With her latest book Talking Classics – a treatise on why the cultural artefacts of Ancient Greece and Rome remain relevant to our present millennium – published in April, just ahead of an accompanying tour, celeb historian Mary Beard talks to Antonia LeVay on finding the ancient world in the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Popular history tends towards the dramatic: the rise and fall of empires, battles that reshaped continents, emperors who dominated the headlines of their age. But according to classicist Mary Beard, the key to understanding the ancient world is in the smaller details, from graffiti scratched on a wall to a loaf of bread buried for millennia or a staircase worn smooth by footsteps 2,000 years ago: fragments left behind by the Greeks and Romans.
“It’s not that the headline events aren’t interesting,” says Beard, who’s been one of Britain’s most recognisable academics for some 15 years now. “But they can be intimidating. You feel you need to know an enormous amount even to begin understanding what someone like Julius Caesar was doing.” By contrast, everyday objects and artefacts can feel instantly accessible.
“There’s something wonderfully immediate about those things,” she explains. “They bring you face-to-face with the past in a way that political history sometimes doesn’t.”
Yet Beard is careful to warn against an easy assumption that often follows that discovery – the idea ancient people were simply ‘just like us’. “That’s part of the excitement of history – but only part of it. They were also completely unlike us! And if they were entirely like us, it would be boring. What makes the ancient world interesting is that combination: things that feel instantly familiar, and others that are utterly alien.”
By way of an example, Beard points out that most people in the ancient world didn’t really know what they looked like. Mirrors existed, but were expensive and rare, so if most people saw their reflection, it would be in a metal surface or a pool of water. “The clear sense of your own face – something we take for granted! – wasn’t really there. It’s a tiny detail, but it changes how you think about identity.”
Those kinds of details are central to how Beard communicates the classics to younger audiences. In April, she’s touring the UK with a live spoken word show based on (and promoting) her latest book, Talking Classics. It explores how the ancient world surrounds us, sometimes in ways we barely notice.
In Britain, the Romans are literally beneath our feet, with ongoing archaeological discoveries across the country. “You don’t have to work very hard to spark people’s interest,” Beard says. “I learned Latin and Greek in quite a boring way at school, but teaching has moved on enormously.”
The key is meeting curiosity halfway. She recalls her role as Latin teacher on Jamie’s Dream School, a 2011 Channel 4 show. Many of its teenage pupils, enrolled by Jamie Oliver, had never encountered Latin before – but two things caught their attention.
The first was Roman numerals (“They were fascinated – because TV programmes often show the date in Roman numerals in the credits”) and the second, place names. Many towns and cities in Britain end in -chester or -caster – derived, Beard told the kids, from the Latin castra, meaning a Roman military camp. “Suddenly a piece of the modern world had been explained – and that’s a powerful moment.”
New technologies are also reshaping how we understand the ancient past. At sites such as Vindolanda, near Hadrian’s Wall, digital reconstructions and AI are being used to visualise how Roman settlements once looked. Beard welcomes these tools, but she’s careful not to let them replace the physical remains themselves: “I think it’s great that we’re using new technology to help us imagine the ancient world, but in the end what matters is the actual ruins.”
Part of her mission is helping people learn to “decode” what might otherwise look like piles of old stone. She remembers guiding a group through Pompeii and pointing out something easily overlooked. “Most buildings there survive only to ground level, but in one room you can see the first few steps of a staircase” – evidence the house once had an upper floor. “Once people noticed that, they started spotting staircases everywhere. You don’t need a lifetime of expertise to understand these places. Sometimes it takes only a morning.”
Beard has long challenged the idea that classical history belongs only to an elite. Until the mid-20th century, knowledge of Latin and Greek was required for a place at Oxford or Cambridge, regardless of one’s chosen subject. “That effectively excluded huge numbers of people,” Beard says.
But the story of classics has always been more complicated, from the classical imagery in 19th and early 20th-century trade union banners to the Roman symbols in political campaigns and workers’ movements – “using the ancient world to make sense of their own struggles,” as Beard puts it. Victorian London staged enormous theatrical spectacles recreating the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii: “massive box-office events – not just for the elite, everyone went.”
What often surprises audiences most during Beard’s talks are the strange, intimate glimpses of ordinary lives. One of her favourite examples is an inscription on the Roman tombstone of a woman who lived in the third century AD. As well as lauding her modesty, domestic skills and good character – fairly typical of such artefacts – it describes her physical beauty in unusual detail, including praise for her “magnificent breasts”, and hints that the woman lived with two male partners. “It’s not exactly standard Roman memorial language! But they weren’t all generals in armour or senators in togas. They were people living messy, complicated lives, just as we do.”
Another tombstone tells the story of a preteen boy who had entered a poetry competition. He hadn’t won, but did well enough that his parents proudly carved his poem into the stone. The inscription ends with a poignant explanation of his death: he had worked himself too hard writing poetry. “Was it pushy parents? Or a child who loved writing too much?” Beard wonders. “People imagine the ancient world as battles and plagues… but everyday life was full of ordinary ambitions and disappointments too.”
These days, particularly in the era of Donald Trump, she’s often asked whether modern political leaders resemble figures from ancient Rome, and though she’s dismissive of the notion in this instance (“I don’t think Trump is like any Roman emperor”), studying the ancient world can reveal patterns of political behaviour that recur across history. Part of Julius Caesar’s popularity came from “going around the political system” and speaking directly to the people, often through public speeches delivered by supporters in crowded streets. “And when a leader tweets directly to the nation, they’re bypassing the usual structures.”
With such a deep immersion in the ancient world, does Beard ever take a break from it? Sometimes – though not always successfully. “I tend to say I want to go somewhere with no museums at all. My husband [Robin Cormack, also a classicist] always wants to visit the local museum. It’s a bit of a family compromise.” Beard is also a Booker Prize judge, which means working through around 160 novels over the year – “so I don’t get to choose what I read! But it’s certainly an adventure.”
For Beard, though, the greatest adventure remains the ancient world itself, less as a distant empire of marble statues and imperial power than a place filled with ordinary people who wrote poems, argued, fell in love, raised families and left traces of their lives in stone. “It doesn’t take much information to open it up,” she says – and sometimes, all it takes is noticing the staircase.
Mary Beard, Blake Theatre, Monmouth, Wed 22 Apr; Stanwell School, Penarth, Thurs 23
Tickets: £25 with book (Monmouth); £15/£25 with book/£5 NUS (Penarth). Info: Monmouth / Penarth
Talking Classics: The Shock Of The Old is published by Profile on Thurs 16 Apr.
Price: £16.99/£12.99 Ebook/£24.99 audiobook. Info: here
words ANTONIA LEVAY
