Mary Beard on SPQR: The History of Ancient Rome

um thank you very very much for that and I'm glad that Jennifer mentioned my first encounter with the ancient world in the British Museum but I'm going to start a little bit later and say not much later and say that I first went to Rome over 40 years ago in 1973 and I vividly remember then that one of the things that struck me most forcibly were actually not the ancient ruins not the wonders of Renaissance art but the fact that still stamped onto every manhole cover and onto every lamppost and published trashcan were the letters that 2,000 years earlier had stood as an abbreviation for the ancient Roman state itself s P Q or cenotes populous clay Romanus the sunnat' and Roman people even now it's the symbol and the logo of the modern city of Rome I think it probably is the longest lasting acronym in the history of the world and I would never have believed in 1973 that I would wind up just a little bit over 40 years later having written a quite long history of ancient Rome with exactly that title and I'm very very pleased to be here tonight which is actually the official publication day of this book in the United States - also what I think must be the most obvious question that any new history about Rome racists to put it bluntly why on earth do we need another history of ancient Rome you know all they're quite enough of them already and I hope this evening that I can show you that and why we do need to go back to Rome we do need to go on rewriting it and to give you a little taste but it'll only be a very little taste of what my particular version of that is like now the first reason the needing a new history is extremely simple that is new things about the Roman world are being discovered all the time an ancient Rome is changing in quite unexpected ways in ways that historian writing even 50 years ago let alone Gibbon writing his decline and fall in the 18th century could never have imagined and that's often through the appliance of modern science now one of my favorite examples of this is the material that is even now coming up from the Greenland ice cap we're in deep borings scientists are bringing up cause of ice which still contain the analyzable traces of the pollution left by Roman industrial processes at a level not matched until almost 2,000 years later now I'm afraid I can't actually show you one of these cause themselves right a suspect you might already have guessed that the whole analyzing process is a bit more complicated than just bringing up the ice and looking for little black bits in it but here is a fridge in Utrecht in which some of these cores a kept and I did go and have a look at them recently and scientists working on these are extremely interesting because they're trying to say where did this pollution come from and the likely answer is that it came from the silver mines that the Romans worked in Spain one of the biggest industrial processes in the whole of the Roman world are actually producing the the metal which in the end produced the coinage of the Roman world was probably what was one of the first examples of global industrial pollution that we have as I say I'm afraid I can't show you the cause and and it's that not quite as clear to the naked eye as you might hope but I can show you um one of the skulls from Roman Britain which is the subject of some equally cutting-edge science which is actually enabling us to track the migration and movement of people in the Roman Empire now we've had only very tantalizing glimpse glimpses before of that kind of movement and it's often from almost always in fact from tombstones now this on the screen now is one of the most intriguing of the glimpses of migration that we've been able to look at until recently comes from the north of Britain and at first sight it isn't anything particularly special it's the memorial to a woman and to put a slightly bigger she's sitting here with her treasure chest her feet and her were working on her land but underneath the figure of the dead woman there's an inscription which tells a slightly more unexpected story explains that she was a woman called Regina that really means Queenie I suppose and she came from the south of the country she was from the cut of a lawn Ian tribe and she had actually been a slave she was an ex lay a liberty' and she had been later freed and married a man called bear artis who says and this is a roll up you know nastily I'm afraid or slightly sadly topical place to come from varieties came from Palmyra he was a POW marinus and here he commemorates his ex lave British wife both in this perfectly possible Latin here but also underneath in his native Aramaic now this is I think a very evocative Jim stolen it raises enormous numbers of questions about how the Roman Empire worked like what an earth was mr. Barratt ëthere what an earth was he doing thousands of miles away from Palmyra in the north of Britain on Hadrian's Wall and how had he hitched up with Regina creamy um had he once been her owner had he bought her as a slave that's my guess but we don't know but you can go on asking questions like you know what on earth did they speak at home you know had Regina learn Aramaic or do they speak Latin or did they speak some native English language and even more than that I suppose you kind of think did these people look odd in the north of England at the time do they say although that that funny couple with the pal marine husband or was this absolutely normal now they are actually just one rather vivid example ah an isolated example of the mobility of people within the Roman Empire that we are