Prof Dame Mary Beard - Them and us

Ladies and Gentlemen welcome back to the 2019 series of Gifford lectures I'm Allison Eliot I'm an honorary fellow of divinity and I'm a member of the Gifford Lectures Committee I'm delighted to welcome our distinguished speaker for this evening professor Dame Mary Beard professor at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Newnham College as she continues her series on the theme the ancient world and us from fear and loathing to enlightenment and ethics the first three lectures professor beard has explored how it is that we can understand people in the ancient world who are both very similar to us but also quite different in their culture and attitudes she's looked at the apparent pleasure they took in murderous games the puzzle of color and the politics of sexual violence this evening in the fourth of her lectures she turns her attention to us and then various forms of exclusion and inclusion in the ancient world the lecture and the questions is evening are being recorded and the video will shortly be available on the university's Gifford lectures web pages I have now great pleasure and handing over to Professor Mary Beard thank you and thanks very much everybody I'm really pleased to be back I want to start this week's lectures with an aspect of the ancient world that we regularly admire right we've had three lectures so far and some decidedly questionable topics gladiators rape the modern whitewashing of diversity in the ancient world and I thought we perhaps needed to change so I'm gonna kick off this time with the gleaming and unsullied case study of classical Athenian democracy though I might as well warn you it's going to emerge a bit more solid than you perhaps hoped I also have to confess that I've slightly reconfigured the elements in this and the next lecture so if you've been studying the lecture descriptions I have to confess that democracy won't be half of my theme tomorrow though I will be looking as promised at tyranny then and Empire I apologize if that ruins it for anybody but I'm afraid as a consequence of writing the descriptions of the lectures before you've written the lectures okay still called awesome then it goes without saying I think that the one-man one-vote system of popular government and I mean one man quite literally that was devised or took shape in Athens from the 6th through to the 5th century BC is now almost universally seen to be one of the ancient world's bright spots right it's not just a system of direct democracy in which all of the city's major decisions were taken by a popular vote of the citizens but structures were in place to ensure that the she'll eat the old Etonians of the Athenian world should not be able to dominate the political process or what we might call the executive so for example seats on the City Council and most of the annual officials most not all was selected randomly by lot what you see on the screen now is a 19th century German attempt to encapsulate this glorious image combining a kind of wonderful idealized scene of an Athenian public meeting actually rather happily not all dressed here it's only Pericles who's dressed in a white sheet everybody else does quite bright and it's got hints of the art and culture that we like to think flourished in Athens precisely because it was a democracy I don't quite know how this lady here has slipped into this public meeting who certainly doesn't belong I think she must be the artist's model it is of course a very dodgy principle that good government makes good art but it's an idea that has often and still goes strong in reference to Athens there was fascinated me an exhibition a fifth century BC Greek art in Washington DC in 1992/3 that was built around exactly that point and as if to underline the fact there was an introduction in the catalogue of the exhibition written by George Bush the first himself there are some of his wise words on Athenian democracy and its heritage in the West I'll be coming back to some of these wise or not so wise words in my last lecture no this admiration of Greek by which we really mean Athenian democracy hasn't by any means always been the rule in fact it's only really been the case that there's been this widespread admiration for less than a couple of centuries I mean your own local attempt to build a tribute to it was actually one of the earliest examples before that before the early 19th century you would not have found anywhere in the West I think many people who admired universal male suffrage leaving women out of the picture entirely and the more moderate quasi democracy at the Roman Republic whose foundations as we saw in a couple of weeks ago was marked by the rape of Lucretia and the suicide of Lucretia the it was the moderate quasi democracy of the Roman Republic that always then seemed to rather more judicious model which is of course why George Bush's own Washington has got a Capitol Hill and a Senate and so forth they were literally seeing themselves in a Roman not a Greek image but now it really is a Athenian democracy different as it was in many ways from our own it's now Athenian democracy that we see as Bush kind of was capitalizing on as taking a foundational role in our political family tree know there are some good things about that I think and I would be the first to say that engaging and looking hard at this early democratic system can usefully undermine some of our own sloppy certainties about how the power of the people really works I think for example that looking hard at ancient Athenian discussions of democracy shall come back to again in a bit usefully challenges the limitations of our own discussions of democracy is a highly appropriate week to be talking about this because we I think it gets more relevant I'm sorry we I think ruly have begun to reduce the democratic process to not much more than voting and it sums up I fear by this kind of slightly self-congratulatory picture but sometimes decorates the front pages of British newspapers showing off an Afghan women in burkas putting a voting paper into a ballot box no I'm not for a minute suggesting that in some ways this kind of image is not uplifting of course it is but the Athenian debates remind us that there is a lot more to democracy than voting wherever you are in the world including here as we I think are finding right now Fenian righteous critics and analysts rightly focused just as strongly as on the act of voting on the question of how people made up their minds what to vote what information what reliable information they had on which to base that vote and who persuaded them to vote which way and by what means legitimate or others and if this doesn't sound too egregiously topical it's worth noting just as a point of information because it's