Prof Dame Mary Beard - Tyranny and democracy

welcome to the latest in the series of Gifford lectures again to Professor Mary be a lecturer who I'll introduce for me in a moment so those of you that know about the Gifford lectures and I know many of you will be regulars here know that the the universe friend was very proud to host the Gifford series here and one of my very pleasant tasks as the principal the University of Edinburgh is to host and to sometimes chair some of these lectures so I get to hear some very interesting contributions so this evening speaker in some ways needs no introduction but that I always follow that statement by saying I'll introduce her so professor Mary Bailey's professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Newnham College and her series is entitled the ancient world and us from fear and loathing to enlightenment and ethics and this evening's lecture is the fifth of her six lectures and I'll mention the details of the sixth one at the end there's a slight change in title so tonight's lecture will be entitled tyranny and Empire the the lecture and the questions are as you see being filmed the video will be available online on the university's Gifford lectures web pages and at the end we'll have time for some questions and that would also be films there will be an opportunity for people who don't want to stay for the question and answer session to leave beforehand but we'll have time for questions at the end and with that with that and with no further ado please let me hand over to Professor Mary beard welcome thank you very much and as Peter said this lecture is now focused not on tyranny and democracy but on tyranny and empire particularly how the Roman Empire has or has not been used to justify imperial domination in the modern world and I'm particularly going to be thinking about the British Empire if you've come to hear about democracy I'm terribly sorry but it is already up online so listen to it in the privacy of your own laptop I want you've got the confession and I want to start by saying but for all there inextricable interconnections ancient Greece by which we often really mean ancient Athens an ancient Rome have often been presented to us as kind of polar opposites in ancient culture sort of non identical twins one goodie and one body even though there have been shifts over time as to which the good years and which the body I did observe yesterday and exaggerating just a little that for several centuries from the Renaissance up to the early 19th century to at least the revolutionary politics of the late 18th century Rome was the culture to emulate it was the early Roman heroes great great example of these heroes such as those here who deposed the monarchy after the death of Lucretia who were in the minds of American revolutionaries and French neo-classicists who saw a model in the principles of law citizenship freedom and in some cases opposition to monarchy that the Roman Republic appeared to his spouse and it really wasn't into the 19th cent that the table's turned and as we saw yesterday Athenian democracy which had previously generally been written off as a pre disastrous experiment in mob rule came to be seen as the preferential model and Greek culture from theater to art and philosophy came to be seen as the Wellsprings of Western civilization which I'm going to be talking about on Thursday and there's your reminder of Edinburgh Scotland to the admiration of Greece at the same time as this growth in in Helena philia was happening Roman politics became characterized not so much as virtuous republicanism but as the corrupt political regime of the Empress who followed the Republic after the assassination of Caesar and Roman culture in general at least in in many imaginations became downgraded as a sort of johnny-come-lately who pinched basically everything that was worthwhile from ancient Greece leaving only as their own inventions the luxury the excess the asses milk births the excessive militarism the gladiatorial games and all the other bad bits as things that were variably Roman it's very much a good cop bad cop kind of routine between Greece and Rome and that's reflected actually in how the ancient classical world is presented to kids here you'll see the Horrible Histories fantastic series but it's the groovy Greeks and the rotten Romans and that absolutely sums it up no it goes without saying I hope that this is a rather silly binary for a start as I think my lectures be making it fairly clear none of the inhabitants of the ancient world were remotely nice in our terms and anybody he thinks that Virgil or Ovid were kind of cultural johnny-come-lately 'he's after the greeks compared with homer say or Euripides clearly hasn't read them and I've discussed already the kind of the only presence across both these cultures of things yesterday like slavery but Universal militarism would be cut would be another case in point what we would think of as trigger-happy violence oppression and cruel reparations were a major Lee major hallmark of international relations across the greco-roman world whatever elaborate legal systems these cultures might have invented internally international law in antiquity was rudimentary the communist way sometimes it would have seen the only way of settling disputes between states was by fighting it out and power was demonstrated by military force again in our terms Alexander the Great was a murderous young thug whom for some reason I failed to understand we still persist in calling the great right I think that would be something we should get rid of you know Alexander of Macedon you know it was nasty piece of work and and if you move to something which is not quite it's not quite as violent on a massive scale as Alexander's conquests Athens exercised its own rule over other states with what must have seemed a terrifying rod of iron as we saw yesterday it was only a second referendum that stopped the massacring the whole male population of a town that had tried to break away from Athenian control but if there is given that overall similarity if there is a single crucial difference between the great world and the Roman world it is in the idea and practice of territorial Empire now Alexander of Macedon that's what I call him conquered swathes of territory but he hardly ruled these ways before he died happily quite quickly and the territory was divided up and Athens as I've just hinted at various points in its history had a slightly longer lasting and hugely controversial Empire but it was still relatively small by imperial standards what marked Rome out as different was an empire that was both vast stretching from Scotland to the Sahara and long lasting in fact in the eastern Mediterranean it lasted until the 15th century we call those later phases of the Eastern Empire the Byzantine Empire but they saw themselves and called themselves the