now starting to be able to track on a much bigger level and that is by going back to the skeletal remains now the giveaway traces in these skeletal remains or in the skulls and in particular in the teeth because the adult teeth and that goes for every single one of us in this room as well as the ancient Romans the adult teeth still contain the chemical traces of the environment where the person was living when those teeth were forming in their jaw so it's slightly scary the analysis in the ways of analysis are not yet hugely precise but you can now clearly tell for example that the person the dead person must have grown up in for example a much warmer climate or a much colder climate from the one in which they died can tell which warmer climate it was whether it was just the warmer south of England the warmer south of France or the still warmer north of Africa but it's showing you that people did not die where they were born and that's beginning to be able to tell us that even in the backwater of Roman Britain and Britain was a decided backwater in the Roman Empire that even in Roman Britain up to about 20% of people who died in the towns of that province had grown up somewhere climatically significantly different which is an extraordinary high level of ability for a pre-industrial community so another example of you know what science can begin to push us towards but actually my favorite example is this it is in fact a large sewer or more correctly it is a cesspit from ancient Herculaneum the neighboring town to Pompeii which was destroyed in 79 AD it's a cess pit that it's underneath a medium-sized block of Roman apartments and what it contains sort of down here though can't really see it what it contains is literally everything that fell down from all the laboratories above right absolutely unmediated the stuff from the laboratories above came down to this cess pit and eventually decomposed in other words what you've got here is the remains of what went into the mouth and through the digestive tracts of the perfectly ordinary people living above it has happily or not I say it isn't when you go and see it it isn't quite as disgusting as I'm making it seem you know I'm afraid excrement 2,000 years old it just looks like rather nice kind of fertilizer and soil or something it has been rediscovered and bags and bags and bags of it are currently being analyzed in Oxford and they are giving away enormous amounts of information about what these ordinary people in the apartments above were eating quite separately from all those fantasies of elaborate cookery and exotic delicacies that we read off in Roman literature you know the kind of stuff you know and pass me the Dormouse stuffed with anchovy in honey please markers that's really what I fancy tonight right let the stop of the movies what we can see here is even if that might have been true of some people and it may well have been the arts of the most ordinary people is that they were eating loads of fruit or figs or pomegranates of eggs of pork chicken and fish and it's also obvious partly because Herculaneum earth is by the coast it's also obvious that sea urchins were a particular favorite because within this decomposed excrement there all kinds of tiny little spikes from the sea urchins that you recover in the mixture just makes you wonder quite how painful it all was if that was really what came out this is quite nasty um so these are some of the new things or the new ways of getting fuller information that we've been able to exploit really in the last 20 years at most and I'm going to be coming back to another new discovery at the end of this talk at this point I want to pause a bit and say that new discoveries are actually the main reason that you need a new history of Rome they're part of it and they're an important part of it but they're not really what drives the need to retell Roman history I think it goes without saying that history isn't simply about uncovering the past seeing what's there taking a look and moving on history is best is about some kind of conversation that you have with a past and the different questions that succeeding generations want to raise with the Roman past or with any past give all kinds of different answers and make an entirely different dialogue that we can have with Rome and they generate a new history that works and speaks for US history in other words is always a work in progress we're always having to redo it we can't ever make it definitive is not that we're better historians and our predecessors we just have different interests and priorities and Roman history is a very obvious example of that and one thing that nobody could miss and it's something which has changed absolutely dramatically in my lifetime is how issues of Roman women sexuality and gender have been treated I mean to be honest when I was a student it's 50 years ago now 50 45 years ago women didn't really have much of a role in the grand sweep of the Roman historical narrative that we learnt that was largely about the policies the aspirations the deeds and the misdeeds and the writing of rich men the only exception I suppose was in the family of the Roman Emperor himself where women sometimes were assumed to be the power and usually the milliner's power behind the throne and none was more villainous than this lady here who is Olivia the wife of the first Roman Emperor Augustus who as a jealous mother is supposed to have got rid of everybody who stood in the way of her own son Tiberius rising to the throne in the end the story goes she even killed her husband the Emperor by according to some writers a Roman