being so such a lot of fake news about around this it is worth pointing out that the Athenians were quite happy to vote on the same issue twice in quick succession right there is a classic case of this which I want everybody to remember if they don't already know about it because it's wonderful ammunition it comes in 427 BC when the town of maleeni on the island of Lesbos tried to break away from what was then an athenian empire in retribution the Athenian assembly came together and they voted to kill all the adult men and to enslave all the women and children the next morning they woke up and they thought no the feeling right and they convened another assembly and they voted instantly to overturn their first decision and luckily the ship which had been dispatched to carry out decision number one was going so slowly because of what the news it was taking that the second ship carrying decision number two easily overtook it and saved the day now there are reasons bad and good for having a second referendum but the fact that that changing your mind is not written into the deep history of democracy is not one of them ok back to the topic that's the last that's the last we couldn't resist this admiration of Athenian democracy however you know I'm I'm a victim of that admiration of it does come at the cost of a large number of blind spots in a modern discussion and modern sort of popular representations of Athenian democracy in order to find a nice ancient Democratic ancestor for ourselves however remote it is we have to choose not to see quite a lot about ancient Athens and about ourselves for a start the very idea that came out very strongly in the Washington DC exhibition in the nineties the very idea that classical Athens was the world's first democracy is one of the worst self-serving misrepresentations that Western civilization has been responsible for it was the first political system to call itself a democracy that's for sure democratic is a greek word and that's why it was the first democratic right okay but there may well have been proto political systems of a similar kind operating in other parts of the West before the age of Athenian democracy we simply don't know but we do know that there are a very early egalitarian and participatory political traditions in parts of the East that were effectively democratic from at least at the time of the Athenian democracy even though we don't recognize them or call them as such I think we should do well to remember that inventing the word democracy which the Athenian certainly did is a very different thing from inventing democratic practice which they almost certainly didn't but even if we stick to a Greek version of democracy there's an awful lot that you know casual discussions total programs and so forth about that system there simply gets brushed under the carpet to give us the slightly gooey virtuous image of Athenian democracy there are some how we want as our ancestor it is not often pointed out for example but of the a thousand or so independent cities in the classical Greek world only a minority were termed or turn themselves democratic as well under a hundred that we know of for certain no probably there were a few more than that the one we know by far the best is Athens but strikingly it's worth remembering that even here almost all the evidence discussing its democracy from the inside in ancient literature comes from well-heeled writers who are very intently all mildly opposed to democracy as a system seeing it I'm sorry this is not meant to be yes not going back to seeing it as a recipe for bad decision-making and what people in the 19th century used so far as we can see it it wasn't us it wasn't that kind of prized possession of the fifth century Athenians that they all loved so far as we can see the idea of democracy in the supposed glory days of 5th century Athens which is what you've got on screen was always deeply contested and it was anything but gooey there were Jews in Athens attempting counter tease there were political assassination and there was a a lively to put it mildly oligarchic political opposition who supported the rule of the few the oligo not the people as a whole and these guys would have been quite happy to betray the city to its great enemies the passions if they could actually got rid of democracy in the process so dominant really is the opposition to the non support of democracy in the contemporary written record that we actually have no intellectual manifesto for ancient Athenian democratic at all we have to reconstruct what they thought they were doing by looking at what the opponent said and looking at what the institution's seemed to suggest was the function and the purpose of all this so we haven't got got very very hazy bit of of ideology which is hard to reach but also how it all worked in practice is also much more ragged at the edges and a bit less glorious than the sort of rosy tinted image you see here uh tends to suggest first of all the number of athenian citizens we're dealing with in this democracy is small now I'm sure you can guess that the exact figures are a real academic battleground but it would not be unconscious eh but the total number of male citizens in the mid 50's II was in the 30 to 40 thousand range which is about the same number as the students of this university right now it's easy to have a democracy when you're this size but even then they were worried like we are about low turnouts and it seems that a combination of various forms of compulsion to attend the voting assemblies and eventually this is carrot-and-stick approach pay as a reward for doing so great pay is reward for voting is a great idea that was needed to get it appears the average Athenian participating in this active direct democracy on a regular basis but in terms of social mobility it was actually very rare for any ordinary bloke live beside the women ever to reach a real position of in in the city it was we're familiar with this overwhelmingly rich men from elite families who competed for the few elected offices there still were rather than those selected by lot and they look down their nose at all the people who attempted to be the leaders of the community they look down their nose at others as if they were interlopers and the comic dramas of the fifth century a full of snide and appalling least snobbish jokes about the nouveau riche who tried to break him to politics you know makes the Bullington club look tame if you read Aristophanes and then of course there were the big exclusions you may be surprised that so far I've only alluded rather gently to the fact that there there were no women in this boys political club nor of course any slaves of which there were many in Athens now the usual modern procedure in talking about this here