The enduring relevance of the Odyssey

Hi, it's Ollie. Uh I'm going away on paternity leave for a couple of weeks. So whilst I'm off, we're going to be bringing you some conversations that we pre-recorded and some conversations from my esteemed colleagues at the New Statesman. I hope you enjoy this episode. The New Statesman What do the classics mean to you? For some, it's a rich field of study, languages, literature, art, spanning continents and centuries from ancient Greece and Rome to the wider Mediterranean and beyond. For others, it can feel distant, even exclusionary, an elitist subject long associated with privilege and access to certain kinds of education. Classics today remains a battleground of ideas, from university campuses to online culture wars, both the political left and right have sought to claim the ancient world, using Greece and Rome to support very different arguments about identity, democracy, empire and belonging. For Merribeard, these tensions are exactly why the subject still matters. Rather than a relic of the past, she sees the classical world as a powerful tool for understanding the present, an idea she has explored in over 20 books on ancient history and numerous document aries on the BBC and elsewhere, all of which have made her Britain's best known classicist. I'm Tanjil Rashid and this is the Exchange from the New Statesman. Mary Beard joins me now. So Mary, thanks for joining us . I mean your book is dedicated to a man who showed you a four thousand year old piece of Egyptian bread and this was a major event in your life, apparently. Yeah, it sounds a bit silly, but do you tell us about that? Um look, I was five . And this is the first time that I remember being remotely kind of excited by the ancient world. And it it happened by chance because my mum, we we lived in Shropshire and I I'd never been to London before. My mum, village school teach er, said it was about time I went to see London, so um uh and particularly laden as a brand for a particular form of um right -wing, imperialist, misogynisti c, uh microcul ture within the West. And I think to some extent you could not, you know, you cannot deny that some of the people who tried to storm the Capitol, did storm the Capitol on the sixth of January, were holding banners which appealed to classical civilization in some way. That is that is undeniably true . The question that you have if you're a a professional classicist is a not not to shy away from that, I think you um you've got to kind of look you've got to face that. But you have to think so what do I do about that? Um what you know, where does that position me ? Well I think that uh uh I'm I'm very conscious that now, and I totally understand this, a lot of professional classicists, particularly younger than me , feel um ashamed to some extent, as I also do, of the uses to which the classical past has been put . What that's but what my position is. And I think that Hello look, I'm seventy-one and you you feel a bit calmer about that when you get to my age. It's not that you don't feel uh opposed to that, but you you you feel less angry about things . And when I'm confronted by that , um I I think the first thing I do uh is to show what a skewed vision of the ancient world that is. Um so you've got um uh far right, alt right um racist white supremacy groups. What do they use as their logo? They use white classical sculpture. But it doesn't take very long to sit down with somebody and to say , look, you know, we have created a particular image of the classical world as if it's white. Let me show you what these sculptures once upon a time look like. Um they were, in our view, possibly quite gar ish. And uh but they weren't they they didn't have that kind of sense of legitimating any kind of white supremacy at all, right? So you Is it true that they were commonly painted and decorated? Normally pa ancient sculpture not always, prob probably, but it's normally painted. There's a debate about how it's painted, because there are only microscopic traces of the paint left and it's quite hard to to to reconstruct accurately the colour scheme of these studieses, but the ye there is one one school of thought, you know, does produce what we would think of as a kind of Disneyland version of these sculptures. Now you have to say, look, I mean I I find that quite reassuring because it's a wonderfully easy way to say to people stop it and I you're you you know we you uh have invested and invented a kind of classical past that never existed. So you can use it if you want, but don't imagine that the ancient Athenians saw it that way , because they didn you know, of um this this ancient inheritance. But at the same time the left um seems sort of ridiculously ashamed of of some of the you know the of their relationship with the classical past. I I I think that's true. And I think you know, the past is there for us to use. It's n you know, this w you know, the job of the historian is not simply to uncover it and show people and then move on. It's about the conversation