Prof Dame Mary Beard - Whiteness

I'd like to welcome you all to this Gifford lecture my name is Joe Shaw I'm a member of the Gifford lectureship committee and I'm delighted to welcome our distinguished speaker professor Mary beard who is professor at the University of Cambridge and a 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 tonight we're going to hear her the second of her six lectures and it's entitled whiteness the lecture and questions this evening are being recorded and the video will shortly be made available online I believe that yesterday's is already online just to give you a an idea of our efficiency on the university's Gifford lectures web pages I now have great pleasure in handing over to Professor Mary Beard is that on, yes right let's I want to start today's lecture from an animated cartoon that was produced by the BBC in 2014 for children at Key Stage two of the English curriculum that's from ages 7 to 11 now for the first three years of its life this cartoon went entirely unnoticed except no doubt by children and their teachers but in 2017 it somehow came to the attention heaven knows how of a far-right journalist and conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson who took one look at it and tweeted I mean who cares about historical accuracy he was objecting to the portrayal of a high-ranking Roman official in Britain as not white, now the truth is the cartoon wasn't perfect the whole animation was not perfect those of you who were here yesterday might like to know that the depiction of gladiatorial combat was a bit cliched to say the least and the caption that was originally underneath this to say that it was a typical family in Roman Britain was soon wisely removed we have no idea what a typical family in Roman Britain was but I think it's extremely unlikely that mixed-race marriages were typical and anyway the story that this is that it's built around this suggests that this is the governor of Roman Britain and his family so not typical at all that's it a BBC not perfect but that said a number of us did reply to mr. Watson to say that this was a perfectly reasonable representation and not surprising in the context of the diversity of Roman Britain and in fact this figure here looks to me as if he was based on the figure of Quintus Lollius Urbicus who was a little-known governor of the province in the first half of the second century AD now Urbicus is one of those rare people that we can actually track across the Roman world there's no statue of him surviving he barely makes it into any Roman history writing the single one-liner about his victories in Britain but we have several written traces of him not so very far from here one of those is the now very idyllic Roman fort of High Rochester just south of the border I suspect it wasn't half as a Dilek as this 2,000 years ago and the trace is an inscription recording the erection of some kind of building during his governorship of Roman Britain you've got a photograph here a drawing and a translation I've blocked out his name that's not so very unusual but what's really striking is that two and a half thousand kilometers away in modern Algeria we have another inscription commemorating Quintus Lollius Urbicus at what was his tiny hometown of tiddis and it explains that he had served in not just Britain but Germany Judea and what we would now call Turkey and just near the town of tiddis there is his clearly labeled family tomb still standing in open country so that's to say Urbicus came from Algeria and when he was serving in Britain he was a very very long way from home now that tells us nothing about the color of his skin he could have been Italian by origin from a Sackler family in Algeria he could well have been Berber and this tomb is is a traditional Berber design of tomb but he could also have had some sub-saharan ancestry there was considerable contacts between North Africa and sub-saharan Africa partly because of the Roman slave trade so we hadn't no idea his name doesn't give it away but what we can say is that that is quite possible as an image of Quintus lowliest urbis no unsurprisingly perhaps none of that factual argument convinced those who were absolutely convinced that the BBC was here black washing history as they put it and they kept up a Twitter and video campaign against me and others the days if not weeks one of the more prominent of these guys and actually a an American academic said more or less that the arguments I was making about Lollius Urbicus' and this image of the Roman family were living proof that scholarship in the United Kingdom was dead right and another guy who clearly had too much time on his hands devoted himself to what he thought was very funny images on with a bit of kind of photoshopping yeah you had to admire the ingenuity I have to say it's a wonderful one I couldn't find you know the life of Henry the eighth's and you can imagine what color Henry the eighth's was right and I expect you can also guess that there was quite a lot worse than these than what I'm now showing you and will spare you now I don't really want to go back to this tonight and I don't want to make this lecture a kind of revenge grudge match against these silly idiots but I hope they watch mr. Johnson but I'm starting from here in order to give a sense of just how edgy just how incendiary the theme that I've chosen for today can be or to put it more positively just how much it still matters to people and that theme as the title of the lecture has it is whiteness all better perhaps the question what color or colors we see the classical world in now I should obviously be touching on themes of race and ethnicity but it's partly in order to avoid getting horribly stuck in the enormously complicated debates around those terms and around the construction of racial difference in the 18th and 19th centuries around the contested definition of ethnicity and around the contested origins of classical culture that Martin Bernal's book black Athena prompted 40 years ago now though in my last lecture to come back to that it's in order really to slightly sidestep all those very complicated debates I've taken a rather more plain speak approach at its very simplest what I'm trying to say is basically well we shut our eyes and try to conjure up a Greek or a Roman what do we see you might like just to imagine you're shutting your eyes and just do it because I will tell you what I think you see in a minute it's partly I've chosen whiteness also in order to kind of move the debate beyond just the color of the skin I want to think about ancient statues white and colored I wonder thing about architecture even togas as well as also the terms in which the Greeks and Romans themselves described the colors around them and why that makes a difference to how we understand the ancient world I shall at the very end come back very briefly to modern ethnicity when I spend a few minutes wondering about the relative non diversity among those who now teach and study classics what should we do I want to ask about classics being as it is such a predominantly white subject so I'm wanting to move away from a narrow focus on race and I've got rather a lot to do and I've chosen a slightly idiosyncratic route around this subject so I hope it works well as last night I'm kind of standing like