Romans equally important that Roman Empire has ever since been crucial in defining at least in the West and characterizing imperial domination from the Holy Roman Empire to the British Empire now as I've done before I want to take a fresh look at this from the ancient side before thinking about the modern legacy of the Roman Empire and what role it plays for us and how far under its shadow we still live now it will come as no surprise if I say as I've said in almost every lecture this time the Roman Empire is actually more puzzling than it sometimes looks the conundrum that everyone always or at least since Gibbon was worried about is why did it fall why did the Roman Empire end and as I showed you a couple of weeks ago there are plenty of half-baked modern attempts to search for lessons for today in whatever might have caused the Empire's decline I just repeat that the Roman Empire did not fall because of mass migration now in a way it's Gibbons question why did the Roman Empire fall but still rules you know in the popular imagination on the Twittersphere and elsewhere but for me the much much more interesting and actually even more puzzling question is not why the Empire fell but how and why it ever got up and running in the first place an empire more or less political control that was bigger in territorial extent than anything seen in the West ever to put this in the most basic simplest historical terms how do we understand how a second-rank small town which is what Rome was in the 4th century BC how do you understand how that second-ranked small town became within 300 years the ruler of such vast Imperial territories and to give you an idea of the territories they are those marked out in white here pretty much at its biggest extent Scotland to the Sahara Spain over to Syria now this is actually a carefully chosen image of the extent of Rome's power because it's taken from a series of maps that Mussolini put on play in the center of Rome and they currently taken down there I think good to go back again to trace the geographical development of Roman power from its origins right through to here uh and to project he didn't put that up for historical merely historical curiosity it was to project his own hope for the resurrection under Mussolini of the Roman Empire didn't get happily very far can I just put in parentheses now because it's something which is always terribly puzzling in my terminology might not always recognize this it's absolutely crucial to grasp when you're looking at histories of the Roman Empire that Rome acquired its empire in a territorial sense most of its empire in a territorial sense when it was a Republican democracy and the Emperor's only came later that is to say the Romans had an empire long before they had anything that we call an emperor now I think that's in parentheses but it's it causes inordinate confusion in almost everybody's a writing ant imagination so just bear that in mind as I go on so how did this happen how did Rome get this Empire how did it take control first of Italy and then far beyond it's very hard to sustain but it's often said in this kind of rotten Romans mentality that we have that the Romans were just nastier or more militaristic than any of the other guys on the block know there is no doubt that the prestige of the Roman elite was always as far as we can tell tied to military success the honour that every Roman most lusted after was every elite when most lusted after was the so-called triumph which we grips very briefly yesterday the procession in which the victorious general who killed a sufficient number of the enemy was transported through the streets of Rome dressed up in the costume of the god Jupiter himself he is Montaigne reimagining the scene in the fifteenth century with Julius Caesar here on his rather fantastic triumphal chariot I mean it's pretty clear to that later on every Emperor after we get to the one man rule following Julius Caesar's assassination that every emperor really needed a victory to validate his own rule even the decidedly unmilitary Claudius had to conquer Britain conquer I think in inverted commas to prove his worth so giving the Romans a bundle of trouble that lasted centuries it's often said that Britain was Rome's Afghanistan and it's not far from being the truth it could never quite go particularly can't conquer Scotland all that's true this is you know Rome is a warrior state it's a highly militaristic prestige ghost totem with military power and military success but there is absolutely no reason to think that Rome was any more militaristic than anybody else right now occasionally sort of over optimistic historians and archeologists have tried to invent peace-loving civilizations in the ancient world like the Minoan civilization invented almost entirely by Arthur Evans in prehistoric Crete with it some innocent herb gatherers and bull leapers but this was fantasy absolute fantasy most of the famous paintings are actually restorations restored into to make this fantasy look true they're nothing like they appear to be and the truth is that everywhere we have any clear evidence whether that's fortifications or military hardware used as grave goods in people's graves everywhere in the ancient world there is this hugely male minute ristic ideology what distinguishes Rome in other words is not that it's militaristic but that it is successfully militaristic or distinguishes Rome is that it wins and the big question is I think not were they more militaristic than anybody else but why did they win what accounts for Rome's military success now this is what I'm going to say goes down terribly badly amongst sort of war gamers but I think it is absolutely nothing to do with superiority in tactics right now there is a huge mystification of the military genius of Julius Caesar who is still for some completely mad reason taught in modern war canopies like like West Point as if he was the supreme tactician of antiquity I mean I did get into terrible trouble saying this but I think that I would still stand by it and I went through quite a lot of battle descriptions and ancient battles and they're pretty fun they're also pretty fantastical but there seems to me that the ancients have only one tactic for winning which is go round the back right you know everything they do is some version of going round the back you know and it's not rocket science you know you can you can you know get people sort of put you know trapped in a little gully or a ravine but basically it's going around the back and I don't think that anybody is working with anything that leads for an awful lot I'm talking about it but don't think anybody's working in the ancient world with anything better than that so it's not about tactics it isn't actually about better or more deadly hardware occasionally there are inventions or weaponry but there's nothing that the enemy can't copy