is not unlike what I pointed to in my latch on gladiators you start off in your book or your article by deploring the exclusions right women were not included slaves were not included then you Park the problem over to one side and proceed with your analysis as if that deploring had never happened they didn't exist no it goes against the grain I have to say for me to say this but I think that they're all I think that's a more understandable procedure for women than slaves and I will explain why becoming really to focus on slaves as the excluded mother I've just had a quick look at the woman Athenian culture throughout counted women out as it were I think you can see that nice link related if you look paradoxically the image of Athens is patron thought s now I put on the screen here the most stunning or perhaps the most revolting reconstruction we have of the great gold and ivory statue of the patron goddess Athena who once stood in the path went happily it has been destroyed but it has been reconstructed along with the pardon itself in Nashville Tennessee which is where this is and it's really worth the visit it really gives you that kind of sense of what it might have been like to be there as I said paradoxically perhaps this statue of female dirty points better than almost anything else at the marginalization of real women in the community the goddess in some ways is everything that the Athenian women were not supposed to be first of all she's a virgin goddess when the duty of the citizen woman was first and foremost and almost exclusively to bear children she is kitted up in Rome peculiar military dress when that dress is the exclusive prerogative of men except for the appallingly transgressive race of female Amazon warriors but they get slaughtered and I think you know we look at this and you see a woman with a shield and a spear and a helmet and a breastplate here and she's carrying a victory and to us I think that that looks just a bit odd right it's it's kind of there's lots of things about classical art that look a bit odd and this is one of them I think what you have to see in ancient terms that looking at that in the middle of the 5th century BC was about as arresting and hold your brain seeing as seeing now the image of a five year old with a Kalashnikov you know it's it's a real clash of different different forms male and female it's also the case as is represented on the sculpture in the gable of the Parthenon and on lots of ceramics that you see here but Athena herself was not born from a woman but she was born directly from the head of her father's youth the obstetric details are clearest here the sculpture of the Parthenon frieze is rather you know cheated by having that Scecina and that Zeus and you know all of the childbirth is long gone when we see that know what this means a game it seems to be audiio Athena's ball from her disease so so watch you know another bit of weird Greek mythology but essentially what's going on here is everything the city's patron goddess stands for is the kind of wishful fantasy of the misogyny of Athenian men in which you can imagine a world without women you know but women are not necessary for bearing children she even she is does not actually have she does not have a mother and they do things you can you can not see the female principle you rely on it but what your patron goddess tells you is that somehow in the world the ideal world of myth things work differently without women now it does seem to me essential that you always have to understand the politics of Athens against that kind of background of cultural masculinity you know no never mind that that women couldn't vote they weren't part of the citizen body in that kind of way I'm not sure and this is where I feel a bit of a coward but a constant return to the absence of women in the athenian polity helps much in getting to grips with the nature of the democracy slavery however and enslaved people have a completely different and absolutely integral role to play here not just as a kind of background of discrimination one uncomfortable fact that that we tend to draw a veil over really is the athens and to some extent I'll be coming onto this Rome to in Athens slavery went ideologically hand-in-hand joined at the head with the Democratic polity of the free citizen there is a characteristic triangulation going on here as I put it in its crudest form in this diagram between free citizens democratic politics and the enslaved or the excluded other that's to say the other side of democracy the essential other side of democracy I'm going to claim is enslavement I mean enslavement or slavery of a particular type so far as we can tell the ancient world was full of a whole mosaic of various forms of non free or not entirely free statuses going back as far as you can possibly see the beginning of humanity people for example who'd fallen into debt become the bondsman dependence of their creditors and so forth now I'm not really talking about that whole range but I'm talking particularly about the mechanism of chattel slavery where the enslaved person is the direct property or Chapel of their master and could be bought and sold just like any other piece of property the indebted bondsman can't be bought and sold I'm talking about slaves that you can trade now what is absolutely clear is that in Athens the origins of democracy and the definition of the freedom of the Athenian citizen are part and parcel of the same process as the development of an exclusion and exploitation of slaves and to some extent foreigners it goes back to a revolution in what was admittedly a rather murky part of the early 6th century BC which did three things crucially simultaneously it established what appears to have been always seen later as the first democratic institutions of the state it abolished all forms of debt bondage for free Athenian citizens so no Athenian citizen could fall into bondage in that sense ever again and at the same time it defined slavery as the chattel slavery of people who were not Athenian that's it sets up an internal external definition of freedom and slavery which go hand in hand and together an absolute boundary was erected between slaves on the one hand and citizens on the other and it was a principle of exclusion that lasted and became sharper actually in different respects as time went on and it's a basic rule of thumb or not a very comfortable one that the more radically democratic Athens becomes the more rigidly and exclusively it defines its citizenship culminating in a decree in 451 BC which said in order to be and this has resonances for us I think in order to be a citizen of Athens you had to have both parents who were Athenian citizens previously it had only been a citizen father now it's often said that