writers an extremely clever trick Augustus Emperor was always very carefully on his guard against poisoning and had all the food at his table very carefully tasted by other vulnerable servants before he himself would touch it so what did Olivia do she painted poison on the figs as they grew on the trees in that Palace Gardens it was said because no one would ever bother the test fruit that was picked directly from the tree and it did make this did make a marvelous moment in the 1970s TV series of I Claudius where Shawn Phillips who you see here as Livia and once he's finally disposed of the old Emperor Augustus and has her son with her is about to leave to do no doubt some more scheming says to Tiberius in that wonderfully camp way oh by the way don't touch the figs it's but one of my favorite moments in the I Claudius television series uh and it's partly the result of a really of modern feminism of the last 40 years there most historians now I have to say there are some exceptions and not all but most historians now don't take those stories quite so straight quite so uncritically even if they do go back to Roman writers themselves I think we're now much more aware of the way that in highly patriarchal societies such as Rome male fantasies often protect crime and wicked scheming onto women who happen to be close to the center of power women and segrete child dressy female ambition is often used as an explanatory device for the accidents of history and is not I have to say entirely gone away there was a touch of the live here about the way that the British press used to treat Cherie Blair who was always seen as the Machiavellian schemer behind Tony so when I'm writing now I'm obviously telling a very different story about Roman women and about Roman power with those kind of issues in mind and I have to warn you that there are rather fewer female poisoners in my book than there were in the works of my predecessors I should also add I suppose at this point that my title SPQR the Senate and people of Rome is an attempt to rescue another abused or ignored group in Roman history I'm trying to parade the people alongside the Senate and to remind all of us and that includes myself the Roman history isn't just about the elite but the big example which I start the book is one with a very specific modern resonance and is particularly interestingly inflected in modern political debate it's a famous moment in 63 BC and centerstage is Marcus Tullius Cicero here one of the best-known Romans of them all literally volumes and volumes of his letters his speeches his philosophical essays and even his jokes still survive not to mention the fact that he's become slightly unlikely hero of a recent series of historical novels by Robert Harris he's the starring role in 63 BC Cicero was consul he was the annual chief elected official in Rome and he believed that he had uncovered a terrorist plot to overthrow the government and burn the city and this plot had been led by disgruntled aristocrat over here Lucius urges Catalina or usually just cat aligned to us what you see on the screen is actually a 19th century painting of one of the key moments in the clash between the noble upstanding consul and the would-be terrorists here and it's appropriately enough a painting set in the old Senate house but commissioned to decorate the modern Italian parliament building in the late nineteenth century and it shows Cicero in full flow well gutter line is a deeply moody not only deeply Moody it's absolutely no one wants to sit by him is that they're all City over here and Cataline is being sent to commentary as we say it's not an entirely accurate portrayal of Roman Senate has either which has turned in some extraordinary semicircular building first columns thought to certainly would not have seen in 63 BC the speech however that we have to imagine Cicero here is in the middle of uttering does still survive because it's been copied and studied and practiced and repeated ever since and it's still just about almost all Latin syllabuses all over the Western world and it's known as the first Catalan Aryan the first speech that Cicero made denouncing this would be aristocratic terrorists and here you have the first words of that speech because it starts with one of the most famous Latin quotes them all coast great tandem Vaudreuil Catalina pati ntr Nostra how long will you go on cattle in abusing our patients it was a favorite famous famous moment in Roman history and the most stunning oratorical success that cicero ever had and the upshot of the speech was that poor old catalan fled the city whether he was quite as guilty as charged I think we shall never know but he certainly left Rome and joined a makeshift army and was later killed in battle against official forces which suggests he probably wasn't quite as innocent as one might sometimes have suspected while in Rome itself having got rid of the terrorist leader Cicero rounded up the rest of the men he believed to be in the plot and he executed them without trial claiming the justification and the protection of an early form of a Homeland Security Act he came to meet the public after he had overseen the execution and uttered in Latin just one rather chilling word Vicks RA which means they have lived or other words they're dead now to start with Cicero was heroin as a savior of the state but soon doubts began to arise about the legality of his actions because one of the fundamental principles of Roman citizenship was that the citizen unlike the non citizen was entitled to a fair and free trial and could not be arbitrarily punished by any state official no