you know if you invent a really super spear and you throw it into the enemy well they're really dumb if they don't make one - because you've given them the model right for me the only remotely convincing answer to why Rome wins and there's still issues here is that the Romans soon had insuperable manpower because of their policy of forming alliances with those they conquered and sometimes incorporating them into citizenship usual pattern in ancient warfare is you go off and you bash up the enemy you take a few cows and stuff bash down their walls and say see you in the next fighting season the Romans apparently almost uniquely make that conquest of next door territories and further afield territories part of the establishment of long-standing relationships with those peoples who are obliged to provide soldiers that gives them a huge advantage numerically in manpower its boots on the ground really that the Romans have and it means but the Romans do quite often lose battles and they lose battles much more often than we kind of allow but they didn't lose Wars they always had more blokes to put into the battle line and that's really what ancient warfare depends on its have you got more manpower than the other side so this there's nothing special here about their kind of military genius they've just got more of them it's also worth pointing out that there's no sign that Rome started out with any idea of systematic Imperial control over conquered territories you can't mustn't imagine a group of senators sitting down in the third century BC with kind of one of those you know Second World War maps because they didn't have maps for a start so you know we're gonna conquer we'll put you know the legions here it's it is not a systematic plan yeah even our modern idea of an ordered set of Roman provinces with governors and central administration and that's always a bit modest modernizing anyway but for centuries it really didn't exist at all and certainly up to the first century BC first 200 years or so of substantial conquest Rome's aim seems basically to have to ensure that it got its own way if the chips were down it wasn't about hands on control and that administrative hands on control was relatively late in coming it's worth remembering actually that the word Pro winged Kea from which province comes Roman Latin word per wing Kea originally just means a job or responsibility for Roman in the second century BC was sent out to a pro ink here he was sent out to do a job which might have been control Spain but it was a job now John Richardson he's going to be chairing our seminar tomorrow has done more than anybody to tease out some of these complexities in Roman imperialism and I hope he's not going to mind if I say that there are some paradoxes and blind spots in the more general modern approaches to this and to our understanding of Rome's empire on the one hand I think we still have a sneaking admiration for the Roman Imperial project as we talked about it as the ancestor of modern globalization some people talk about it as the ancestor of the EU for example and we point to kind of recognizable similarities in the material culture of North Africa and Hadrian's Wall as if it was a kind of proto coca-cola style globalization of culture with which in which we feel somewhat invested are we talk also endlessly about Romans connectivity and their infrastructure by which basically we mean roads and you also notice if you just read almost any Roman history textbook or listen to most TV documentaries and go back to the word great it's not just Alexander the Great the word great creeps in every so often when we are talking about the Roman military machine how often have you heard people talk about the greatest Roman general or great a great Conqueror heroism those men whom are equally well perhaps better be dubbed genocide all maniacs you know every time you read great Conqueror see if genocidal maniac will do instead very often it will and I mean that quite literally because the slaughter the scale of the slaughter wreaked by Julius Caesar in Gaul has been actually put on the scale of genocide perhaps a million killed by observers of this who are much more moderate than I am and even some Romans admittedly they're Caesar's enemies thought that he was guilty of crimes against humanity now I don't think we should imagine therefore that the Gauls were up to innocent peace-loving victims of all this right the Asterix image of the quirky druids and the magic potion and all that is romantic but wrong I think if you want a rather more accurate view of the flavor of Gallic culture that was pretty much annihilated by Caesar it's provided by a Greek observer who visited Gaul shortly before caesar's invasion and he said words to the effect of it was quite a jolt at first to see the heads of decapitated enemies pinned up outside their huts but after a while you kind of got used to it so the fact that people get defeated in the ancient world doesn't mean that they were nicer than the people who conquered them so we have a far too systematic a far too much planned image of Roman imperialism but the other side of the coin that we tend to downplay is this is a bit like slavery yesterday if not Roman opposition to Empire at least Roman anxieties about Empire sure as I said Rome is a warrior state and you can't get away from that but when Roman writers looked hard the dynamics and that consequences of Empire they saw the downsides of it as well as the upsize it is a good rule of thumb I think any period that the sharpest critiques of Empire come as much from within the Imperial States themselves as they come from the victims of imperialism it is I'm afraid the Imperial states and the Imperial aggressors who know what they get up to and that is certainly true of Rome for a number of Roman writers it was the acquisition of empire and especially the year 1 4 6 BC when by horrible coincidence Roman armies annihilated both the Greek city of Corinth and Hannibal city of Carthage and what is now Tunisia for a number of Roman writers it was that year of enormous Roman success that marked the beginning of Roman decline 146 BC note you know we are hundreds of years before Gibbon even started to think about Roman decline we're a hundred years before the assassination of Caesar in their view it was from that period on when Rome had effectively unchallenged dominance that you saw the growth of luxury which sucked the Romans spirit and it was at the terrible destruction of Carthage a really brutal destruction of the city of Carthage partly kind of in very belated revenge for the fear of Hannibal but the Roman general skippy Oh overseeing watch standing and watching Carthage go up in flames he was spotted crying him crying but it's another version of him when he was asked by an eyewitness why he was crying he replied to the effect of the same thing would one day happen