Is America akin to Rome in decline? Was Trump like Caligula? What can the Antonine plague tell us about our response to Covid? These are questions that have been asked of late, but they’re only recent iterations of a longstanding impulse: When a seeming paradigm shift occurs, contemporary commentators will look to ancient Rome for parallels, lessons, warnings. But what do we truly hope to reveal with these comparisons to Rome? And what do those hopes say about us? Mary Beard has spent a lifetime examining such questions. The success with which the Cambridge classics professor, best-selling author, television documentary series host and feisty Twitter star has done so has elevated her to something akin to icon status — though, like the subjects she studies, that status is not free of complications, which she welcomes. “If I’ve got a function in life other than being a bloody dinosaur,” says Beard, who is 66, “then the job is to say things are complicated. They’re always complicated.”
Obviously we can refer back to ancient Rome and say we took positive influence from their ideas about, for example, law and government. These days, though, it seems that pundits are mostly inclined to look to Rome for cautionary tales. But have we ever really looked back and said, Boy, the Ancient Romans screwed that up, so let’s do things differently? The comparisons can just feel like a highfalutin parlor game. I’ll tell you where you see it: military campaigns. The aggressive or do-gooding West has a disastrous campaign in the Middle East and then people start to say, Ooh, Romans always had trouble there. It looks frightfully learned, and as if it’s rooting your distaste for that kind of military escapade in the terms of real history when, in fact, it’s using history to justify what you think anyway. But no, you don’t sit down and say, “Hmm, the ancient Roman Empire: These are people who were pro-migration. So I’m a bit worried about my strongly nationalist tendencies, because I’ve looked at Rome and they seemed to do rather well by taking a very different approach.” What the Romans are teaching is always at that meta level of what it might be like to take a view different from your own. But, “I’ve suddenly realized,” said somebody in the 1830s, “if the ancient Greeks finally got around to giving the vote to all adult males, why can’t we?” That never happened.
So why this almost instinctual urge to continue looking for parallels? You know, when people used to call me about Trump because they wanted to know which Roman emperor you’d compare him to, I always thought, This is damn stupid. The comparison wasn’t doing anybody any harm, but I would either give a little lesson about why this was not a sensible way forward or I would try to find a Roman emperor that I thought they wouldn’t have heard of. I usually picked on Elagabalus,1 who makes Nero look like a pussycat. So as long as it’s a parlor game, it’s harmless. Maybe you then say, So why bother? What is important for me about ancient Rome is two things. One is it provides a safe space for us to discuss issues about communal living, politics, exploitation, in which we’re not invested. We can talk about Nero putting the Christians to death brutally in a way that doesn’t impinge on modern Christians — it’s so far in the past. We can think about enslavement and empire because Rome, in a way, doesn’t matter at all. It’s a very long time ago; no one’s going to get hurt by them. We’re in charge of ancient Rome now. Second, Rome helps us stand outside ourselves. For me, Rome was a brutal and exploitative empire. But the idea of looking at a big, nasty imperial community who saw their origin in migration, in asylum, and that always traded on the incorporation of the foreign — it takes us out of some of our assumptions.
But on the idea of ancient Rome being a safe space, isn’t it a point of contention in contemporary classical scholarship that classics are inextricably intertwined with white supremacy? There is absolutely no doubt that ancient Rome in particular but also bits of ancient Greece have been used to validate fascism, dictatorship, white supremacy. There were things that were whited over: ancient slavery was talked about as if it was some kind of version of 19th-century domestic service. People have always been extremely good at not seeing what they didn’t want to see in the ancient world or using the ancient world to validate appalling stuff. That said, there has been a tendency to overestimate the “toxic” history of subjects, because academic subjects do not exist outside the culture in which they’re studied. So of course classics have a toxic history. Nuclear physics has a toxic history. Anthropology has a toxic history. It’s extremely important to look at it and face up to it, but classics wasn’t responsible for fascism. We use these things and these traditions, and we’ve used them for bad and good.
But I guess the question is whether you think academia’s increasing awareness of and sensitivity to new perspectives on white supremacy — or even identity politics more broadly — requires a commensurate reorientation of how classics are taught? I don’t know how much weight you’re putting on commensurate.
Neither do I. [Laughs.] Well, to take a very tame example, when I was a student we barely did the history of women in the ancient world, never mind gender, gender identity, trans politics. That changed with second-wave feminism. It seems to me utterly obvious that you engage with and change the nature of what you teach as politics changes. It’s perhaps more contentious to see exactly how you approach that in relation to a more popular understanding of classics. Because there is a danger that if people get a glimpse of some of the battles in the modern academy and some of the loudest claims about the toxic history of classics, the subject loses support. Every academic subject, in order to survive, relies on people thinking it’s worth supporting. One thing that I’ve tried to do in my teleprograms2
is to say, Look, the subject is interesting and one of the reasons that we are still studying it is because it has been implicated in the history of the West, and some of that history you’ve got to look in the eye — and it’s not always nice.
You mentioned how second-wave feminism incurred new perspectives on the classics. Are there contemporary aspects of feminist thinking that you’ve since had to incorporate into your understanding of classics? I’m not sure I’d call it feminist, but: issues of gender. I was educationally brought up to see ancient Greece but also ancient Rome as a strongly binary-gendered culture that incorporated all kinds of homoeroticism — which is what Oscar Wilde and company picked up on. I was taught that there’s a fixed binary divide. Various bits of L.G.B.T.Q. theorizing made us keep our eyes open for ways in which that’s not true entirely. As one example, there’s a famous statue, and it comes in various versions, of a life-size marble Hermaphroditus lying down,3 and the figure has a penis and breasts. When I was a student, we were taught either that it was a very clever representation of a particularly odd Greek myth or an elegant Greco-Roman joke. There were times when I taught that. I wouldn’t today. And while you cannot take debates about gender fluidity, trans politics or whatever and just impose them on the ancient world, I’ve come to see that some Romans were fervently debating these things. That Hermaphroditus statue that I was taught was a joke is much more likely now to be seen in terms of a Roman debate about gender and sexual identity.
Speaking of which, a few weeks ago there was this kerfuffle on Twitter when people got mad at you for following TERFs,4 and your response was basically to say that you follow people not necessarily because you agree with their views but to understand what they think, which didn’t seem to satisfy anyone. What did that experience show you about social media?5 I see, in a way that I hadn’t before, that Twitter operates with very different microcommunities within it. Mostly those microcommunities jostle along quite happily with each other, but sometimes they come into conflict. I went on to Twitter 10 years ago because I did journalism with The Times Literary Supplement and was told to have a Twitter account. You’d tweet an article so people would click on it. You followed people that might be saying interesting things even if you disagreed with them. Or perhaps you’d follow people because you were going to disagree with them and that was a way in which you’d get information. That’s one version of Twitter, which quite a lot of people of my generation hold. It’s a version which is based in a degree of privilege. But it’s now clear to me that there are other people within Twitter who are using it as a support group. They block people they don’t want to hear, and they’ve created a micro-community within the platform. That’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do. But in my version of Twitter, if you spot somebody saying, “She follows some TERFs,” you think, Why are you trying to police whom I follow? So what you’ve brought up is a case in which two versions of Twitter came head to head, and they’re incompatible. I sort of knew that before, but now I’m able to describe it more clearly.