Athenian democracy relied in practical terms on slaves and it would have been impossible for Athenian men to take the time off to do democracy if they hadn't had slaves to do their work for them I'm sure that's true but I think more to the point is that somewhere deep down there the whole ideological rationale of Athenian freedom and liberty and democracy was based on a division between free Athenians and enslaved or potentially enslaved outsiders now I don't for a minute want to say that the only driver of mass slavery in Athens or in the Greek world in general was the cause of citizen freedom I've already said that there were different forms of unfreedom that were endemic and they're also all other kinds of reasons for enslavement for example conquest that I'll be coming back to poverty tomorrow and it's also the case that slavery flourished in societies that were not democracies in Athens in in the Greek world in cultures that put a degree of stress on the citizen but not necessarily the Democratic citizen but the connections I want to say between the liberty of the free and its antitype in slavery were absolutely crucial and they were also in ancient Rome now Rome's political life as you might call it was in many ways very very different from classical Athens fundamentally because of a difference of size I said a moment or two ago that in Athens we're dealing with a citizen body male citizen body thirty to forty thousand in the mid 50 centuries that's pretty much the high spot of the Athenian population by contrast the population here I mean the total population including women and slaves of the city of Rome alone never mind the rest of Italy by the end of the first century BC was in the region of a million that's the biggest city in the Western world until 19th century London and in relationship to slavery too there was some significant contrasts between Athens and Rome the most significant was that the Romans regularly liberated freed their slaves who owned their domestic slaves say don't know about those working in the mines or whatever who owned being given their freedom became Roman citizens with more or less full citizen rights now there's no reason to think that that was done out of affection a bigger motive they might sometimes have been but a bigger motive may well have been crudely economic to get rid of a worker who was now not worth the upkeep or to put this I think uncomfortably crudely but it this is the kind of uncomfortable crudeness that you have to accept in the institutions of ancient slavery I think getting rid of a slave freeing a slave could be the equivalent of getting rid of an old washing machine that has become too expensive to repair right it's probably as instrumental and awkward I think as that but whatever the motives for this freedom and there were no doubt many it embedded slavery at the heart of Roman society in a rather more complicated way than in Athens because because of this influx of freed slaves into the citizen body it's reckoned that by the mid second century AD a significant proportion maybe something between a third and a half of the citizen population of the city had slavery in their ancestry so there there is a very very big difference which was noticed in the ancient world itself and you see here a snapshot a part of that process you've got a Freeborn Roman man here between two of his ex slaves in a perfectly Roman even if slightly patronizing I think trio but there's still something of what I would call the Athenian principle in the Roman case because the Romans - in the fourth century BC abolished the debt bondage of Roman citizens and defined enslavement as something that happened to others so if at Rome slaves could become citizens that's true citizens by definition could never become slaves know what I'm trying to do is to say look right at the very heart of these cultures slavery is absolutely central and embedded and it's another case where we really have to ask how could they do it what stories what narratives what explanations what theorizing made it possible for one group of human beings to treat another group with the full backing of the law as effectively subhuman as quotes machines with a voice as they called it I think it's robots human robots how can we without actually apparent opposition I think that's important you know if you're thinking that there was an abolitionist movement in Rome or Greece I think forget it how how could this have just gone on being practiced it might individuals who had all things sorts of things to say about it but it's absolutely certain there is no communal movement against this and how can we understand the violence that seems to mark the status of the slave I mean it is not a coincidence that some Roman slave names um literally meant beat me rights equal to slave and you'll call when you call out your calling to beat me how can you how can you understand I mean effectively I suppose how it is possible for a whole culture to think that you can treat other human beings as animals now if you can't tell whether this caller originally belonged to a slave or to a dog that I think is the whole point right it's got a little thing round its own you know I've run away there's be reward if you return me and could see that it is equally appropriate and that's the giveaway for animals or humans and there were in this institution oh I'm staying with Rome for a bit well we'll come back to her since I don't think it's any different there were terrible atrocities both on the day to day level you know you don't need me to tell you what working down an ancient mine as a slave would have been like but it's also notorious one off incidence in 61 AD for example when a Roman aristocracy slaves the Lord took its course that said that all 400 slaves in the household would be put to death if a slave kills a master all the slaves in the household are killed that's the way you prevent slaves killing their masters and for me it's the old gladiator question again you know how could the average Roman bloke who's perfectly decent and loved his dog you know sit there day in the you know Coliseum watching that stuff it's the gladiator question real arge it raises some similar issues but it also takes the question on a bet exposing I think rather more clearly some of the cracks in ancient moral certainty and I shall come to our certainty in the end so how did the morality of slavery work well to answer that we need to think a little bit about what we actually know about slaves I confess I'm thinking a bit hesitant doing that in this university because it has a great tradition of studying slaves and slavery and I suspect there are people in the audience you know quite a lot more about this than me so they have to forgive me but again it is a bit like