to Rome and he's doing that can 1 4 6 no I have to say I think it's a pretty long story really in a virtuous skippy oh who is just completely trashed this city then it has a scintilla of conscience you know and says happened to us one day but it leads I think no doubt that anxieties about the Empire begin from the moment that he's at its greatest success there is however nothing cloying in the analysis of the Roman historian Tacitus in the biography that he wrote of his father-in-law who was for a time the governor of Britain in scripting a speech to put into the mouth of a Caledonian freedom fighter by the name of Cal mcus you can see a local version of him Tacitus discusses the very nature of Roman imperialism what do the Romans do he asks answer they make a desert and they call it peace now it is often fondly imagined that this was really uh tered by some early Caledonian but I'm afraid 99.9% certain that Cal gigas did not speak Latin and that he probably didn't exist he's a figment of Roman imagination which is now beautifully reconstructed for you here what you get in that phrase they make a desert and call it peace is a homegrown Roman analysis of empire put into their mouths of a barbarian and it's probably the most powerful and sharpest critique of empire that was ever written by anyone it goes without saying I think that modern empires are still making deserts and calling them peace and there aren't enough Tacitus around in the world to call them out I'm afraid ok so what I mean trying to do is capture some of the ambivalence is that hover around the Roman Empire from the way our own language can somehow situate us on the same side as the Romans proto global culture to the critiques and anxieties about imperialism found at the center of Roman Imperial culture I might have if there'd be more time just to go back to the triumph for a minute I might have added something about kind of Roman descriptions and discussions you get of these very frequent victory parades are very frequent because the Romans are often winning very frequent victory parades in the Republic here Caesar and it is the generals finest hour this is what every general wants it was also the triumph is a poisoned chalice uncomfortably often it was always said disaster lurked just around the corner for the successful general it certainly lurked just around the corner for Caesar it was about to be assassinated and sometimes and again it kind of adds I think to this picture of sort of ambivalence sometimes writers explain that the general lost his spot in the limelight walking past the crowds and they all looked and cried for the prisoners they did not clap the general they were back in the Coliseum with the elephants and people feeling sorry for the elephants what I want to do now next 20 minutes it sort of build on that and to think harder about how the Roman Empire has somehow replayed in modern imagination and politics and in particular how it's been used to justify Imperial regimes because one of the charges that is very often thrown at classics and the study of the Romans in general and Roman archaeology is that it has provided it has been linked to and provided a justification for Empire and certainly through the late 9th and 22nd 19th and 20th centuries it was a peculiarly powerful vindication of the British Empire now that's not to say it was a practical driver of imperialism in Britain the British didn't get the idea of having an empire from reading Roman writing but it provided a kind of historical and symbolic legitimation a kind of symbolic ancestor of what the British were all about now up to a point that is true.i the leading figures of british imperial expansion as you see here could present them cells quite literally in Roman guys here's Lord Cornwallis looking very fetching in his Roman armor and there were many cases where the Imperial the newly built Imperial capitals of the British Empire were forged in the likeness of ancient Rome and there you get lodgings buildings in New Delhi and that's only the tip of the iceberg it's also clear that the Roman Empire or even the ancient world in general gave the British a language with which to talk about their own Imperial enterprise gunboats the names of gunboats are always absolutely different ways and gunboats were very frequently named after the gods and heroes of classical myth and in the Crimean War you find HMS Agamemnon HMS Ajax HMS Neptune serving alongside slightly less classically resonance HMS Edinburgh and the HMS James what so so if you have James Watt and Agamemnon going in together to fight the Crimean War right and there are all kinds of direct parallels drawn between classical history and British successes and failures it's actually something of a nineteenth-century cliche to compare the Boer War to the disastrous invasion of Sicily by Athens towards the end of the fifth century BC but more than those kind of off the peg easy sort of Boris Johnson style comparisons there were strong assertions from leading scholars at the time but the practices and principles of Roman rule through useful light on British rule and vice-versa ancient Rome helped you understand Britain and Britain helped you understand ancient Rome 1956 John Collingwood Bruce one of the leading lights of the study of Hadrian's Wall drew very close parallels between the campaign's in Scotland against catechist of the Roman governor Agricola the father-in-law his biography Tacitus wrote and the fighting of liberties in yet again the Crimean War or rather he criticized British leaders for not having learnt the lessons that Agricola had to teach particularly in the sphere of infrastructure and transport it's one of the classic pieces of blurring between the British and the Roman Empire's just going to read you a little bit what Colin would Bruce had to say unfortunately our Prime Minister was too busy to study antiquities it was not until after our army had suffered the Severus calamities that a road was made from balaclava to the camp again we should probably have taken him to some of our stations on Hadrian's Wall and shown him the care with which a Roman army was entrenched even when it rested for just a single night right so the British messed up the Crimean War because they didn't have Roman infrastructure and half a century or so later in 1911 Frances have a field professor of Roman history Oxford and he was actually founding the National Society for the promotion of Roman studies had words on broadly the same theme which were published in the very first issue of the journal of Roman studies he has this to say the Roman imperial system alike in its differences and similarities lights up our own empire for example in India at every turn the methods by which Rome incorporated and Deena lized and assimilated more than half its wide dominions and the success of Rome unintended perhaps but complete in spreading