matter what crime they were suspected of and Cicero soon found himself in exile on the charge of having executed a citizen without due process and after he'd left town his house was demolished and a shrine of the goddess Liberty was erected on his site he was allowed to return a few months later but his career never really recovered now this dilemma of Cicero versus Katalin was debated ever after in Rome and for us I think it doesn't make March doesn't take much to see the echoes or even the prequel here of our own debates on almost exactly the same unanswerable question how do you balance the security of the state against the rights of the individual citizen Cicero vs. Cataline is always in my mind at least when we debate detention without trial want animo Bey or more recently The Killing by British forces of British citizens fighting for Isis if you want a nice glimpse of the topicality of the incident just take a look at these rather um eager hungarian protesters of a couple of years ago they're protesting against their own government but the slogan that they are blazoning is Cicero's words at the beginning of his speech against catalan cro earthquake tandem now of course the rights of roman citizenship are not new as part of political debate it's just they are always continually be made new andrey inflected go back 50 years to the middle of the cold war and john f kennedy exploited the ideals of roman citizenship for slightly different reasons in his ich bin ein Berliner speech two thousand years ago he insisted these are his words the proudest boast was keyless Romanus some I am a Roman citizen today in the world of freedom the proudest boast is ich bin ein Berliner there is I have to say a little sting in the tail of that one what Kennedy or his speech writers probably didn't realize was that the most famous and most quotable use of that phrase in ancient Rome had been a decidedly awkward one because those were the words Kirra sramana some repeatedly cried out from the cross on which he was being crucified by an unfortunate and entirely innocent citizen on the island of Sicily who was being put to death by Rome by a rogue Roman governor even if guilty Roman citizens were by law immune from such degrading punishment the man was desperately trying to claim his citizen rights he was Romana's some Kiwis Romana's some but it turned out to make not a blind bit of difference and he died in agony I suspect that Kennedy speech writers didn't know what the upshot was of that most famous use of the phrase overall I suppose I claimed that the principles and practice of Roman citizenship have underpinned in changing and very definitely changing ways Western political debate over the last 300 to 400 years a much more fundamentally actually than the principles and practice of Athenian democracy ever have and of course they're coming back for us into modern view in yet another different way as we debate the current crises over migration and refugees especially but not only in Europe I think it's worth remembering that the term illegal migrant is one that the Romans would never have understood and in fact in their own mythology they believed that there citizens had actually been in our terms a banned refugees economic migrants and asylum seekers so as our current investment in some of these things the Romans debate change so does our investment in Roman history and so does the way we choose to write that history but I want to spend the end of this talk going back to some of those new discoveries and sharing with you just one rediscovery of my own and one I have to say that I made after SPQR had gone to press it's a nice indication I think of how new things about Rome do turn up all the time and sometimes in very unexpected places okay just to set this in context one of the questions that I address in the book is the tricky question of when Rome became Rome as we know it that's to say the place starts off in the 9th or 8th centuries BC as a small very ordinary little place a bit of a dump actually on the banks of the Tiber when does it become the Rome we know with the institution's the ways of doing things and the expansionist tendencies well that we know is Roman when if you like does Rome become SPQR now I'm not going to give away all the answers to that but it won't spoil the read I think if I say though I'm pretty clear that the really key formative or transformative period doesn't come until the 4th century BC probably four centuries into the city's history and alongside that I'm pretty clear that the first Romans that we can now encounter who are more historical than they are mythical and certainly the first that we have any direct primary evidence for lived around the turn of the 4th and 3rd centuries BC that's what 250 300 years before Julius Caesar and the first one of all who actually becomes quite a hero in my fourth chapter is a man from one of the most prominent Roman families of all a man called Skippy Oh Bob artists Skippy Oh long beard or Skippy Oh Billy and he was consul the leading elected official in the state in 298 BC when Rome had already gained control of a lot of the Italian peninsula and was on the cusp of expanding overseas his descendants men like Skippy africanus and Skippy oh I'm le anus want to be went on to be some of the most successful or blood-stained I suppose depending on your point of view a Roman conquerors on them all it was africanus and a mealy anus who between them sent Hannibal and the Carthaginians packing now almost all the traces we can find Bob eight Bob artists as I shall now call him look very archaic and they would have looked