gladiators we've got quite a lot of vivid and sometimes nasty evidence glimpses like the color on the screen but at the same time the big picture the infrastructure and the history of slavery is an institution in any detailed sense is really elusive in one way as I've said own freedom in the ancient world goes back as far as we can see it you've got slaves in their might Minoan mycenaean linear b tablets but we have no clear idea of why the characteristic form of chattel slavery that I've been talking about with slaves bought and sold as property why that died out in the early Middle Ages except to say it's probably got more to do with economics and less to do with Christianity than we might hope and in some ways you know there is a sense in which ancient slavery is a kind of unitary phenomenon in opposition to freedom but beyond that even chattel slavery came in many different forms and different conditions from the utter degradation I think we have to imagine all those working in the mine or some agricultural operations to more domestic settings which would presumably have been not quite so bad whether in private houses or family workshops - indeed relatively powerful positions as the skilled assistance doctors and secretaries administrators of Roman aristocrats and Emperor's more so in Rome and Athens but you could find a similar spread in Athens no there is not much life experience in common between that kind of elite slave who might themselves have actually owned slaves because it's that complicated and the poor souls who were digging in the mines and in fact although this again goes against the grain and I think against our modern liberal gut reaction I think that I would probably have preferred to have been a slave secretary of let's say Cicero or the Emperor Augustus to someone who was free but unemployed and destitute now ancient writers didn't devote very much attention or concern on the free poor I think for the very simple reason that the poor were a problem who neatly sold themselves they died right no I think it's a I throw in that fact because I think it again when we're thinking about our reactions to slavery of course we deplore it of course we're all abolitionists but I think that you have to reckon that there were some people in the ancient world who were worse off than the slaves and the the free destitute probably come into that category we know even less about them than the slaves because they have no meat support again another non surprise I'm sure as for how many slaves there were altogether it's a big unknown and how many families used had owned slaves again uncertain it's taken to be pretty much universal we don't really know one of the guesses puts the number of slaves in Italy and say the first or second centuries ad at about a million and a half which would be the quarter of the total population but again we don't really know what the total population is but you know we've got a big a big significant minority of slaves in part of the population I know there are all kinds of unanswerable questions that are raised from this I mean like where do they get them from I mean the first generation of slaves come from conquest almost certainly and you can see them here's a triumphal procession procession after great Roman victory and here's two captives are they're being processed along the streets of Rome but they're going to end up as somebody's slave it's still though a subject of enormous debate once the major series of conquests have finished where you get your slaves from at that number is it home breeding you know do slaves actually have to reproduce themselves in order to reproduce the Masters property some may have come from those abandoned babies I mentioned in an earlier lecture and there are some slaves who have names which say not beat me but picked up on the rubbish heap which presumably suggests that was their origin it's hard not to imagine that there were not as nasty people traffickers operating certainly on the margins of the Roman Empire in the age of the world as there are nasty people traffickers now that we really don't know but more than anything what frustrates the study of slavery and this goes also for women of course is that we have hardly any voice from the slaves themselves and that makes it very unlike the study of slavery in the American South where there is considerable slave testimony there are a handful of surviving authors who are sometimes imagined on a little bit of evidence to being slaves perhaps the Roman writer of fables feed hrus perhaps the Roman comic dramatist Terence or perhaps not but for the most part we're always one removed from the voice of the slave as with the Roman poet Horace who was the son of an ex-slave or we're always finding ourselves on the other end of the conversation as with this gold bracelet found near Pompeii which is actually rather lovely thing and it is inscribed in Latin with words to the effect of this is a present from master to his slave girl no I cannot tell you the so penis that this brings out in historians who talk about it right they say oh look how sweet here we've got evidence of romantic relationship between master and slave oh god he's given her this lovely bracelet right well maybe that is what happened but I can't help thinking when I read those sake bits of description I wonder whether it looked quite like that to the slave girl who had no choice about whether to get into bed with her old slob of a master even if he'd managed to convince himself it was all wonderfully consensual right and that reminds us don't forget that slaves were expected to fulfill all duties and that included sex now it's partly because of this absence of the slave viewpoint that pushes me as a historian to look at the perspective of the owners even if somehow you think it's morally the victims who deserve our attention and as I said it pushes me to the question of how could this institution have been sustained you know how could we not find any kind of vocal abolitionism no one fundamental answer to that I guess it's the standard one you'd have heard from many Greek and Roman intellectuals was some version of the slave not being a human being like I was trying to argue the gladiator was not seen as a human being in the sense of not being a person with agency and rights I already mentioned one version of that when I referred to one Roman writer seeing slaves as machines with a voice or in our terms as I said robots it's even more striking what the 4th century Greek philosopher Aristotle had to say when he talked about how you thought about slavery and he talked about those who were those slaves were slaves ie subhuman by nature so he is theorizing at category if he found it quite hard because he couldn't deal with people who had been free