its greco-roman culture over more than a third of Europe and a part of Africa concern in many ways our own age an empire Rome in other words offered a lesson in empire for the British and it was partly because of those perceived links between Rome and the British Empire but men like Benjamin Jowett the master of Bailey or College Oxford in 1870s and 80s thought that the Empire should be run by classicists particularly classes from Oxford and particularly classes from Bailey or College and you see him here in a kind of amazing mixture I think utter overweening self-confidence and total corrosive self-doubt really but whether confident or doubting he played a large part in constructing what's often seemed like a magic circle joining up people who knew about the ancient Roman Empire and governed the modern British one classics it being said and classicists being the natural in rota Commerce Imperial administrators now that's a Magic Circle captured in a rather more amusing way here in what was then already a rather nostalgic cartoon from a 1950s Britain's children's book how to be top which starred as his antihero one nigel Molesworth aloud who even though he'd been sent to a very expensive private prep school some custards refuses to be moulded into proper elite shape no matter how much Latin he is fed this cartoon parodies moulds worth much lessons and his grappling with one of the trickiest parts of Latin grammar there is the gerund now those of you who have spent their years up to this point blissfully free of the gerund A count yourself lucky B it is what we call if you will know what it is it is what we would call a verbal noun often in English marked by the word in singing walking etc and it's a slight more complicated in Latin now this cartoon features the author of the most famous Latin grammar in the UK at the time and still in print Kennedy's Latin primer first published in the late 19th century and this guy here is Kennedy yes seen in the guise of an imperial Explorer or exploiter who has trapped down this Porter sorry she's important in this story he's tracked down this poor little verbal noun here the gerund and is taking it back in captivity to his grammatical zoo in the UK now whatever they kids aged 10 or so who read this in the 50s it's pointing pretty clearly and memorably at the links between imperial expansion here seem as exploration and the teaching and the learning of in this case the Latin language is pointing to the connection between Empire and classics now let's get the lady on because I should say that just in there's not enough women in this talk so we're going to have one Christopher Strait has proved that although Benjamin Hall Kennedy's name appears on the title page of Kennedy's Latin primer and I just called him the author just now this grammar book this most famous of all gråvik's and in the British Isles was actually ghost written by his daughter's Marian and Julia and here's Marian that you see we know very little much more about this and it's another story but we can't mention Kennedy without mentioning the truth so it's absolutely clear that there are really important connections between imperialism an ancient to modern between British Imperial exploitation and them seeing links with Roman exploitation but I think any two common caricature that somehow imagines the British sort of simply symbolically or literally reclosing their imperial ambitions in togas and testudo neighs and things well back home battalions of classical scholars were hard at work kind of underwriting that Mirage that is oversimplifying a picture of what's going on as the picture of Kennedy and the gerund was it puts a very crude image of the Roman Empire center stage and even more fundamentally it ignores the debates and disagreements about the Roman Empire and the modern Empire that were raging in the late 19th century if you look more carefully at this apparent linkage between the British and the Romans you will find that it always proved impossible however much they might have wanted to quite align Britain and Rome and the issue one of the big issues in the 19th century was not the display of Rome as the ancestor of modern imperialism it was how to wrestle with the fact that you couldn't quite make it the ancestor of British imperialism now this is one of my key witnesses to that and it's perhaps the most vivid symbol of the lack of fit between ancient and modern empires it's the early 20th century statue of Buddha koror Boadicea the rebel against the Romans in the first century AD the reign of Nero in the sixties that still stands on the Thames embankment outside the houses of parliament Boadicea was the British queen who rose up against the Romans when they reneged on in green on agreements that they made with her husband after her husband's death he had been basically a Roman collaborator there was a brief bit of warfare described by Roman writers in highly colored tones Boadicea is supposed to have won some very nasty victories quite how nasty we don't really know because we've only got the Roman accounts and inevitably it ended in the suppression of the rebellion the abuse and death of Boudicca and her daughters now strikingly this vast bronze of a British rebel against Rome is perhaps the most aggressive monument to British imperialism in London I mean or at least it runs Nelson's column pretty close second I think and it's really aggressive partly because of the words described on its plinth which basically say don't worry Boudicca your descendants will conquer and rule more territory than the Romans ever did and you see it in the poets exact words here regions Caesar never knew thy posterity shall sway now that points to two things that disrupt any simple equivalence between oh I'm putting this inverted commas our Empire and the Romans first there's a real awkwardness in looking at the history of Roman Britain there is a real awkwardness about wandering in the late 19th and early 20th century whose side the observer or the reader is supposed to be on are we on the Roman side or are we on the British side was Boudicca a rebel against the legitimate authority of Rome or was she a valiant freedom fighter like calgis and it goes a long way beyond Boadicea some of the most jingoistic literature of the 19th century turns out to be much more ambivalent about Roman imperialism especially in Britain than you'd expect I'm thinking here of the among other things the children's books of G a Henty with their earthly giveaway titles like the dash for cartoon or by right of conquest with Cortez in Mexico there's no doubt we are not on the Sudanese side in the dash for Khartoum and we're not in the Mexican side in with Cortez in Mexico his novel set in Britain as the title beric the Britain and it takes an unexpected line because it deploys the innovating effect of Roman rule on the native population whose True Grit