you awkwardly I think on the shifting boundary between us and then between the ancient world and the modern world and I'm trying to look both ways but this evening there are going to be much more direct issues of modern politics in play issues that center around the question of who gets to see themselves reflected in the ancient world how and why is it that the alt right or the far right or whatever you want to call them how is it that they've come to see the classical world as a mirror of themselves of their own worldview and very often of they're paraded whiteness and what is at stake for the rest of us when they can script the classical world into their own political project and I should say I do mean far right here I'm not talking about Jacob Riis MOG I'm talking about something not further to write at something which is not not really conservative but basically white supremacists know also I don't want to tar too many people with this brush I've got no unfortunate metaphor right I've got no doubt but among those who objected to the BBC and they were very many were people who were genuinely surprised by that representation of people in Roman Britain who were taken off God hadn't really thought or known about about the diversity of Roman Britain and those who thought in the terrible cliche it was all PC gone Matt I'm sure there were some of those and I think when the BBC still had the caption typical on it some of them were right to object but there was within that a nucleus of real hard liners whose racist comments about that cartoon I mean remember it's a kids school cartoon by Roman Britain who's racist comments I could not I think appropriately and possibly legally read out to you so how do we face this now I have to say I feel something of a moral dilemma here which is partly why I chose to talk about this subject and I hope it goes without saying that I deplore the weaponizing of the ancient world in the course of white supremacy which is basically what some of this case and I feel as uncomfortable as I'm sure very very many people do when I read yesterday's team when I read that Steve Bannon is opening what she calls a gladiator school outside Rome to teach right-wing politicians how to fight for judeo-christian values by which he means white judeo-christian values I mean it's straight out of Seneca you know the idea of the gladiator as the symbol of the fight for the right right in every sense of the word you know none of this makes me feel happy but I think there's also a fundamental principle that no one owns the classics and if professional classicists want as I do for the subject to continue to be part of widespread public debate and public interest that can't be on the condition that it can only be used for causes of which we approve you can't say enjoy my subject but only on the terms I lay down it should be honest I feel actually that there's rather too much hand wringing in the classical profession about the way these groups these far-right groups misuse as they would say the classics and I think that hand wringing gets us nowhere and it reeks likely of kind of professional exclusivity I think that the only way to face this stuff is with the facts on which here and elsewhere happily the alt-right and their friends are largely wrong I think you can beat them on facts you don't have to beat them on certif taking the subject away from us no I said a few moments ago but one question was and I think it's it's a simple question but it gets to the heart of it really it's what do we see when we shut our eyes and we think of an ancient Greek or Roman know that how many of you've done that mental experiment but I can be fairly sure that for most of us certainly for me the answer is something like this right now this pair are of course familiar to some they are Mattila and kike Elias who are the stars of the first book of the excellent Cambridge Latin course which now guides most learners in the UK through their beginning steps in Latin they are much loved they're much replicated even on tote bags Kye Kelley assessed in Auto it is guaranteed to be recognizable by anybody who's done this book and they're much parodied and if you want I didn't put any of this you can find some rather rude parodies if you put calculus into google images Waikele assessed in part Ilias estimate hello right everybody who knows Latin laughs at that one yeah but for all this and for all the fun the familiarity all the time they're all white and if they're male they're all white toga clad right the Cambridge Latin calls did not invent that vision the classical world obviously it's only picking up on a long history from the Renaissance on of representing the inhabitants of the ancient world of thinking about them as if they were just like us when us is Western white Europeans whether that's Botticelli his early Roman heroes who were going to be looking at on Thursday or Lord Layton's sultry Greek girls picking up pebbles on the beach you know you can go through the whole history of Western art and you can find thousands of Greeks and Romans looking much like us in inverted commas one of the consequences I think and I think there's a route to this but one of the consequences of elite Western culture for let's say half a millennium seeing itself in the tradition of the classical Greeks and Romans has been that it is also projected its own image of itself back onto the Greeks and Romans and as the Cambridge Latin course shows we're still learning to see the Romans in that way but more than that as the kerfuffle over the cartoon shows that projection of our own image back into antiquity then by a kind of entirely circular process appears to give that particular image of western whiteness an unbroken history going back more than 2,000 years but it another way when the poet Shelley fameless' famously said we are all Greeks the other side of that coin was all Greeks are us right and that now plays very much into the hands of the far right but beyond that Niraj that we are the Greeks the Greeks are us we we Western white Europeans look like this like the Romans and Greeks looked beyond that Niraj the fact is that even in Roman Britain and I say even because Britain was the most backward and unjoined up province of us otherwise strikingly joined our Empire you know Britain was the pits let's face it yes hope is not going to go that way again even in Britain the people you would have seen around you didn't look universally like this right there was almost every stage skin colour here from black and brown to pink and white and Quinta slowly as urbis is not the only resident from very far away one of my favourite tombstones from the whole of the province is this one now in the South Shields Museum found nearby put up by a Syrian man from Palmyra his name was Bharat ease to his British wife by the name of Regina which I suppose we would say Queenie right this is bharata's and Queenie and she as the tombstone tells us was from the Catalonian tribe which is around sand albans she's I would love to make her an Essex girl but she's not quite an Essex girl but very nearly so you've got Sir Ian man with his British sort almost Essex girl wife now we know no more about this couple than what we see here though there is a fragmentary tombstone at Corbridge which may be bharata system it's