and then conquered and then became slaves that was a problem but what was what he wanted intellectually was to say that people those who were slaves were naturally slaves and you can find lots of discussions not quite as acute as Aristotle but along the same lines in ancient literature for me though the crucial point in these arguments about slaves and machines slaves are subhuman slaves are naturally slaves the crucial point is that those arguments tend to be terribly terribly ragged at the edges now I mentioned in passing when I was talking in my phone lecture about gladiators the sense that gladiators weren't really human which I thought in some way was underpinning the crowds ability to watch that sense was always a perilous one a Cicero said on one occasion the spectators felt sorry for the elephants who were going to be killed because they seemed to be human but in the case of slavery in Roman culture certainly but also I think you could make the same argument for athenian we're dealing for me with an enormous fault line in the moral intellectual cultural world here a vast gaping moral paradox on the question of what freedom and humanity was all about I'm not talking here about ancient opposition to slavery I'm talking about ancient anxiety about it that's to say on the one hand as I've said slavery was ideologically embedded in the definition of free citizenship and that symbiosis of slave and master was acted out practically on a day-to-day basis now I was struck myself by this on one rather surprising occasion when I took a group of students to a local Roma Museum and in this museum they had four kids a dress yourself in a toga display right a bit like this but not quite so grant now these students were a day out that was meant to be intellectual but they went and done well rushed to this and started putting the toga on which I rather disapproved until I realized that we had all learned one very important lesson from this and dressing up books and that is it is absolutely impossible to put a toga on without help togas mean slaves right slightly less playfully that was the students never forgot him slightly less place flee it was soon after that incident with the toka that I noticed a particular cruelty of the emperor Domitian at the end of the first century AD that I hadn't noticed before Domitian was hosting a dinner party specifically in order to humiliate his guests one of those humiliations was that at the end of the dinner he swapped their slaves round and he sent them home with somebody else's now why was that so terrifying why was that so in a part of the this whole kind of cruelty of the Emperor I can only understand it in the sense that the Civic citizenry and personal identity of the Freeborn man was forged in his relationship to the enslaved dehumanized machine with a voice they kind of go together yet on the other hand what is just him as important as those those assertions of the symbiosis of slavery and freedom it seems to me and there's evidence for it that it was impossible to sustain that image of the robot in the everyday life at Rome slaves were not like gladiators they were not on the other side of the representational wall of the Colosseum they were not a spectacle of dehumanized other nurse they shared your bed they read to you they talk as they helped you put on your toga they were in some sense is a self-evident human as you or I and often from whatever reason when they were freed at Rome they crossed the boundary that kept apart the person from the robot interestingly those 400 slaves were executed in punishment for just one of their number having murdered their master we're told when we told about that that the ordinary people when they learnt of the planned punishment in Rome they rioted in solidarity with the slaves so you're getting these glimpses of a kind of shared humanity like Cicero talking about his elephants and I think it's in response to these huge paradoxes the question of the slave is human and not human as us and other but Roman discourse and literature is full of attempts to repackage slave status to debate and read abate the hierarchies between slave and free and to cloak the whole institution in a big layer of false consciousness now some of this consists in the kind of banalisation we saw when gladiators or infantilization now those of you who are here a couple of weeks ago may remember these horrible little Cupid's who are actually gladiators their wings here domesticating gladiatorial combat something not entirely dissimilar is going on here and it's a common tactic the slaves are represented as smaller this is a dinner party here's the guests the slaves are all little even the one who is propping up the guy who's puking up here right as if the hierarchy of adult the child has been used to translate the hierarchy of free to slave and it's the same tactic found in the use of the term poo air or boy to talk to a slave or to go back to my french lessons at school we were taught to address French waiters as garçon if you did that you get into real trouble but that's how we learn to do it's about hierarchy seen in terms of youth and age but even more strikingly I think is the rich literary tradition faces or reverses or questions the relationship between slave and master and in individual instances its morality it's hard not to suspect that one of the Communist themes in both Greek and Roman comedy that is the clever slave who repeatedly outwits the dim master is some kind of attempt to obscure the real relations of vicious power that are at stake but just as important or a whole series of anecdotes that focus on the moral even if not legal illegitimate see of the Masters physical power over the slave and in the sense the moral triumph of the slave the snappiest of these is a story told about the emperor hadrian who is once said to have got into a terrible temper and stabbed a slave in the eye with his pen he soon did nothing oh my god what have I done moment he felt terrible and he said to the slave he could choose any gift he wanted slave didn't reply Hadrian pushed him and said come on you know any gift you want the slave finally just said I just want my eye back please I got him in one now I don't for a minute one to let masters off the hook or be seeming to mitigate the whole institution of slavery as I said one of the limitations that we have on our understanding of this is that we have almost zero evidence from the slave side what I'm wanting to stress is that this black spot there is a black spot of institutionalized exploitation is both absolutely embedded in the culture of the ancient world so that you could not think Greek or Roman politics without it and at the same time it was almost impossible for the ancients to handle they lived with it but they