British True Grit is not restored until the Normans came along in 1066 so the hemti who you might have expected given you know what else he writes to have been very Pro Rome yeah the Henty the ancestors of British imperialist power are really the Norman French they're not the Romans at all but second causing problems there was a really worrying for many commentators in convenient geographical and geopolitical disjunction between these empires as the poem on the plinth shows those regions Caesar never knew or what the British are going to rule now interestingly before the dismemberment to the autumn Empire the only territories that were in both the British and the Roman Empire or Britain itself Cyprus and Gibraltar and as one early twentieth century historian was forced to conclude when he tried to compare what he called greater britain and greater rome echoing this poem I think he said the whole of the British Empire is in parts of the world which Rome never knew and which never knew Rome which was to say that the triumph of Britain for him was not the continuation of the Roman Empire but an up turning of that world order by what had been the most marginal province in the whole empire Rome's Afghanistan now you get a sideways glimpse of that in one of the most popular and indeed cliched Victorian images of all an etching by Gustave doré a of 1872 which illustrates a bomb oh by thomas babington macaulay who in a prophecy skippy on it like in a prophecy about the future of london what would happen when london had collapsed in centuries to come referred to some traveler from new zealand there he is in the vast and the midst of a vast solitude taking his stand on the broken arch of london bridge just there in order to sketch the ruins of some paul's it's exactly what you see it was a real real victorian cliche punch was only one of the many magazines to satirize a whole new zealand idea saying that this bloody awful sketcher should be retired because he was blocking the transport on London Bridge in it feeble joke but a check but what's the classical connection here well partly as I suggested there's a back reference here to skip you ping at the destruction of Carthage you know well rome was going to be destroyed London will be destroyed and it plays with the idea of the young British grand tourist who now sketches the ruins of ancient Rome here being replaced in a different Imperial context but I think also it points to the disjunction and the different territorial context of these two empires it's not by chance that this is a New Zealander from the other side of the world what we're seeing then are the symbolic problems never mind those colonial administrators in their togas of trying to constrict the Romans choose the British cause but the dispute went further than that I just referred to Jowett Benjamin Jowett who was the spokesperson for the centrality of classicists in public and imperial administration and for the knowledge of Latin and Greek and ancient Greece and ancient Rome being correlated with a capacity for imperial government now it's particular concern was entry to the British government of India known as the Indian Civil Service the popular joke at the time was it was neither Indian nor civil nor a service and it's now often assumed that jao its ponderings about the links between classics and Empire were typical that he was expressing a loud official ideology of the legitimating power of antiquity in Imperial exploitation but we need to be a bit careful jarett's was certainly one view and he was an influential voice among those who wanted to put Oxford first and actually offered at the center of the global Empire but do you think it's worth remembering that when people shout as loud as Joe it did it's usually because not everyone agrees with them not because they're stating the bleedin obvious and what is clear here is in the 19th century there was a big debate going on some people fell very strongly that Java was wrong and in fact the terms and conditions for doing the Indian civil service exams became something of a battleground because they were repeatedly changed sometimes to make it easy for Oxford classicists you do other times to exclude them from the competition by putting different age ranges so you behind all this there is a debate about how far Rome helps you but there's more to it than that this is where I'm coming to the end the classics was in the 19th century conscripted into both sides of the debate the irony is at the same time as Jaret was trying to recruit his Oxford classicists to serve the Empire CP Scott you see here also in Oxford classicist who went on to be editor of the Manchester Guardian which was the most powerful anti imperial paper in the country Scott was trying to Hoover up the same classicists to come and work on the Manchester Guardian to denounce Empire alright and he won't chinos classicists because they read their Tacitus and they knew all about making a desert and calling it peace and that's what he wanted in the paper now my point here is not to deny the legitimating force of classics in British Imperial discourse or in other Western empires my point is to underline that the influence of classics was always a matter of debate it was disputed argued over and denied and for me and it is leading to what I'm going to say in my last lecture and perhaps it's an even bigger point to which reflects I think quite directly on the themes of these lectures the classical world in us we have all of us a terrible tendency to want classics and the classical tradition to be pretty mono valent to mean just one thing and to support a single position usually a reactionary one but actually the real contribution and the classical tradition is to provide us with some of the tools with which we can argue about this classics was neither for or against Empire but it influence was debated and contested and that is a lesson the even professional classicists need to learn but I'm going to finish with just one final example which rather turns the tables and some things I've said 15 minutes ago I quoted a bit of an article by Collingwood Bruce arguing how important the lessons of the Roman Empire should have been for the conduct of the Crimean War the article is entitled the practical advantages accruing from the study of archaeology and it is been hailed as a prize specimen of Imperial archaeology it's one book recently summed it up Collingwood Bruce was making an explicit argument for the direct significance of Roman military planning in the organisation of the British Army now when I read that quote out I noticed some of you smiled and you were absolutely spot on the fact is Collingwood Bruce's article is a joke it is all very well to extract that little passage about roads about Agricola and the road from balaclava to the camp but if you read the rest of it and I come to the reluctant conclusion