in the town looks as if they’re musing on something. Even my taxi driver from the station to Beard’s house, Gaspar from Braga in Portugal, is a thinker, riffing eloquently on everything from economics to the risk of global conflict.
Gaspar once lived in Switzerland. I ask him about the stereotype that some Swiss can seem a little repressed. “Yes, because they’re surrounded on all sides by mountains. Shortened horizons can affect some people’s way of thinking about the world,” he says.
From the back seat where I am doing last-minute interview preparation, I look up from my notes, struck by this wisdom. If only Gaspar was coming to Beard’s home too.
He drops me at her four-storey terraced house on a leafy road where she lives with her husband, Robin Cormack, a classicist and expert on Byzantine art. Theirs is undeniably the home of academics. The house may sink under the weight of all the books.
As I’m stirring my coffee, I pray that Beard doesn’t ask me what I studied.
“What did you study?” she says. I reveal a rather prosaic education in business and journalism. Beard, in jest, suppresses a little grimace, causing both of us to giggle. Then we get down to business – her latest publication.
Beard, a prolific broadcaster and writer, and possibly the most famous classicist alive, has a new book out this month, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old. It delves deep into the worlds of ancient Rome and Greece – and the lives of ancient Greeks and Romans – to make cogent arguments about why classics is relevant today.
As well as learning about history and art, she believes we should also consider what the ancient world may have actually felt like to its inhabitants. Study of the ancients can also help to bust modern myths, she suggests.
“The teacher in me regularly speaks out when I see the ancient world being misrepresented in support of poisonous causes [today],” Beard writes in the book. “I’m always very happy to rub the nose of any inveterate racist in the fact that most ancient sculpture was originally not white at all.”
She uses the contemporary example of Beyoncé and Jay-Z (together The Carters), who filmed the video for their 2018 single Apeshit in the Louvre in Paris: “[They] joyfully put two fingers up to the mythical ‘purity’ of classical sculpture – by placing black and brown singers centre stage alongside such white marble classics as the Venus de Milo.”
Another amusing passage in the book is built around an ancient story of a young man shagging a statue of Aphrodite. Beard revels in eschewing formality.
She asks “what is the point of the classics?”. She avoids getting bogged down in the usual arguments, such as how Athenian democracy inspires modern politics. Instead, she suggests that classics, with its focus on Greek and Latin, most notably “teaches us to read difficult things”. This is a vital skill for modernity.
Beard has long claimed standard socialist and feminist ideals. She insists that classics is not “the exclusive property of the elite”. She also notes that “plenty of the worst villains in history have been strikingly unimproved by their classical education”.
Yet she believes it can still improve the rest of us. As we chat away, she tells me she wants the book to “speak to people who haven’t really thought much about classics”. It is a stimulating read but still an accessible one.
“Who wants to teach a subject that only posh boys can do?” she says, leaning into the argument that classics is a bulwark of the English class system – think of a blond-tousled Boris Johnson reciting Homer’s Iliad with a knowing half-grin.
“I’m very keen on clever posh boys: I’ve taught loads. But I want classics to be for clever anybodies – the clever non-posh, clever girls, women, clever working class,” says Beard.
But not everybody is clever, I reply. What use is classics to limited brains?
“You’re right to pick me up on that. I stressed the clever part because places such as Cambridge that teach classics are still very selective. Is classics only for the smart or clever? Emphatically no, it is not. For all of us, thinking about what happened a long time ago is a really important way of thinking about the complexities of us.”
Anyway, Beard says, “not many people are really thick”.
Classics can give us a language to talk about difficult things. For me, those paintings and stories are asking me every day to say: ‘So how do we deal with this?’
She insists that classics “matters more if we revere it less”. She means this as an argument against elitism. Yet I’m not so sure. How can we not revere it?
Beard is the only child of an architect and a head teacher. She is the product of an elite education and a high-flying academic career as a don. She has made television documentaries, written a dozen books, given lectures worldwide. She epitomises “elite”.
I suggest that hers may, in fact, be an elite argument. Only someone of privilege could afford to regard classical art and literature with “irreverence”. For the working class, the precariat, the fruits of classical Greek and Roman art are so far removed from their ordinary lives that the only logical and reasonable response is to look at it all with wonder.
“That is a good way of putting it,” Beard says.
She recalls, when she was a student, a professor telling the class to call him by his first name – to be less reverent. Uncomfortable doing this, she says, the result was that the class spoke up less. What was meant as a friendly intervention became a barrier.
