Prof. Mary Beard: "What's the Point of Ancient Rome?"

[Music] and I thank you very much that's a bit humbling actually so have to talk after that introduction those were know who work on ancient Rome tend to find that we are in much public demand but not always for the right reasons I was reflecting the other day that the communist question that journalists either ring me up or email me about is very simple one and it is which Roman Emperor is Donald Trump most like well this always puts you in a difficult position I have one of two responses if I've got a lot of time and they're on the phone I tried to go through the arguments with them of why that's a really stupid question I mean even I mean you know I hate Trump but I mean somehow the idea of these anything like a Roman Emperor is just so stupid if I've not got much time there's a good there's a quicker response to this which is to tell them the name of an emperor they've never heard of because then you know that they will have to google it and they will learn something lunch the favorite my favorite one that I've heard I usually use is the third century Emperor Elagabalus you know who that famously smothered his dinner guests in a shower of roses so generously that they suffocated right I like I always like to think of these guys now usually guys um going back to the you know how do you spell like again you know getting it from Google no it is obviously a really stupid question and it's a really lazy bit of journalism these poor guys they've got you know they've got a few column inches to fill and they think how should we do that and a foliar need I know you don't bring up Mary beard right and it is rivaled I suppose only by their others from the second ranking question that people ask which is what does the fall of the Roman Empire have to teach us now all right and in Britain and particularly in brexit Britain it tends to come in the form of is it true that the Roman Empire fell because they were too many foreigners this is a longer question to answer right but once fries right but all that kind of journalistic albeit slightly silly slightly lazy interest in ancient Rome does for me raise the question about the role of Rome not so much in academic study I can talk about that for ages but really the role of ancient Rome in a much more public definition of what history is and a much wider definition of what contemporary debates Rome might contribute to and I think it's quite important not to say it's relevant too but might be might contribute to now obviously that's but is the question I want to just to broach with you tonight it's obviously hugely overgeneralizing I suppose it goes without saying that the role of ancient Rome in modern Rome you know when you have a columbarium in your garden feels different from the way ancient Rome is embedded in say that debates in the United States you know where there is still a Senate and where people in Washington DC still have a topography which is determined by a particular vision of Rome and it's different again from thinking about ancient Rome in the United Kingdom and people in the u k-- I think remain in it even as a very popular level they remain confused about quite you've signed they're on you know are we on the Roman site because the Romans kind of brought running water and laboratories and roads and a kind of Monty Python deskaway or are we real always really rebels you know are we Boadicea and are we trying to to get rid of this occupying power first you know I am touching corners there are always kind of differences and I think also across Europe across the West across the world really there's not only those kind of different styles of engagement and different emotional actually engagements as well as intellectual engagements with the ancient world but there are different historical traditions to how people embrace or reject the model of Rome and the different social uses to which Rome quite outside the Academy has always been put now my younger colleagues at this point I think would want me to stress and I will mention this because I think it's important they want me to stress the toxic as for horribly 21st century words the toxic effects of our engagement with Rome and the toxic purposes to which Rome particularly within Europe and not only within Europe has been put we only need to think about you know the relatively recent past to the last say let's 150 200 years to think of Rome somehow being used you know in a wider culture to justify dictatorship to justify Empire and to justify particular forms of social elitism you know in this city we've been walking around a little bit this afternoon and it the connections forged by Mussolini with Augustus you know are in your face when when you walk ant and in Britain I think it's true to some extent of other European countries but I think Britain is a particularly extreme example of it you know the idea that the British social elite use knowledge of Latin as a social gatekeeper in order to keep other people out it's something that people who today work in universities are still struggling with I mean it's you know sociologists dream isn't it how do you create a social elite well you make the poor little boys this social elite learn two dead languages of no use to them in order to stop the plebs getting in and anybody who works in university now trying in the UK to teach and encourage people to come to learn to learn more at university level about the ancient world is still struggling with that image of exclusiveness and not a painful exclusiveness I mean these poor kids were not taught that in Greek very well so I think that if you're looking at Rome in in the in the world of general culture I think that you have got there is an inheritance which is not holy doesn't feel comfortable but it seems to me that that is only one side of the story and that to stress the toxicity of the ancient world and its influence on the modern world is actually to miss out some really much much more important points about what engaging with talking about dialoguing with ancient Rome can bring to modern debates and to modern and culture outside the kademan I could talk eulogists in the audience now apologize that I'm not talking here about new discoveries you know we could we know that the new discoveries by ancient Rome that come from the soil appealing to large numbers of people that's true that's not what I'm concerned with I mean I think the kind of the background to what I'm thinking of trying