that way too later Rome's too but at the time Bob artists was a hugely innovative representative of this new Rome that's now room among other things he was the first to build himself a big family tomb on the first big road that was ever built out of the city going south the Appian Way this is Pyrenees ease imaginative version of it from the late 18th century and I can't see how I could ever possibly have looked like that you can in fact still visit this tomb this is what it looks like in the inside very definitely rather spooky mausoleum and this is it's slightly down-at-heel exterior which doesn't look very much and this is the sarcophagus of Skippy Oh Bob artists himself and it's inscribed on the outside with what is effectively the first mini biography of any Roman ever to survive and it's extraordinary revealing of the ideology of this period we don't know exactly when Bob artist died but a good guess say the two 80s BC that's two hundred and fifty years before the death of Caesar and here are the words are themselves which I think speak very plainly about the ideology of the period but the latter not there but here you've got a my English translation here's his name Cornelius Lucius Skippy Oh Bob artists born in his father deniers and here is what counts he was a brave man and a wise one interesting his appearance was equal to his virtue looking good counted I think in Rome and then Aires offices he was consul he was censor and another office heed I'll amongst you and then the military ideology he captured terraza his honor and somnium he subdued or Lucania and he took hostages now in a way that sums him up and you can see what I mean I think by saying that by this point the Romans had become Roman but there's another story to skip you Bob artists which I've been tracking down in the last few months and which leads very directly right back to the man himself although it starts a slightly different track and that is the story of the tombs uncovering in the late 18th century in 1780 to be precise now the excavation at that period was something of a cause celebra because it was sponsored by Pope Pius the sixth who took all the stuff worth having back to the Vatican raising a lot of questions about how come the church was disturbing this last resting place of the ancient dead so actually when you visit the tomb now what you see are exact copies of what was found in the tomb including Barbarossa's favorite famous sarcophagus the originals all being in the Vatican where you can still see them now it was partly those arguments surrounding it that gave the tomb huge thing in the nineteenth century it was a controversial site and it made it one of the hot spots for tourists in the city of Rome in a way that it certainly isn't now and replicas above artists is coffin actually crop up in the most unlikely places here is a version of Bob artists his coffin you can see it's exactly the same in Highgate Cemetery in London containing the last remains of a female novelist and here is one in Philadelphia containing the last remains of Commodore Isaac Howe and if you were to go to the Protestant cemetery in Rome itself you'd actually come across a line of about nine of these coffins and just supposing you didn't actually fancy being buried in one you could always turn it into what every 19th century desk needed which was a Skippy Oh Bob artists inkwell it you take a little top-off and you got the hole for the ink underneath so it becomes very very big in the 19th century and very controversial and it doesn't take much to see that there's another little question lurking here which is if the Pope took that coffin that was so often replicated and took it off to the Vatican what actually happened to Bob artists his bones people were worried at the time about disturbing the dead but where are the dead gone now seems after the tomb was excavated but the bones themselves ended up in an elaborate villa garden in Padua after they've been given by the Pope to a well-known Venetian senator senator Carini who incorporated them into his lavish philosophical garden at his villa at Alta Cairo now this is a drawing of the memorial that apparently held the bones of Skippy Oh Bob artists this thing to say I don't entirely see what the phallic symbols are doing quite a next door but never mind we won't ever know I suspect because although this drawing survives the whole garden itself has been destroyed and I haven't yet been able to discover what happened to the Buried bones of Skippy Oh Bob artists there was however something else it is said on the finger of the bones of Bob artists had been a signet ring and this didn't go to Padua with the bones but it went to the Pope himself who generously gave it to a french scholar monsieur du toll who had actually studied the Skippy au family and the Pope thought it'd be nice for him to have the ring monsieur du tour later sold it or gave it to the english Lord Barkley and in the late 19th century through a combination of sale and inheritance barbar tosses ring was said to have ended up in the collection of the Dukes of Northumberland at anak castle in the north of England where in fact Harry Potter movies and parts of Downton Abbey an hour filmed and after that it doesn't get mentioned when a few weeks ago I emailed the Dukes administration annik I didn't really imagine that the ring would still be there but after a certain kind of polite in do you call delay I got an email back to say but indeed skipper Bob artists his ring was still in the possession of the Duke anok and here it is it is the very ring that Bob artists took with him to his tomb it's