plausible enough that he was here we don't know why but it's plausible enough that he was here in some kind of trading capacity though when people say he was here in a trading capacity usually means they've got no other reason they got no other kind of explanation of why's here and she does seem to beam as the inscription says she was originally his slave and then his wife and the memorial itself is enough to give us a glimpse of at least cultural mix because it is largely written in Latin but there's an Aramaic inscription underneath let's see here Latin and his put or he's had it inscribed in Aramaic saying Queeny farewell underneath was always puzzled about who the hell they found in South Shields who could inscribe Aramaic but they did write sorry to anybody from Sophia and there's plenty more evidence from Roman Britain a pointing the same direction I don't want to pile example after example to kind of build up this culturally diverse picture but I'm thinking among other things of an account in the biography of septimus severus the emperor of an encounter with an Ethiopian does a black soldier when he was inspecting the Army on her dream this wall and I'm thinking to of increasing amounts a bio archaeological data the point in the same direction I'm going to tell you this but you get a promise that you're not going to ask me questions about it afterwards because I'm telling you what you know I know and I can give you a reading list but I'm not an expert in bio archaeology but it's one of the most productive new scientific methods which I think it's actually stunning really in its simplicity even for us who are not scientists is the analysis of oxygen isotope traces in the tooth enamel of human remains it is based on the principle and it would be true of ours as much as it is of these people 2,000 years ago it's based on the principle the adult teeth still contain the traces of the oxygen isotopes of the water that you drank when your adult teeth were forming in your jaw and that varies dramatically with climate an environment and what you get from that relatively conclusive and relatively simple test is clear evidence of people here who grow up a long way away there's a Roman cemetery for example at Winchester were 40 skeletons the teeth of 40 skeletons have been tested in that way five of them had oxygen isotopes making it hallee certain that they grew up in North Africa and that's not untypical the analysis also skull formation confirms that picture although it's much more rough-and-ready much more impressionistic in its approach this skull of a woman found near Eastbourne strongly suggests from the shape of the skull and the eyebrow ridges but she had sub-saharan Africa African ancestry but the tooth analysis makes it pretty clear that she grew up in southern Britain so you can see somebody who's got ancestors from a long way away but almost certainly grew up here no out of that and you know we could spend half an hour multiplying those examples there are all kinds of loose ends the fact for example that somebody grew up in North Africa there's not a thing definite about the color of his or her skin and the evidence striking as it is from these cemeteries is overwhelmingly urban or military and because you don't get cemeteries which reflect the you don't get cemeteries for the poor old peasants in the countryside who made up the majority probably the British population and in case you're wondering DNA analysis doesn't help us that's to say the DNA analysis is very hard to sequence DNA from these ancient skeletons but the DNA analysis of the more an indigenous British population shows very little trace of anything that looks African or of anything that looks mediterranean or of anything that looks Norman French or of anything that looks Viking and there is some puzzles about why that's the case but it doesn't help for this problem but the overall consensus now amongst Roman historians and archaeologists that what you would have seen if you looked round the population of the urban or military areas of Roman Britain would not just be calculus on Mattila how many people were talking about it's impossible to say but the myth of a white Roman Britain is exactly that it's a myth and if it's true for Roman Britain it's even more true for the rest of the Roman Empire a vast area stretching from Syria to Spain Scotland to this a horror without any internal boundaries clearly documented trading links army mobility roads and sometimes the mass movement of populations in the enslavement that followed conquest it's also lots of loose ends it's also very hard to tell how this diversity was experienced and in some ways that's a more interesting question than whether it exists it or not when I look at Barratt eases memorial for Regina the thing that I can't help wondering so this is going to be Sun sound again is if I'm being rude about South Shields I can't help wondering what kind of couple they made in Downton Roman South Shields we have no idea of what the colour of Bharat is his skin all we know is that he says he came from Palmyra which doesn't tell you very much we don't know what clothes he adopted what his hairstyle was but you can't help wondering how noticeable this couple were did they stick Oh No did people remark on them you know were there the kind of uh you know Roman equivalents of you know no Syrians here or were they just part of the environment the mixed environment that you sort of expect no you wonder that when you look at this certainly could find someone who could inscribe his Aramaic so there may have been quite a few more but we have no evidence we have no evidence even to begin to answer that question at least as far as South Shields is concerned but if you look to the evidence from nearer to the center of the Empire there is more that you can say Roman writers were often horribly prejudiced against outsiders they ridiculed that character but cowardice the weirdness the inferiority of anybody who wasn't like them and as you'd expect Greek and Roman intellectuals speculated on wide inhabitants of different parts of the world looks different it's a reasonable topic of speculation and they often came up with all kinds of different versions of environmental determinism 3 explain why Greeks and Romans always came out on top as against those who lived where it was too hot too wet too cold or whatever what they said about the people of Roman Britain doesn't bear repeating so they're not a kind of nice easygoing liberal multicultural lot to say the least but so far as we can tell skin color was not a major and certainly not the key co-ordinate of their prejudices this figure here's a figure from a mosaic the entry to the hot room in a set of private baths in Pompeii and very likely he's a figure at the very least of thought but it isn't the racist image that we might read it as with the kind of connection I think it suggests to us between race servitude and sexuality this presumably he's meant to be I think the slave attendant of the bathing suite I wouldn't deny those connections entirely but in Roman terms the point is probably different the black skin here may well be playing on the idea of the heat of the room because black skin was often explained you know why do some people where it's hot have black skin well it's because of the burning