to argue here say suppose we never knew anything more about ancient Rome than we know now so let's forget about glamorous archeology or lest I myself changing why would we still think you know what has ancient Rome got going for it and it's got a lot more than whether Trump is like Nero where Ella gapless I can tell you and I want to just group what I have to say into kind of three very rough headings surprise complexity and difference and I want to you know to make an argument which kind of goes below some of the sillier ways in which Rome gets incorporated in media social and otherwise I think in terms of surprise what I think it's really worth underlining here is the fact that there is such an enormous amount of material culture and literature surviving from the Roman Empire and before now I think that academics are kind of frightfully kind of gloomy crowd and you go to any academic conference about the Romans oh my god they're always saying oh you know we don't know anything about this we have perfectly true we have no voices of women or nobody is telling us about you know Roman historians themselves not interested in the economy and you kind of come away with the impression that you know our knowledge of ancient Rome our direct immediate knowledge isn't tiny no the truth is you know you can buy mone what the Romans don't tell us about but if you do that you're probably asking the wrong questions you know you're never going to find out about the Roman a macro economic climate but there's lots of other things that you can and I think in terms of taking Rome out into a wider audience you know it is extremely important to stress that there is no surviving Roman literature than anybody could master in a lifetime now it's not like working on the 20th century sure it's not but there is an enormous amount of stuff that you could not hope to get through and it's telling you more about some aspects not always the aspects but we think we want to know about but it's telling you more about some aspects of life in ancient Rome then you would possibly find again until you got say to the world of Renaissance Florence and I thought but this is a richly documented community in which it is fun to delve and which there is plenty of material for delving so the point one really is surprised because people are surprised by that but also you know I think it's a pity that academics can't quit being so kind of gloomy kind of you're like above how little we know we know loads about room and a well you know to 2,000 years ago almost and sometimes we can tell the story of the city day by day you know that is something to be fascinated by into interest people with but that's very obvious point I think that I'm also interested really in the way that Rome helps us partly because of its distance it helps us explore the notion of sophisticated complexity now I find that at the moment very appealing because I think that one thing that social media does you know I'm a great tweeter but Twitter is a terrible terrible culprit here it's you know social media reduces questions to simple binary opposition answers you know you're either for me and so I like you and I follow you and I retweet you or you know you're against me which case I'm going to pile in on you and I think you know particularly in the kind of complexity just to go back to Britain from home the kind of complexity that debates about brexit have raised has been so woefully undermined by a determination of quite a lot of social media to deny that sense of complexity and somehow the me intro becomes a beacon and you can talk to people in this way it becomes a beacon for enjoying things being complicated now that comes in in many ways and I think the perhaps the most obvious ways in terms of imperialism and if you think of our a stranded caricature of the Romans is that they're nasty brutal expansionist military imperialists right and they are you know I mean up to a point that is true you know Caesar committed you know Caesar was not a great general he committed genocide in Gaul in our Terms fine but I think that one of the things that engages people when you start to talk about that is that actually Romans were what are the nastiest brutalist Imperial cultures ever they weren't any different from those ancient cultures we kind of think are nicer the athenians were just as horrible as the Romans you know in those massive man of a man they massacred just as men but I think it's what is really important for me is that what comes out of that culture are some of the most important pointed and strident critiques of empire that anybody has ever seen now I don't just mean I think it's quite interesting that when Skippy Oh finally destroyed cottage in the second century BC in a horrible really rooting and burning if the city he was observed by his friend the historian Polybius looking at these flames of the city of Carthage and skip here was crying and Polybius according to his account turns to skip here dim actually polybius was at this point unusually and said why are you crying Skippy Oh Skippy Oh clothes a bit of Homer it's interesting that Skippy oh this second century but Roman appeals to him to the effect that that's going to happen to our city Monday so you have built into this kind of sense of Roman imperialism a sense that he cannot possibly last the empires cannot last but for me the most important and most moving critique ever of Roman Empire was one written by the historian Tacitus in the second century AD a man who climbed up the Roman administrative ladder was the son-in-law of Governor of Britain and he writes the history of his father of his father-in-law and is poppy his campaigns in Britain and at one point he puts words into the mouth of an opposing Britain a Britain of posting the Romans and this guy is made to say by pastors and it's such as his words know what you know what is the Roman Empire amount to and it's a very famous dying this is what the Romans do is they make a desert and they call it peace now no point ever since has that description or Empire ever been bettered right but you know we are still making deserts and calling it peace and that was absolutely already formulated by these apparently brutish Romans and I think people in terms of thinking about complexity 2,000 years ago it's safe territory but we can talk about those things and people enjoy getting to grips with that kind of that kind of way that things aren't every symbol as they see and just occasionally I'm pleased