quite plain its plain gold but appropriately enough for one of these early Romans with military ambition the the design of the signet ring itself is a figure of the goddess victory now for me I'm going to confess there was a bit more of a special thrill here this must count I think as the only bit of Roman jewelry that we can match up with a known historical owner see only when we've got with a name attached and that's this great man or fee early third century BC and why did it turn up it turns up in a British medieval castle and I'd say if I wasn't actually currently in the United States I'd be hotfooting it up tyrannic I'm hoping that they let me try this ring on time Z is my ambition but one thing is for sure if my spqr is a lucky to get a second edition this ring is certainly don't have pride of place in it but you saw it first so thank you ah right I think I now are allowed or supposed to take some of these really interesting questions that people have submitted in on pieces of paper and I hope that Jennifer is going to tell us when we've reached the end of time partly because I can't see a thing in the dark and very little grip on exactly how late we are but I will take them pretty much at in in random order and I'll read them out and I'll answer them as briefly as I can the first one is very much to my taste which says why didn't Allia potestas appear in SPQR that's a very nice question because it's referring to one of the most extraordinary tombstones are ever to appear of a Roman woman ever to be found of a Roman woman and it's currently in Museum of Rome and it's very detailed long tombstone describing the virtues of this woman called alia potestas but also describing her living arrangements and her living arrangement is that she is the center of a menage tois living with two young men which breaks up after alia potestas died but it describes her virtues while she was still living there describes her body in almost uncomfortable detail there are very elaborate discussions of her breasts and nipples on the tombstone but it also says quite sort of undermining Lee but in this main Asha tois alia potestas was always the first up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night because of course she was still doing the housework however erotic she was and I have to say it's very it's a very remiss of me not to put alia potestas in the book it is probably she probably dates from slightly after the timescale of my book which ends in 212 ad when Caracalla the Emperor Caracalla gives all Roman citizen all Roman inhabitants of the Empire citizenship but I think it's a bit sad that I did leave her out because whoever asked this question knows as well as I do that she is one of the very few glimpses that we get of a woman on a tombstone or any form in Rome who doesn't simply Accord to some sort of male fantasy of the absolutely perfect married woman then I've got another question here which has given me our three opportunities to to choose different questions but I'm going to choose number two it's as if you could have dinner and drinks with one man and one woman from the Roman world who would they be and why and I'm afraid I'm going to choose Cicero as my man because although Cicero has had a kind of bad press I mean deeply deeply conservative and terribly pompous when I was doing my book on Roman laughter I discovered just what Cicero's other ancient reputation was which was um to be the best Joker the Roman world had ever seen in fact Cicero's problems as one of his biographers he just didn't know when to stop telling those gags and it was so irritating so I'm gonna sit next dinner to the world's Roman world's greatest Joker and you know I'm torn for my woman that man if I'm gonna have dinner with somebody I'd like if possible to hear from somebody we don't know about so you know in a rather PC way I want to hear kind of the views of the the slave female masters at the local baths but I'd probably actually choose Nero's mum Agri Pina especially to find out if Nero really had murdered her if you could conjure up one piece of new technology what mystery about reaching Rome would you want to solve that's a very difficult one because I think this kind of way of understanding eight you know what stands between us and really getting to grips and getting close with the Roman world probably isn't any one thing to kind of whole set of things that we can't quite understand and I'm not sure that I could actually imagine a bit apart from time travel a bit of new technology that would are really aren't for some of the things that that always puzzled me but this isn't a bit of a cop-out I think I would say but I would just love to know what really happened in a Roman public baths but if there was any way of finding that out I would I'd go there how would the Roman government secure funds to support its governmental operations legions and bread and circuses and that's where does the money come from in Rome is a huge question and uh one problem is people have tried to work out that some big mega economic calculations about how the Roman Empire sustained itself you know I have reckoned that actually despite the the sense that it has you know more money than that it needs and can burn it in vast extravagant building projects probably it was often managing on a bit of a knife edge of economic stability there's one very key example of that which we learn about at the end of the reign of the first emperor Augustus when there's a mutiny and the mutiny is caused by the fact that the Roman soldiers are being kept on for longer than their official number of years of service in