effect of the Sun that's why skin gets black and that in fact is what ethiop's or Ethiopian means it means back faced and here I suspect we've got a little joke about you're just going to go into a very hot place and say you've got an Ethiopian and his rather large penis is probably again in part at least sort of hint about the sexually slightly erratically charged atmosphere a bathing rather than necessarily pointing in the way that we might think at him and certainly if you say what a Roman think Roman think of a sway well there were certainly African slaves and they were elite Africans too but I think the Romans thought of a slave probably he thought of some shaggy ginger hair German as much as anything else right and so if you're wanting if you are setting out to find legitimation in the ancient world for racist ideology you've chosen a rather bad place to do it but as I said it isn't just a matter of the skin colour of the human population the beginning of the lecture the imagined why yes of the ancient world is a much wider phenomenon and particularly prominent in that whiteness all the hordes of greco-roman marble statues that line museum shelves and in many ways have come to symbolize for us classical culture and at one step remove I think in symbolizing classical culture once that removed to legitimate that why image of the human beings that populated the classical world everything in the classical world looks white if you go to museum or almost everything and you might want to add our cinematic vision to that every ancient Roman city scape in all the great movies is also gleaming white marble piled on gleaming white marble though they've allowed a red column and it's probably no surprise to that this kind of whiteness with the connotations of aesthetic and out one remove racial purity has also come to act as the poster boy of some far-right organizations and one of the clearest cases here is a neo-nazi party in the United States which until a few weeks ago was known as identity Europa or identity ever OPA not quite clear which but has partly in the face of happily very much falling membership rebranded itself as the American identity movement I'm going to show you it's older posters because they've got a whole series of PR posters which a feature scrubbed white classical or classicizing sculpture will not protect your heritage or future belong to us that's become great again you can see the origins of these slogans and the logic is pretty obvious the white purity of the classical tradition whether it's the Apollo Belvedere II as you see here Michelangelo's David on the right that kind of underpins the logic of their white political position is actually logic taken up by their opponents who ran parodic poster campaigns against them which to start with I didn't realize what parodies make angry old men white men great again what's quite nice one oh I get it now they're educated bigots now in this case it seems even easier to knock on the head the misunderstanding of ancient culture which underlies this because it is established beyond reasonable doubt beyond doubt really that much ancient sculpture was not white at all that it was brightly colored or polychromatic as the academic jargon has it for a start there were thousands upon thousands of bronze statues which never looked white most of these have disappeared because they've been melted down into some medieval set of munitions probably there were also gold and silver statues melted down for all the different purposes there were marbles marble statues in all kinds of different colors I always want to throw this black Imperial lady who's probably Nero's mother Agri Pina in the face of white supremacists Agri Pina was not so far as we know black but she is here represented in black stone and in a black stone that was infinitely more costly and precious to work than relatively soft why marble so you've certainly got no fit here between the blackness of the stone and the blackness of her skin but the point is and this has been made a lot of recently the point is that even what now looks like that kind of pure white marble we have come to expect that originally was brightly colored or much of it was we know from the traces of paint that you can still see on some sculpture like here is the original red and this is how she's been reconstructed slightly more garishly sometimes you see it very clearly actually still on the stone but more often it is only visible by microscopic analysis the color that is still surviving you cannot see with the naked eye but can be reconstructed like this Archer and actually we know they were painted because some ancient writers tell us that sculpture was painted and here's a rather nice vars in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and here's the painter he's actually at work painting the statue now this is both a simple and at the same time a controversial story and it's so controversial that one of my colleagues in the state Sarah bond was threatened with death on line after she'd explained clearly and plainly and without any unemotionally in a popular article that the painting of white ancient sculpture was normal but however we've ended up with a lineup of one classical white statue after another in our museums and I'll be coming to that later much of the blame is natural wear and tear the ideological consequences of this whiteness that we are now confronted with is pretty clear the classical and the classicizing world now scenes a very white space and that is unpacked 'add fairly or not on the idea of the museum and on the idea of the classical museum as bolstering one particular version of political and racial history and here you can see it under attack and there also obviously further implications in this about what classics itself stands for no that is all true but I'd like to say at this point that the story is a little bit more complicated than how I've just described it and I think we need to nuance the picture a bit and not to throw the baby out with the bathwater first as a matter of archeological fact I do wonder quite how Universal the painting of ancient marble sculpture was I have no idea it was common but when you see something like this and you can just see that this marble is highly polished and it's been highly polished in antiquity this this is how it was dug up it hasn't been given a nice polish later it's a fourth century BC statue from Olympia it's hard to imagine that that statue was much painted if you're going to polish it you don't paint it I would say and the fact that Roman love poets regularly hail marble as white and then compare it to their girlfriends skin I think also should give us a little bit of a pause about quite how polychromatic marble often was always was now my own sense although it's a bit unfashionable to say is that the painting of marble statues was probably more common earlier in antiquity than later but I think there's quite a lot of ideologues in all sides of this story and there are polychromatic ideologues who want to tell you that all ancient sculpture was culled I don't think I believe that secondly I think we have to accept an uncomfortable truth but although we don't find ourselves on the same political side as the old right I think that most of us are probably on the aesthetic same side as the