to say that you find that Rome offers very clear challenges even to those who eagerly conscripted to their virtuous purposes but with far too much simplicity my favorite example of that is John F Kennedy doing his famous speech in Berlin I'm barely in a speech what runs up to him saying you know is he said go back to ancient Roman what was the proudest slogan of the ancient Romans it was key this Romana song I am a room citizen and that leads him on to this discussion of you know how he too can be a berlina what I think Kennedy's speech writers because presumably he didn't write it himself what Kennedy's speech writers didn't know or realize or share with him was the fact that that was a Roman slogan and indeed it was his most famous use was machine by Cicero of some of the terrible goings-on in Cicely under rapacious governor governor fairies and at one point he does repeat several times key with Romano song key with Ramon Aslam I'm a Roman citizen who is saying it you say to yourself who was making that claim actually it was a claim made uh Turley fruitlessly by a Roman citizen on Sicily who was being crucified by various he had been turned on his cross to face the land of Italy and Barry said tough luck mate and this guy died shouting to you is Roman arson Kira's Romanism I'm a Roman citizen it may not blind bit of difference in some ways you know there is a very complicated story there about how we might want to inflect Kennedy's enthusiastic use of this and its most famous ancient example but just to finish I want to finish with the idea of the difference of the Romans or the that peculiar combination that you get in all kinds of other periods of history of Romans not unique in that peculiar combination of our sense of similarity and difference simultaneously with Rome I think there is something about this distant culture which in a way turns us into as it were anthropologists of ourselves but Barris it is a way of seeing ourselves from the outside now in part of course the Romans are they feel they can feel very similar that's popular because we have learnt some of them our own ways of talking about problems we face from reading them or reading people who have read them and so for example you know I think I think it will be it would be an impoverished reading of Dante not to know anything about Virgil's Aeneid and I think if you look back to some of the struggles the fall of the Republic before the rise of Julius Caesar you find our own debates about terrorism what Homeland Security means and the liberty of the individual citizen those have been formative debates really ever after when when Cicero again confronts the people who he believes you know he believes about does not just think Tony Blair were people trying to undermine and to destroy the Republic of Rome and he puts those suspected criminals to death without trial that sense of what right the state has to use summary execution or summary imprisonment or imprisonment beyond due process is one's other debates we still have and their debates that partly feel familiar to us because that's how we have learned to talk about them but I think that in some ways even more important is that the Romans jolt us out of our self-satisfaction about our own kind of sense of appalling modernist self-righteousness I'm just going to give you two examples of that you know one is going around any place that you could go to college any place you could go where there are apparently slave rooms I think here for example of Hadrian's better activity but there's plenty and you go round with a group of students and you say and you look at these rooms and you know exactly what the students are going to say in his house is terrible this is appalling slavery and then you say to them do you think we have people who are enslaved now and first of all they say okay no you know we abolished slavery in whatever way did and then you say are you really sure you know or you really saw there aren't people who are living in conditions exactly like this with as much freedom or lack of it as these people who lived here had and suddenly they switched they suddenly say gosh you know the perspective that you have the place in which you stand you know you can seem totally self confident about the social change that has happened over the last two hundred years but in the end it is written in nothing but the most vivid example of this I came across about suppose 20 years ago when I was working with some media in the Coliseum and you work in the Coliseum with media you have plenty of time when you do nothing and you're waiting for them to faff around you know getting the recording right so I went around the Coliseum listening to what the school parties were being told and there were school parties from every nation in Europe you know there was plenty Italians French German Brits enormous and what was interesting was that the strategy of the teachers in the Colosseum was almost always identical they would say what was this place for that class usually a boy this is where the Romans killed in a people by that millionaire or whatever gladiators I just passed the fake gladiators on the way and they'll know what happened to you and chat about that and then the teacher would say always would we do that now and they all say no no we wouldn't and you just big temptation to go over to those kids and say what do you think happens to boxes you know when they retire you know what do you watch what do you know what do your parents watch in the movies you know do you think you don't watch people getting killed I was not too polite to do that but he did seem to me that it was another great example of where you could you can use this distinct culture to to puncture that kind of are self-righteous certainty that we're better than the past and I suppose what I'm just giving you is a sorta version of my longer response to the journalists who want to know about which emperor Donald Trump is most like you know you want to sit down and say that's not why we study Rome we study Rome in part to see ourselves from a different point of view and that's why it's interesting and you know and stuff whether Trump is like Caligula or not thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Holberg Prize

Views: 21,711

Keywords: Humanities, Social Sciences, Holberg Prize, Award, Research, Lecture, University, Mary Beard, Rome, Ancient Rome

Id: adQBRYQ_5F8

Length: 27min 34sec (1654 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 12 2019