failed to make sense of it their ex relations are always inadequate what it does if you're alert them is exposes their own doubts and anxieties to finish I want to say so what about us how do we get in here well I think slavery once again brings out the sanctimonious self-righteousness in us all all over again you know it's the question would we do that now oh of course we wouldn't hey come on think again do we have slaves yes we do and even though slaves were slave rebellion was actually strikingly rare and interestingly and sometimes puzzlingly rare in antiquity we still thrill to you know the most famous rebel of them all you know oh I am Spartacus etc as if it was incumbent on us to side with the rebels to make ourselves feel better we're on the Spartacus's side a little bit but more fundamentally we tend to turn a blind eye to the centrality of this form of human exploitation in ancient politics there's a collusion to worship at the Wellsprings of Athenian democracy without noticing that slavery was one of its crucial components without seeing that ancient Liberty was built on ancient slavery and Ted instead we tend to think of it as a an unfortunate epiphenomena and you know it's it's worked on by people who are specialists in ancient slavery where it ought to be central and somehow I think we're used to looking at the ancient world most of us without facing it and how do we do that well we repeatedly domesticated now I don't mean always to be picking on the Cambridge Latin course but the treatment of Grumio the slave cook the sometimes good-humoured sometimes grumpy household retainer is a good example here you see him in his kitchen and here on the right with one of his mates now the Latin phrase underneath the slaves were happy has recently caused some raised eyebrows I had to say I think it would be equally misleading to say that you know the slaves were always miserable you know it being a kind of amazing capacity of the human spirit to be happy in the most unlikely circumstances and I'm sure that slaves were not always misery there is however a sense but to give our young latin learners this version of slavery which is what the cambridge latin course does not the beaten verses of slavery of the version or the minds is to give them only one small bit of the story Grumio i don't know if anybody watches itv 'Plebs' series Grumio the slave has a whole new life in a new television series in which he's equally likely ism in the Cambridge Latin custom so we domesticate it we make it nice household retainer kind of stuff we also translate slavery away like we translate rape away we say abducted not rape and I think one of the striking things about Emily Wilson's recent translation as the Odyssey is that she was pretty much the first I think not thee first but pretty much the first to translate the woman slaves in Odysseus's household many of whom get killed in the end not as handmaidens as they are conventionally translated but as slaves but we missed a finish we are also the followers of the ancients in the comfortable narrative like in plebs and like here of the comic and clever slave who despite his or her position in the hierarchy always gets the better of the stupid old master now I don't know how many people in the audience room but Frankie Howard as the slave Lurky extremely camp slave lucky Oh obviously shown on prime-time television in Pompeii in the sixties and early seventies I remember watching this we're absolutely hilarity week by week and I saw nothing in it at all other than there are the gratifying triumphs of the underdog and now it seems to me that that is one of the problems that we have in looking at slavery not one of the solutions thank you okay now we have time for some questions if you want to ask your question and put up your hand as this gentleman has back here and wait until the cordless mic come to you now it's very confusing what I'm going to ask when I sometimes I think to this lays your room I'm Roman but I live here from 22 years I'm also a British citizen now but when I think to Rome I mean when you say about slavery in Rome you make me think about Petronius, Petronius he wrote about Tramalchio the famous tramalchionus so Trimalchio was probably a Syrian slave that it was he became a freedman so in the satirical of Petronius I think we are talking about about 120 Anno Domini so I became is so extremely rich that I think he's probably as you say a person that becoming so rich he was so able to invite everyone at his dinner it was quite probably yeah maybe he was teasing Patroni was teasing this person for his dreadful bad taste so I think he's what we won off can I say something also talking about Juvenal, Juvenal detests women and it was a misogynist and he detests that Greek people they were talking about Greek influence anyway but what do you think about this what is called in this country the hostile environment in a role I've always thought no I have come to think that the Petronius Satyricon on that and the portrayal of an ex-slave who's made it very very rich is another one of those cases where we're seeing the ambivalence about slavery and particularly the transformation of the status of slave to free man really paraded because you Tremonti has got a whole load of money and part of the point of the Satyricon is to show how this ex- slave as is always getting it wrong you know it's always a bit naff it's a bit vulgar it's a bit something you know it's kind of I'm sorry if there's a Premier Division football player yeah but it's it's kind of he's a bit like what a really really well you know it's a bit like the Beckham's you know with having Thrones and things like that you know and you think this is so enough it shows you know you can't be it has no breeding no taste what is always a good question though after you've read a load of loads of pages and pages of this kind of remark is excessed the question was had to our students when they're reading is if you were invited to dinner by Trimalchio would you go and the answer is always yes so you've got that you know like we would go to you know the Palazzo Beckham when we if we were asked know so there's a kind of a kind of relationship to that to getting it right getting it wrong is very very complicated the joke is not always on Trimalchio, it's partly on us oh gold-plated taps how vulgar here comes some like first of all I have to say and I'm sure I speak from everyone we are all your pupils you'll give so magnificent a mixture of Education and entertainment which is what education should always be and it is so delightful for us to see that you do it in the lecture theatre with the same extraordinary skill that you do in your writings thank you now that's the I wondered what you thought of the confession of St. Patrick as