oldest right right now I can accept that this is how the famous primaporta Augustus once looked but you're jolly well not going to make me like it right for better or worse my training in Western culture has been too long and too effective for me to think that that looks nice I'm sorry and I know that I'm not the only one in his recent autobiographical poem tyv James the television critic cut rogue and poet stepped aside for a few verses to as it were as he said thank God that by and large the colour has disappeared from a classical sculpture and he praised the ghost white the white ghost flesh that misses him that beats the polychromatic crap out of the Disney Land that antiquity once was and more American archaeologists looked at this particular reconstruction and he said it may the Emperor Augustus look like a man in a frock trying to hail a right which I have to say I agree with right now I also have a kind of sneaking suspicion that those people those scientists particularly those who are looking through their microscopes they they do make these reconstructions partly to shock us they want us to say oh my goodness me is that how it really looks they say yes you know so they want to make them as DS nation Clive's words as broadly as they can and I think to some extent the people who make these you know paint the plaster reconstructions like this are partly saying - the whole tradition but we think we've internalized about the beauty of classical sculpture the thought that that was that this statue stood in the Emperor Augustus his widows villa really beats me but it did right but even more to the point is how we think this image of white marble that dominates our vision of classical sculpture how did we get it how does it originate it's clear enough to see the political consequences the cultural political consequences of seeing antiquity is white and purely aesthetic and white with a capital W and that's clear but what was the origin of it now there's a tendency I think now to see politics at work at the origin of this whiteness as well as in the consequence and one of the main culprits is almost always said to be JJ Benkelman who died in 1760 1768 the year this portrait was painted Winkelman was the so-called father of art history the first man systematically to analyze an attempt to date a wide body of classical culture but according to what is becoming the standard story he is the man more than anyone else who has foisted the admiration of the pure white marble onto his successors and why did he do that essentially the argument goes because he had a Eurocentric vision saw color as a marker of the primitive and identified the pinnacle of civilization just like Europa people in such works of art as the Apollo Belvedere II that you see on the screen know there is a small grain of truth in that in Cummins eighteenth-century work is very influential on how we see classical sculpture and I would challenge anybody to read vinkle man's eulogy of the Apollo Belvedere II without feeling a bit sick it's awful right but I think the idea that somehow Benkelman was you know the father really of the alt-right in this respect really is a kind of driven by a desire to make you know conspiracy out of a cock-up initial offers a historical chronology that doesn't add up for a start ever since it was rediscovered in the Renaissance this sculpture came out of the ground more or less white that is because in the ground almost all traces of paint had gone and such traces as there were didn't withstand the usual techniques of cleaning where I have to say admittedly the boundary between being dirty and being colored may have been a bit fussy and it really is a part for a few statues like one of the ones I just showed you it's only in the last few decades that scientific techniques have enabled us to detect traces of pigment that we can't see with the naked eye but to dub vinkle Minh a euro centrist in the modern sense is just silly right he was an eighteenth-century guy who'd never set foot out of Austria Germany and Italy what else could he be but you're eccentric right and he certainly wasn't the first to invest in the quality of the whiteness of the tradition of classical sculpture I mean you've only got to look at the work of Renaissance sculptures in the two centuries before Winkleman who did exactly that they were imitating the whiteness that they saw in classical art Michelangelo's David as you see here was never painted so it's this is going back further than the 18th century it's going back to probably to the 15th century at least although it's interesting that the implications of now the whiteness of David were enough to prompt a black David to be brought in to Florence in that in 2016 actually in memory of the victims of the nice bombings but you can see this this is not just in classical sculpture there's a bigger edginess here and anyway I think vinkle Minh would feel actually mildly pissed off to discover that he'd become enemy number one in the whiteness argument and actually he did realize that some ancient sculpture had been painted and indeed he devoted a whole chapter of his book to a painted ancient sculptor now he didn't particularly like the idea that's for sure and he too suspected it was probably early and not belonging to his high period of classical art and that was certainly one way of putting it down but he did not ignore the idea sculptures were painted nor did people in the 19th century like the painter alma-tadema ignore it when he's got a record here of what the path freeze must have looked like so actually although it's only in the last few decades that clever boffins have got their microscopes out and their lasers to reveal what these colors were ever since the 18th century people have known that this was the case and I think in some ways that no one actually comes out very well out of the whiteness versus colored sculpture debate or at least they don't come out with much subtlety leaving aside the driving ideology the alt-right are quite simply misrepresenting the tradition of ancient sculpture in asserting is universal whiteness they're not always wrong they're not wrong about David but basically they're wrong on the other hand many of those see quite rightly I think point to the apparent racial exclusivity which the faux whiteness of classical sculpture has recently underpinned there are very least I think guilty of oversimplifying the history of the whole tradition of painted sculpture in their search for goodies and baddies it has become a kind of act of some article of faith that is morally bad not to recognize the ancient sculpture was colored and in a sense both the white Brigade and the colored Brigade here I think fighting it rather silly argument as a brief coda to this section before I finish I can't resist saying that if I wanted to unseat identity Europa's confidence in the history of whiteness I wouldn't argue about sculpture I'd point them to the history Greek ceramics which I'm sure they also admire and particularly to the so-called black thicker style of Athenian vases in the 6th century such as you see here and I would ask them one simple question all the pots of the 6th century whose skin is white and the answer to that is always and only woman's skin and I suspect that would shut the alt-right up because they not just