Beard “never felt 100 per cent at home as a Cambridge classicist”. It was a man’s world when she joined. Beard also hails from the English midlands county of Shropshire, and retains the broad accent to prove it. Her trajectory may have led her to the elite, but she wasn’t a purebred of that rarefied world when she entered.
Even after she gained prominence by making television series later in her career, Beard was the target of trolling for her refusal to get too obsessed with her appearance as a woman. Notoriously, the late culture critic AA Gill once criticised her looks by saying she shouldn’t be let anywhere near television. Beard is phlegmatic about such barbs. She tries to reason with her trolls.
She says she got through the early part of her career by basically “pretending to be a bloke”. She recalls writing one of her first big papers aged about 25. Excited, she sent it to a senior colleague, a man. He took her out for a “boozy lunch” and told her it was okay, but boring. He was right, she says, and she had been weakly aping a male voice.
“The lunch was boozy because he was nervous to tell me this. But it was the right thing for him to say. I realised: ‘This isn’t me. I’m not convincing.’ I knew I had things to say but it would only be interesting if I found my own way to say them.”
It took her a few more years, she says, but eventually she learned not to worry about how, for example, the tone of her voice might affect her academic authority.
The abuse of women and depictions of atrocities such as rape feature prominently in Greek and Roman art and literature. Beard has, in the past, written of her own experience of being raped in her 20s by a man she met on a train in Italy.
‘When we look back at the Greeks and Romans, we see their weirdness to us. What are historians in the future going to find weird about us?’
— Mary Beard
Have Beard’s own life experiences shaped her insight into these depictions, and has the art in turn helped her to better understand what was perpetrated against her?
“In a way, the answer to that would be ‘yes’. Classics can give us a language to talk about difficult things. For me, those paintings and stories are asking me every day to say: ‘So how do we deal with this?’”
She doesn’t shut down the topic of what happened to her all those years ago. But she doesn’t dwell on it either. Nor do I.
Beard is known in Britain as a pugnacious debater who relishes pushing back against her critics. She has a famously mixed history with Boris Johnson, for example, who also presents himself as a serious classicist. When he was London mayor in 2015, he challenged Beard to a public debate. She is widely seen as having trounced him.
[ Confronting the Classics (2014) by Mary Beard: Fascinating and funOpens in new window ]
Does she think Johnson is a good classicist?
“I think he is sincerely interested in it. He is not ignorant. But the difficult thing with Boris is that he will argue fast and loose to win, and that sometimes means misrepresenting the ancient world.”
Does she like him?
“Not as a prime minister. But for a drink? Yeah. There is also still a kind of decency to him which we sometimes forget.”
Beard was a prominent backer of Johnson’s former opposite number, the one-time Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Her opinion of him has changed since. “I went off him. I felt in the end he wasn’t getting anywhere. He didn’t handle the anti-Semitism thing in a way that was dignified for anybody.”
What about the current Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer?
“I’m disappointed because I thought he was going to be a kind of [postwar Labour prime minister Clement] Attlee – a bit dull, but maybe what we needed. But it hasn’t worked.”
[ How often do you think of the Roman Empire? Quite a lot if you are Mary BeardOpens in new window ]
She is weary of being asked which Roman emperor was most like US president Donald Trump. She thinks none of them were, but she does see a parallel in how he and some imperial Romans have used power.
“He chops and changes and we think he can’t make his mind up. But actually – and this kind of vacillation was hugely important in imperial power – the ruler changing his mind is precisely how he shows control. The advisers must jump to the new thing he says.”
She no longer teaches at Cambridge, but Beard has much to keep her occupied. She is the chair of the judging panel for this year’s Booker literary prize – “160 books in six months! You don’t need to ask me how I fill my days”. The prize will be announced in November.
She also co-hosts a podcast, Instant Classics, and is the classics editor of the Times Literary Review. Meanwhile, her book tour for Talking Classics this year will take her all over Britain, to the US and also to Dublin and Belfast in Ireland.
Much of Beard’s life has been about looking into the ancient past. What does she think about the future?
“When we look back at the Greeks and Romans, we see their weirdness to us. What are historians in the future going to find weird about us? That is a question that every historian now should ask themselves.”
What does Beard think people will find weird in future? She says our notion of crime and punishment, such as threatening to lock people up for minor infractions such as dodging train fares.
“Undergraduates in the future are going to be writing about penal policy in the 21st century, asking ‘What the hell did they think they were doing?’”
Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard is published by Profile Books