that most people who talk about this article have not read the rest of it it becomes boring Dingley obvious that it's a send-up Collingwood Bruce let me tell you what happens in the rest Collingwood Bruce also recommended underfloor heating Roman underfloor heating for use in the Crimea he claimed that Roman Malta would have been much better in the construction of Durham Jail and he observed that Roman kitchen equipment was infinitely superior to the modern he particularly praised a gravy strainer from Pompeii in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland Romans didn't have gravy and that is one indication that this is a joke right yeah he told a cock-and-bull story about how the Dukes master cook was shown the gravy strainer and quotes pronounced it better than any he had the peculiarity of it consisted rim being turned slightly inwards so that it can be slightly shaken over the joint without the risk of any unstrained gravy coming over the edge now nobody could have read this and said that this was an example of Roman Imperial archaeology unless they had no sense of humor whatsoever to be sure joking comparisons between Rome and Rome Roman Empire and Cretan practices they're still comparisons and they're obviously the whole article is obviously reacting to something but I think the Dukes gravy strainer is a great reminder of how careful we have to be when we confront the legacy of Rome in our own culture sometimes we all the people are writing about it or actually having a laugh right thanks so thank you very much Mary that was excellent as always and I learned some new words helena philia Alexander the not-so-great and and the fact that we're now in the northern part of Rome's Afghanistan so that was great and those of you that that are leaving before the questions that you're welcome to do so just to fill that gap the the fifth and final sorry yes the sixth and final lecture of the series will be on Thursday evening at the same time in the same place at 5:30 p.m. entitled classical civilization with a question mark with a question mark question mark yes I'll get ridiculed who doesn't have a question all right okay that question was very important and we are holding an online discussion throughout the fortnight of the series and this is on our Gifford lectures blog led by Andrew Johnson of New College so to follow and contribute to that discussion please visit the dressers at the back of the leaflet and also on the gifford lecture web pages so with that and a good number of people left to answer you ask you some questions Mary I'm going to open it up for questions we've got about we're supposed to have about 15 minutes but little bit behind schedule but we'll try and make it as 15 minutes if we can there is a roving microphone so if you'd like to ask a question please try and attract my attention and then wait for the microphone to arrive right at the very back I really enjoyed your lecture and learned a great deal about ancient Rome and its methodology of acquiring an empire if you were unwise enough to try to build a new empire now would we come to you for lessons on how to do it we have recent examples of the British building their empire and there's no doubt that some of us might think that that's what Israel is doing at the moment so my question is you're a classicist do you think your fellow historian at least not a classicists William Papas idea on settler colonialism is that a new idea or did the Romans practice settler color there was a lot more space in the ancient Roman Empire which i think is absolutely key here that there is no land hunger and nobody wants to particularly go anywhere so what what you find is all kinds of what they would have called colonist veteran usually Forex soldiers but not always colonists all across the Empire who fulfilled you know the role of being little mini Rome's in whether it's on the borders of the Sahara or you know in southern Britain but there is no no let me I would we do not know of course the reaction of the locals next to whom these colonies were set off because we do not have their voices however broadly speaking what we can see is a really Britain is not actually squashed you know it's not squashed full but I think you know what I would say you know in terms of lessons you know I don't think it's about stopping the colonists if you think about some of the things that I was saying at the beginning you know I don't usually like the idea there being lessons from any bit of Rome I think is normally their judging and a bit silly but one of the things that Rome provides some kind of model for isn't in cooperative rather than an inclusive Empire and so you get to the second century AD and you discover that you have Emperor's who come from Spain example and later on in the century and pres you come from North Africa so for me the model of the Roman Empire I don't want to make it sounds as if it's a kind of very liberal one it's still the nasty brutal jealous title Empire run by maniacs but they're maniacs who decide whatever reason and we don't understand this the extending the privileges of being the ruling rather than keeping people out is the best way to go why the hell they built Hadrian's Wall we don't know but it cannot possibly have been to keep the Scots out I mean the Caledonians up unless the Caledonians were really stupid hi there and thank you very much for your lecture again um just to quickly follow on one point the last speaker said I think we should also remember that many Israelis were returning from their homeland that they were kicked out off by the Romans 2,000 years before so it's a lot more nuanced than that but my question is as you mentioned there is a huge debate in the in the 19th century around what rule classics should play and classist issue play in a influencing our Empire of the time and do you think perhaps if there was more engineers and more scientists that had been involved in that debate that perhaps at the Indian Civil Service may have been it may have been more may been more useful to the Indian Civil Service and what role did classicists play now in our own society since were we in terms of influencing government and policy I suspect it's a bit hard to track this I suspect that those who were very opposed to Jarrett who somehow thought that all of the world should be run by Oxford it's really what he thought and he was pretty much in league with Gladstone in that thought it was not you know it was it wasn't you know they were a small very vociferous group but they were not some they were he wasn't the only one I suspect very strongly that there is a that it's in that the enemy Forge Alice if people precisely like what what you say but that there are a kind of practical things that are required and this is of course is the time that I and I can't speak for Scottish universities are usually better than British than