whiteness they also ape a kind of white male warrior mentality and you will see on these voices men are always represented as black and women are always represented as white I think one needs to oh you're not that kind of territory needless to say this is not because women in ancient Athens were white and men were black but because the representation the relationship between representation and reality is much more complicated than just thinking of a direct analog between the color of the representation and the color of the real skin just as it was with Agri Pina so I want to bring this lecture to an end though by coming back briefly to another controversy that a BBC production prompted last year might start with it's the same sort of controversy but it raised different issues the production I have in mind I don't know if anybody saw it was the series Troy fall of a city I thought was pretty ghastly actually loosely based on very loosely based on the Homeric epics what particularly caused outrage and you couldn't see where it kind of starts from the same position what particularly caused outrage surprisingly widely actually was a choice of a black actor David gassy to play Achilles the Greek hero of the Trojan War there was plenty more in response to this of the political correctness gone mad kind of argument plenty of why are they taking away my literature and the cause of their multicultural project and some of those who actually knew their Homeric poems joined in quoting the apparent fact that Homer had set Achilles was blond now at this point I thought once bitten twice shy I thought I would keep out of this argument so I tweeted only very briefly to say this was all a bit misplaced doesn't it this argument as achilles it actually never existed right boreal Paddington Bear right you know anyway this was acting right and if he's gonna be acting right you wouldn't be English very odd for Greek to then I wisely we drew from the fray one of my colleagues Tim Whitmarsh delved in a bit more deeply and decided to take on the Achilles was blond brigade the Greek word they were referring to in Houma is examples as Whitmarsh pointed out blonde is a possible translation of xanthus but so also is brown grizzled gray or golden and to take another example he said odysseus who was played by a white actor is actually at one point in Homer described as melon craze which can be translated as black skinned that could also mean tanned or in the kind of coding of the VARs I just showed you kind of ruggedly bloke ish I think might be another way of seeing it now partly in this there's a problem of pinning down the color in the sense of what hue is being referred to just as we might have problems in everyday conversation it deciding what the boundary was between blue and green but it's a bigger issue here which is really important for the more you look at the way Homer and other great writers describe color the more you find and that they don't actually fit our definition of color what we think color is in any straightforward way xanthus that blonde word also clearly has an element of motion it's kind of waving us speed and the milanka is the black skinned also connotes tricks in us and while eNOS just like the latin adjective mama reyes or marble-like can mean white but can also mean sparkling or shiny the C gets described as mama Reyes and the C is not white in our terms now how the Greeks and Romans actually saw things is one of the biggest gaps we have between us and then what did the world actually look like to them but what these definitional puzzles mean is it's not just the problem is not just that you can't kind of map one color term directly onto another and that's a problem in most European languages - you can't even map the idea of color itself between ancient and modern cultures and that means that whatever we see in what survives there's inevitably and necessarily an underlying category mistake in looking for whiteness in the ancient well we've got no idea what the ancients would have thought whiteness was and it's at that bottom line but the alt-right and others are wrong now have that point in your head because it actually informs a bigger modern point which is where I'm going to finish it's a slightly surprising link but it works I hope because it's often said and rightly that classics as an academic discipline is far too white it attracts too few people of color it props itself up on an old exclusive white prestige model what is not only unfair but also means that the discipline itself misses out on the advantages and insights that come from diversity question is how to solve them now don't worry I'm not going to give you an hour long explanation how to solve it I'm going to point you in one direction I'm going to suggest that what we've seen this evening in this color issue is relevant to that big modern social and pedagogical problem I think for example the divide was rewrite in the Cambridge Latin course I might go to some effort to ensure that the characters in the first book didn't all look like this right I don't I'd rather not give the impression that learning Latin was a whites-only area and I think there's a case to be made for extending the boundaries of what is studied in the ancient world beyond northern european northern Europe and the Mediterranean shores on the grounds that if you make the subject of study look less white European you might make it more attractive to those who are not themselves of white European inheritance that said I worry that in doing that we might fall into the trap that has been set by the half bate ill-informed tirades of the ultra who claim to see their whiteness reflected in the greco-roman world you don't escape that trap simply by holding up a mirror to someone else and it is absolutely a false promise to suggest that anybody can find themselves in the ancient world that's the main reason or it might terms the main reason why the alt-right are wrong the only honest way to diversify the subject of classics is not to buy into this kind of identity politics good or bad it's to insist that the ancient world is more different from any of us than we can possibly imagine nobody owns classics how ever its defined and nobody's identity and nobody's color is reflected they're classics and the classical world is a mirror to nobody but that more positively those details about whiteness color and language in Greek and Roman culture show one of the greatest and mind-changing intellectual rewards of study in the classical world is the poet Louis MacNiece put it because it is so unimaginably different that's to say classics it's about all of us and it's about not a single one of us and that is why classics has diverse appeal and why we can learn from it and I hope that it will become more diverse and this old white lady I hope she'll live to see the diversity thank you well thank you very much that was a tremendous lecture lots of lots of food for thought which doubtless you will be able to sort of come back it's professor Beard in a moment because we have a time for question and answers I just want to thank you at this stage and we'll come back to thank you more formally later on by giving you another round of applause just to let you know that Professor Mary beard will continue her series on Thursday evening at the same