a slave narratives coming from a romanized world although not at that point still a part of the Roman Empire I mean that's that's what I think the problem is it happens it's about 20 years since I read the confession isn't Patrick so do not imagine that I'm deeply familiar I have read it a long time ago I think that I mean I think the problem is for me is that I can the kind of narratives I'm looking at they get their edge and their difficulty because they are embedded in that in the centrality of slavery to the political institutions of the certainly the Greek city-state but also in different ways to the Roman polity now I don't that as I recall it is that is not what gives that narrative the edge whereas for you know Hadrian versus his slave and the I the it is about that it's the symbiotic quality which makes it which drives the ambiguity I don't think you have that in that or in later I mean you there's an awful lot of attempts to to say rightly I think to want to see this classical Roman slavery within a comparative tradition and you know also the good in many ways but there is seem to me a fundamental difference always that that is not how any of those later cultures weather during my talk to antebellum America it's it's lacking one terribly important building block when you were talking about the paradox of everything that Athena represents and the exclusion of women from politics which I know wasn't the focus of the lecture but a bit about women in I was wondering how the Athenians could reconcile the later necessity of an Athenian mother but the exclusion of Athenian it's really interesting and I start that from the you know you talk about my own mum now you go up to the Acropolis and you say and she says not only knowing a little bit about what you've told you about offense she said but you said that it was all terribly misogynistic and yet they've got their patron goddess he's a woman right that doesn't add up to me and it's a good point and so I I mean I think I would just read it absolutely literally I think what what that is that statue is saying and what the stories that told and retold about Athena are telling you is that if the world was perfect we wouldn't have women you know and there's a lot of cultures and myths which make that which make that leap and so I think that what it does given that we know that actually the job of the woman was having the babies and breeding all this stuff I think what it does is repeatedly tells women that they're second that they are not just second best and that they haven't got voting rights whatever that in a perfect world they wouldn't exist it's a kind of way of saying you you know if things what if things were better we'd do without you oh when you look at that statue if you're a woman you don't think well it's nice to know they worship the woman you just think that is not that is so shocking it's not me and if I read it right it's saying it's not you and actually it's showing that things would be better if you weren't here unless plenty and you know both Greek and other mythologies which make that point this even is just extremely vulgar and displaying it do go to Nashville it's amazing someone wrote up at the back there so wait until the mic comes because yes yes just to pick up on the interesting question and interesting answer about St Patrick I'd you know Christian philosophy abolishing the distinction between master and slave and TV documentary about some Paul some years ago in which Tom Holland proposes some Paul as someone who from Christian philosophy challenges the distinction between master and slave and a bit Jew and Gentile etc I just wonder what your thoughts might be what there are people who know about the literature of the early church in this room in much greater intimate detail than I do but what I what I would say insofar as I've thought about that which I obviously have a bit because you do you do you ever think what where does from where does this institution get challenged I mean what's that was really clear is that I didn't talk about this but because we don't have time but the another section that I would have liked to put in is that slavery first I'll talk about bacon but then in pagan writing slavery is absolutely embedded as an image as a metaphor in Roman literature and read it across the board it's it's you can't think about yourself this is real my supposed kind of ancient intersectionality you can't think about yourself in the world without thinking about slavery is one of the ways of seeing the relationship between you and anybody else so the obvious example of that would be in Latin love poetry when what is the relationship of the man to his desired woman it's so witty on it slavery right now how does plenty address the Emperor Trajan when he's writing to him domine right which is the word for master no yes he horrified at the idea that he was putting himself in the position of a slave but that kind of that that the definition of that hierarchy is absolutely embedded in how do you talk about your relationship with anybody else higher lower etcetera and it seems to me that although it sometimes in a different modality the really Christianity inherits that rather than overturns it now if you go to the question of why does ancient slavery end most of the people I'm happy to hear from the experts most of the people that I've read about that you know by the time we're getting into the early Middle Ages see it is economic not moral and I mean Christianity it seems to me is using in in you know the pre sick you know up to Agustin is using and sometimes subverting but it using the the the building blocks for talking about status hierarchy wealth etc that will be deeply recognizable though sometimes twisted from any pagan discourse whether that's children or written it does actually start to have a debate about poverty in a way which paper literature doesn't but also slavery that it's it's using the terms but as I say I'm not that is what I think I think any comment on that let's hear from the experts never talk about slavery with a load of theologians any further questions drink well well I think we have to say thank you very much indeed.

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

Views: 20,413

Rating: 4.8566308 out of 5

Keywords: Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh University, Mary Beard, 2019, University of Cambridge, Mary Beard Lecture, University of Edinburgh, Classics, Newnham college, Dame Mary Beard, Edinburgh, University, lecture, The Ancient World and us, enlightenment, ethics, professor, students, learning, political change, slave, toleration, inclusion, women v men, women and men, equality

Id: xg0XzbASIwE

Length: 78min 27sec (4707 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2019