English ones in this respect but in Oxford Cambridge in London at the time it is of course the moment when University syllabus isn't curricula being vastly expanded you know to things like agricultural science and things like this I think Joe it would probably benefit feeds in a degree in agricultural science so I think what you what you're seeing if you put this in a different context not an imperial context but you're seeing it in terms of a question about higher education what is taught to people with what we would call tertiary education and how that relates to Britain's role overseas and they I imagine are trying to Jarrett's opponents are trying to to Hoover up people who have what they would think of as practical knowledge there's a lot of debate about what in Cambridge em was called oriental studies because the oriental people in Oriental Studies who were feeling a bit of the backlash from gelatin Oxford so their job wasn't to teach Indian civil servants you know they you know they they like Sanskrit love poetry you know and the idea that they were kind of teaching it's supposed to be teaching they hadn't maidens of empire was not what they want to know I think it's very easy to kind of somehow see is totally antediluvian idea that you know you only have to have read about Skippy Oh conquering carthage and you can go and you know you'll be great on the northern frontier i think that was a you know a really minor element actually a bit of a parity yeah victorian age we kind of know we're terribly used to kind of thinking it's all like joe it not all frightfully stuffy you know it's busy inventing almost everything that we know like you know university syllabuses university terms transport trains time so they're not dim it's somebody at the but I can't see cuz of their life yes in the middle there yes things yeah hi thanks very much for your lecture so you mentioned at one point that the key to Roman imperialism was this policy of conscripted cities or people's that the Romans had encountered rather than sort of destroying and pillaging and I was just curious you know do we know whether this was radically different from how other city-states behaved in their sort of military relationship and was there a turning point or was this distinctive of Roman imperialism from the beginning was there some Emperor who said you know I have this great idea let's let's do this what's interesting is that it's you know it's not that nobody else in the ancient world made a treaty with somebody they with demands for military service after conquest what's interesting about Rome is it's absolutely embedded as far as we can see from the very beginning of knowledge of 5th and 4th century BC Rome is pretty hazy but it looks like and how it happened we don't know it looks like that their model of conquest is very quickly not hit-and-run which is basically what other archaic militaristic models are but it is forming a relationship of some long-term nature almost always apparently requiring military service now sometimes that is the incorporation into Roman citizenship sometimes its alliances at a different level what we have no clue about is what the you know impetus to that is you know we again you know you go back and it's back to a load of Romans in togas sitting around and somebody say do you know I've got a brilliant idea you know let's let's not just take the animals let's let's make them serve in our armies you know whatever we have no idea but it's you I can never remember the figures John will remember the figures much better than me but you get to a point that by by the Hana ballot wall you know the Romans are nearly knocked out but they just got always more people there's always more that they can put in and that does seem to me the bottom line of their success but this is all happening in you know the 5th and 4th centuries BC about which we know so little but you can see that that's the pattern maybe time for one more yes I would take two more and then we'll be but maybe you can't make your questions relatively quickly so on the end on the end there first please hi there and I was very taken with your rebranding of great generals into genocidal maniacs and and I was wondering whether that rebranding exercise and is an attempt to rebrand our current batch of genocidal maniacs certainly asks us to reflect a little more pointedly on our own military activity let me put it that way you know I think yeah really quick one since we apparently cannot rely on the positive example of the Roman Empire are we then safer with the anti imperialist parallel that focuses on ROMs decline I think it's I think it's very interesting and I think that it gives you much more food for thought I think the issue is symbiotic and then I think that there's a bit like what I was saying about slavery yesterday that these exploitative cultures breed within them the critiques of their own exploitation and they're often more interesting I mean critiques then sadly you know what the poor victims have to say because they're bred from because they know there were no more sharp analysts of well that's a minute there's a beautiful example but white South Africans knew exactly what was going on in apartheid South Africa and they often produce much as we load them some of the shoppers critiques of it and I think that's the same for you know Tacitus hazardous was not a peace-loving guy you know none of these guys I didn't sit at home saying oh I really would rather not fight you know he was probably in his time as jingoistic as the rest of them but he saw what the logic of it was because he knew what their not drink of it was and I think that's I've often wanted to do series of radio programs so now I can tell you maybe someone will be listening but it would be called on the wrong side of history and it'd be listening to the analysis that was on the that was offered by those people who we dismiss because you know they're Roman imperialists or they were anti women's suffrage or whatever and he actually say what do we learn from listening to the guys and they're most they are guys who who were brought up but could reflect on this and I think that's what Tacitus to some extent solaced offers you when it's a corrective and I'm sure that's what when Dora was drawing New Zealand you know he knew exactly that he was fitting in to a tradition which we imperialist one thing we know is it can't last that's what we met so you heard it here the next radio series will be on the wrong side of history so please join me in thanking professor Mary Beard

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

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Rating: 4.8029556 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, Lucretia, Lucretia and the politics of sexual violence

Id: hIcmI7XmosE

Length: 76min 7sec (4567 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019