time of 5:30 p.m. and we look forward to the next lecture which will be entitled Lucretia and the politics of sexual violence so it's not going to get any less any less controversial it may get more controversial I just want to make a couple of announcements as many of you will know but I'll just repeat the points we're holding an online discussion throughout the fortnight there are the two weeks of the series it's not a fortnight because it's a week now and it's a week somewhat later on in the month on our Gifford lectures blog led by Andrew Johnson of new college to following to contribute to the discussion which we warmly welcome you to do please visit the address the URL at the back of the leaflet and on our Gifford lectures web pages you're also warmly invited to attend the Gifford seminar which is hosted by the Royal Society of Edinburgh along with the University of Edinburgh it will be held on Wednesday the 29th of May from 2:30 to 4:30 sorry 2:30 to 3:45 in the Geo 3 lecture theatre in 50 George Square and professor beard will be joined by a number of other people from the University of Edinburgh including Professor Douglas Cairns and Dr. Lucy Grig and they'll be discussing questions from the audience arising from this this Gifford lecture series you can get tickets for this there are still some available although they're limited for our University Gifford lectures web pages so just I'm about to invite you to to ask questions please remember wait until the the cordless mic has reached you but I do want to give people, if there's still people who need to leave at this stage will want to leave at this stage just there's a few more moments for you to go if there is anybody we can we can just wait but meanwhile please can we have the mics coming out and the first questions will be very welcome it's not easy to see where are the mics today somebody's got to have a question or a comment I can't this bill did you have your hand up bill yeah Mark, Bill Zacks thank you very much for this equal no less illuminating thank you gladiatorial lecture what if anything do we know about the views of the classical world from the so-called Dark Ages the middle, the Middle Ages the period between ours and its I want to say nothing now that's not fair because I think the experience of the the medieval experience of the classical world was so hugely different that and I think it's it's often kind of painted as if it was ignorant and I think it is not ignorant the middle Egger artists and writers of the Middle Ages in a sense made a connection between their selves and the ancient world in a very different way from the Renaissance I mean to put that crudely in in simple terms you know by the time you get to the 15th century if you want to do a statue of Julius Caesar or a painting of Julius you make him look like a Roman you know it's got a toga on he's got a laurel wreath if you're doing an illustration of Julius Caesar in the 12th century he looks like somebody from the 12th century now we have been brought up to think that that you know there is you know an increase in expertise and knowledge of the ancient world now actually anybody drawing Caesar in the 12th century damn well knew that season didn't look like him they just chose to do it differently just like when they dressed up 17th century guys in togas they knew they didn't wear them now but what that means is that kind of totally different engagement with how you might represent the ancient world but the that you can't do this color stuff on the same continuum and so everything the ancient world as its perceived in what we have in the Middle Ages a fuzzy boundary between 14th to 16th century just it each has it is sidestepping that idea of color and whiteness so you can't really tell what they thought I don't think they're stupid I mean people tend to think oh they didn't realize that the Romans were different yes they jolly well did they just chose not to show them it's different okay at the back there yeah thank you thank you very much for a really really interesting lecture and you finished on I think a very compelling point a point which is about getting people excited about learning classics so how'd you go about actually sharing that vision and getting people interested and excited well you do your best having I think it's you know in in many ways I think that what I'm saying is something which the classes team would be able to back up that the that professional classicists are very committed to something like the model that I suggested but I think that I mean I think it is hugely important and I will talk about this in the last lecture it's hugely important to celebrate the difference of the ancient world and make that difference seem exciting rather than the kind of you know which you know which Roman Emperor was Donald Trump like kind of version which is making which is kind of domesticating I mean I said I think part of the problem about getting people interested in the ancient world is that it is account of you want to get them excited by the the tightrope that you walk when you're looking at it I mean you know it's a said well it's in a book you know it's looking at the Roman world or any bit of the classical it's just like being on a tightrope you look down one side and they're all being just like us you know they're yeah they've got the same bodily functions they go into the loo they're falling in love you look down the other side and they're completely mad you know they're doing weird things you could never imagine doing and it since it always seems to me that that is the kind of that is the really heady excitement of looking at the ancient world and all you can do is talk it and hope that you reach people and you know I think there is a supplement I don't mean to knock the Cambridge Latin course but a Cambridge Latin cause is like I can't of the sort of beginners French book that I had or you know the ladybird book with mum dad and two kids no it's not only that they're white the old damn family is you know a nuclear family with there's Matteler and Calculus I can't remember the name of the kids but it's two of them and there's Grumio the cook you know it's and there's an awful lot is being thrown away in the extend of what you might think was exciting in that kind of domestication and you see it too when you know you go to archaeological sites very occasionally they manage to undomesticated particularly when they've got multi seater lavatory because they have to under medicate back say do you really think they all went to the loo together you know my goodness me but otherwise it's all kind of it's all standardized it's all just like what we might you know it's a the nuclear family is back projected and you know I think that that's you know it's like tight units it's like space exploration in some ways thinking about the ancient world but you know all you can do is just go on talking the talk I'm sure we could crowdsource some more information from the cambridge latin courses it was certainly what I learned my very little Latin in any way over people and people do remember it though (speaks latin) great so thank yo u very much and it's great to see Mattel and calculus again my question is really about the law and whether the Romans or the Roman system ever had a category a legal category of race