the Roman army and that their pensions are being decreased now I think I certainly know from debates currently in the UK and maybe they're the same here that that any government that is making you work longer and paying you less pension is actually got trouble with the balance of payments and there are many hints that Rome was for all the way it could call on the natural resources including the silver mines of Spain in a sense to underpin its operations it is nevertheless marginal sometimes in its ability to keep going and so you say how did they secure the funds taxation the exploitation of the natural resources of the world taxation in various forms including pork taxes import taxes and they only just managed it I think here's a question about many stories in the Talmud or parables or symbolic but one portion the Talmud recounts that Nero converted to Judaism if that historian that stories historically factual could it account for the negative depiction of the Emperor Nero by Roman historians such as justice who also described Jesus in a very ugly we're certainly the case that Tacitus did and many other writers did describe Jews are in extremely ugly way not quite as ugly as they described the Christians but pretty bad one thing we do know I think it's very very unlikely I have to say that that Nero himself actually converted to Judaism but it is clear that some senior Romans did convert to Judaism or attracted by Judaism and it is it is one I think from from the point of view of a Roman historian thinking of from the baseline of paganism in the Roman world it's actually extremely interesting how far other forms particularly of monotheism did become attractive to many people at Rome and not just the elite what what we know is that that I suppose you becomes very difficult to understand you see periods both in Judaism and Christianity or big standoffs between exclusive monotheism and Roman polytheistic paganism and you see also periods of much greater or less a fair from the Roman authorities and particularly in relation to Judaism not case for Christianity until the third century at least you see that there are some major Jewish figures are in the background of Roman history who are really in some senses powerbrokers and after the end of the first Giulio Claudian dynasty the man who put Vespasian the first leader of the next successful dynasty on the throne was an extremely prominent and powerful Jew called Tiberius Julius Alexander so there's a there is a very big an unresolved issue here about our the relationship between Roman paganism which we tend to think of as far too monolithic I think and a Judaism and Christianity and how that actually works out in not only the ordinary everyday lives around but really the power structure I can't I'm afraid read that one so I'm terribly sorry so I want if I missed you I had to come and ask I just couldn't read it but then the last one would be Caesar populist his hero we're talking Julius Caesar here populist hero or dangerous dictator ah I think my answer that has to be both you know it Caesar is an extraordinarily interesting character uh we ought to be able to know exactly or much more clearly what was driving him the most Roman major political figures because we have his own account of some of his campaigns both against the Gauls where was effectively I'm afraid of genocidal maniac and also in the Civil War but even so it becomes its really uncertain what actually Caesars ambition is and he caused the problem is he gets killed too soon you know yeah we can't quite see where it's all going because he gets nipped in the bud I suppose the one thing that I would say is that although I was brought up to think of the assassins of Caesar as yet another group of Romans who were standing up as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar would have it for liberty against dictatorship in the ancient world the more I've looked at the careers of people like Brutus and cassia sees supposedly noble Roman's the more I thought they are kind of repulsive load of characters and Brutus at once one stays is I think charging something like 98% interest to some poor unsuspecting citizens of Cyprus who've taken out alone from him and when he finds it difficult to get the money paid he manages to go and will basically besiege the local council chamber in one of the main towns of Cyprus and actually starve some of the councillors to death now that's the guy who later on becomes um paraded as a hero of the people's Liberty and I think it just shows what a complicated or world art the history of ancient Rome is if that is the case so thank you very much everybody you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

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Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, Mary Beard (Author), History, history of rome, roman empire, spqr, a history of ancient rome

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Length: 59min 25sec (3565 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2015

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From /r/LDQ

“Beard’s popularizing bent is grounded in a deep knowledge of the arcane, and she gives new insight into the hoariest of topics,” wrote Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker. This fall, the Cambridge Professor launches S.P.Q.R., A History of Ancient Rome, with massive fanfare. Come discover why celebrities turn up to her book events, why she’s considered one of the world’s foremost classicists and why, after hearing her speak, you’ll never think of Julius Caesar, Cicero or Nero in the same way again.