‘Try to think about yourself as the slave’: Advice from historian Mary Beard

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Mary Beard. The Professor Emerita of Classics at Cambridge, 69, is a British TV host and author. Her books, including Pompeii and Women & Power, have been published in more than 30 languages. Her latest is Emperor of Rome.

Mary Beard: “We all like to think that if we were living in an autocratic regime, we’d fight back. The Roman Empire suggests most of us wouldn’t.”Credit: Louie Douvis

POLITICS

To what extent can studying ancient history illuminate modern-day politics? No, I don’t think that it does, although it’s tempting to draw parallels. When Trump was president, journalists were always ringing me up [asking], “Which Roman emperor is Trump most like?” That’s very hard because Trump isn’t like a Roman emperor. I was recently writing a book on Roman emperors [Emperor of Rome] and, when I came to the end, I thought, “What have I learnt here?”

And? That autocracy continued because people went along with it; everybody co-operated or collaborated. Or they said, “I don’t much like this, but I haven’t known any different and I’m doing okay.” The number of people who put their head above the parapet was very small and they were either brave or naive – it’s very hard to know which. We all like to think that if we were living in an autocratic regime, we’d fight back. The Roman Empire suggests most of us wouldn’t.

Your book Emperor of Rome has come out at the same time as a hilarious social media trend that suggests heterosexual men think about the Roman Empire a lot. What accounts for this? [Laughs] That TikTok trend hit almost the week that Emperor of Rome was published and I thought, “Oh, gosh, my publishers have been brilliant. They’ve done the most fantastic PR job here!” Then I realised it wasn’t them! But I came to the conclusion that, in some ways, the Roman world was a kind of safe space where men could still be macho if they wanted. It’s an empire where – in the West, at least – you can still say, “Yes, I think about it.” You couldn’t go back to 20th-century fascist regimes, but thinking about the Roman Empire gives you that sort of space. But I also want my books to say, “It’s all right to think of yourself as an emperor, but also try to think about yourself as the slave cleaning the baths, or the foot soldier who got terribly injured, or the guy working down the mines.” When we think back in history, it tends to give us an excuse to aggrandise our own positions, to be the glamorous people. Sorry, mate, most of us wouldn’t have been glamorous.

DEATH

What losses in life have impacted you the most? Well, this is entirely unoriginal, but it’s your mum and dad. It’s that feeling of loss, but also – and this is much more selfish – you’re grieving for yourself as much as you are for the people who’ve gone. You think, “It’s me next.” It was scary, but there was also a strange sense of liberation: “I’m free to die now.”

That’s such an interesting perspective – I hadn’t thought of before. Did that realisation catch you off guard? Yes, it did. There are generational responsibilities. When you talk to anybody who’s lost a child, you know how awful that is. The duty of the child is to stay alive, but you’re now released from the obligation to live.

If you were to die today, what would be left to be done? I’ve got contracts …

Your publishers will be very pleased you gave that answer. [Laughs] They will!

SEX

You went to Cambridge in the 1970s, a time when it and your subject were heavily male-dominated. How did you navigate that? Cambridge is a mixed university, but I was – and still am – at a women-only college. Classics students were largely posh white men but, in Newnham College, which was women-only, I had all the advantages of living in a very supportive female environment. I would like to say that I triumphed over adversity. To some extent – making it in a male field – that’s true, but I also have to say that several of my male peers and, later, my male colleagues, bent over backwards to help me.

When I studied ancient history in high school, I had a great teacher who’d get us to do our homework by signalling that there was saucy stuff coming up. Should we think of the classics and ancient history as inherently quite horny? [Laughs] I had a similar but different experience. I was at an all-girls high school and the boys’ school was up the road. We sometimes used to get together for events. I was quite naive. We’d been reading the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes. Aristophanes’ work has got some quite horny bits in it, but I didn’t realise that entirely. I’d been puzzled why, on our printouts, sometimes we jumped from line 950 to line 955. And I thought, “Why is that?” When I looked at the text, I discovered that, of course, the naughty bits had been cut out.

How do you reflect on your generation’s attitudes to sex and relationships? There couldn’t possibly be anybody who looks back at their sexual history and says, “I did everything right.” That said, can I look back and feel reasonably comfortable about how I’ve lived? I can. I never saw the Summer of Love but, in a way, I was a beneficiary of some of the freedoms that were gained from that. And I’m aware enough to see that the Summer of Love could be seen in different ways: it gave women sexual freedom, but it also gave men more freedom to exploit those women. With all those things in mind, it’s been okay. And I don’t think that you can want for more than to be able to say that.

[e-mail]

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.