in the way that we might have now or that part eight South Africa had or somewhere else they didn't I mean they have legal categories where we don't expect them I mean such as free and slave and a whole lot of other categories of limited freedom in between I think what's very interesting is that where you it is and I'm going to be talking about slavery in the second week but and this in some ways goes back to Bill's point to if you get well when you start to get the representation in late medieval art and on but particularly from the 15th century I'll show you a Botticelli next time actually about 14 about 1500 where the ancients mentioned slaves the modern the Renaissance artists will represent that slave as black so you start to get a you start to get the the racial imposition on to something which in the ancient world was not racial at all as I say you've told a Roman to think about a slave they're much more likely to thought about a shaggy northern barbarian than about a black guy so I'm going to go over here because I'm trying to keep a balance in questions if I can so they're just in front hi and you spilled towards the end about how you have an issue with people who are basically projecting on the Romans they see a mirror image and so I'm a biologist by background and we get the issue with things like stitch people get very upset about transgender fish or homosexual penguins and all sorts of things and if people are projecting onto something like I mean at least rulings are human how do you challenge that and how do you try and stop that probably quite natural impulse that people do try and see themselves history I mean I think it's um it's hard because you know come from all my sense of celebrating the weirdness all the difference that is actually impart the idea that you can have some commonality with these people that also brings people in you know if the Romans were just incomprehensible to us they'd be much less interesting but I think you know you could only do I think I think there's no magic bullet I think you do it on a case-by-case basis and the example that I've just used but I'll be very briefly will have on the screen on Thursday the great Botticelli painting in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston of a famous Roman rape the rape of Lucretia and a slave has a major as a as a by part a big part in this story and Botticelli has done the slave as a black slave now I was at a workshop about this painting with a load of people who taught it I don't teach Potter Jenny but they were saying that that was one the places where their students University students you could really bring them into those debates because you could say how do we think of a slave and to see Botticelli doing that and then to think about difference and similarities they said their students really got into interested in that kind of diversity but I think it's you are combating well you're combating by and large the whole tradition of Western art history you know which you want to say how did the Romans look it is it's awful downer to say well they don't look like anything you've ever seen and so I think you're you're wanting to or I'm constantly wanting to kind of get people to enjoy the difference while also have a feeling for some sort of similarity but it I think it's very very hard I really do at least it's not fish the last question here hello thank you very much for your talk I I really enjoy it in and agree with most of what you see which is not usual know one thing they start weighing and I wonder if any one ever pointed that the identity of people that one of their poster boys a representation of an uncircumcised Jewish boy and how they square that they look if they are deeply deeply illogical right and in some ways I mean although I think it's quite interesting to see how the old right are kind of using these characters there's two things which kind of make one feel that one shouldn't really overestimate their likelihood of taking out of world takeover I mean but what is there's not very many of them you know even the guy who ran this identity Europa said his membership was in dozens rather than in hundredths probably like 20 right just for the meet line in posters but they're also terribly illogical and it terribly ignorant and no I think all the time you just need to call them out for not knowing stuff and I mean I think there is a there is a debate and I think it's it I suppose I've given the impression that they that that these far-right groups just using classics I mean they're not they're you know people who work on Viking history say they're using Viking history people who work on Christianity say that they're using Christianity now actually most of them are just as illogical they're because most of them deny they're Christians but they they're using Christianity because they suddenly come and I think are right the Crusades that's us for actually they they get themselves into a complete hopeless total so every logical ities that's why I mean I'm you know I'm calm I am fairly confident that we don't have we ought to try to show them the error of their ways but where they're not going to win because they're not smart enough to win and they make the you know they make me stupid errors so I'm quite I did a seminar with students who are worried about social media abuse and one of them got up at the end and said what we were in the English faculty in Cambridge and they said what would we do if somebody from the old right came into one of our seminars looking terrified I said they wouldn't dare thank you very much thank you to the audience for your questions great selection questions there and thank you again to Professor Mary Beard both for her lecture and for her responses for questions I think I think we expected very much that Professor Beard would provide a set of Gifford lectures that what that you know challenged preconceptions myths because that's very much what she's been doing I think for a very long time in in the way that she's conducting herself within academia and as a public intellectual as Jay Brown said yesterday so can we just thank her once again in the usual way

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

Views: 66,587

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

Id: 8QgP2DOkbpo

Length: 82min 26sec (4946 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2019

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Professor Dame Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, delivers the Gifford Lecture "Whiteness". It is the second lecture in the series "The Ancient World and us: from fear and loathing to enlightenment and ethics".

This lecture moves from the colour of ancient statues to the skin colour of the Greeks and Romans themselves. Why have these issues proved so inflammatory in the study of antiquity? Who is committed to a white vision of the ancient world, and why? It argues not that antiquity was a world before racism, but that its very different ideas about colour (skin and otherwise) can destabilise our own.

This lecture series explores why the classical world still matters and what ethical dilemmas the study of classics raises (and has always raised). Taking six particular themes, it hopes to show how antiquity can continue to challenge the moral certainties of modernity.