that we have with it. I think that what some of the critics and as I say I I totally understand where they're coming from, what some of the critics don't, I think, give enough airtime too, is the idea of co,urse, within the last 300 years, the classical past has you has been used to legitimate left wing causes as well as right wing causes. No, there isn't an intrinsic inherent politic s in the ancient world, there are different ways of using it. So you know Marx famously said that the French Revolution was thought in um in uh Roman dress. The American Revolution was certainly fought in Roman dress. The you know the the proto very proto gay movement uh in in this country in the late nineteenth century was explicitly using the homeroticism of fifth and fourth century Athenian culture as a way of stamping its brand on the present. So I think people should just be care ful before they ass ume that the only thing that classic s has done has been to support uh the the conservative with both the large and small see. I mean I I think one of the most interesting things you get if you look at Gramsci's letters and papers from prison is in in one of his uh short pieces, he says we need Latin and Greek in schools. Antonio Gramsci, the most famous 20th century And lots of anti-kolonial thinkers from outside of outside of the West, from places like India, were were immersed in the Western classical And they used them , I think , they appropriated them really constructively. I mean , wouldn't it have been nice to have been at the performance of Sophocles Antigone that Nelson Mandela and Co. put on on Robin Island . And there's actually so much to work with if you're not from Europe , actually. S a surprising amount. I mean if you if you if you're interested in the idea of empires , you know w where is the sort of the biggest corpus of thought and you know, about emp empires and imperialism? And you know, people imagine um not that as I see it, I think that the the the terrain of the ancient world and then debates about the ancient world is actually um a space for argument. They seem to imagine that it comes kind of ready kitted out with a right wing ideology. And now it in part that's true. I mean you it would be hard to look at um the culture of Rome under the emperors and not see a c a a culture that in which empire was jingoistic ally proclaimed. It is also the case and and it's it you know it's actually we know it's often the case that um some of the best critiques of empire come from within empires . There were Romans who Roman writers who framed a critique of empire that is as powerful as you know any that have ever been made. I mean the the obvious example is early second century historian Tacitus. Actually when he's writing about Roman Britain. Now, his scripts, but it's Tacitus' words, he's his scripts of denunciation of empire. And uh you know, the the classic few words are you know, what's the point of empire? What happens what do the Romans do and he says they make a desert and call it peace. Now uh you know I would be prepared to say that within the literature I had read there was no more correct analysis I mean this quote from Tacitus, they make a wasteland and call it peace, or they make a desert and call it peace, is is is so often quoted in anti-colonial literature or critiques of imperialism, often without even knowing what the source is. Um interestingly the writer V. Snipal quotes from Tacitus quite a lot in his um uh writings on on colonialism Exactly. To know that making a desert and calling it peace is still going on. Yeah. And and Gaza, of course, is a is a is a region very resonant in the history of the ancient world. Could you perhaps tell us a little about that? Yeah, I mean one of the things I I think that again we tend to go wrong about when we're thinking about the ancient world is that we think of uh of classical antiquity being Italy and mainland Greece, right? And a few northern provinces like us, you know, um who have been, you know, who were brought, you know, running water by these brutal but quote civilizing Romans, right? And that's that I I suppose that in terms of popular presentations of the ancient classical world that would be um a pretty clear stereotype. Now, the the point about antiquity, classical antiquity, is that it doesn't stop at the boundaries of Greece. And what we now call the near East or the Middle East some of the most important areas, the most fruitful for most culturally important areas of the whole of classical antiquity. I mean Syria , for example , is the fount of some of the most exc iting imaginative writing in ancient Greek. The coast of Africa is where some of the best, most influential Latin comes from. Now, Gaza is in a sense, you know, as you say, it is central in the ancient world. It's not it the ancient classical world. It's not it's not marginal. And I think that it's part partly that In the popular imagination, those bits of the classical world are not thought of as being parts of the classical world that has enabled the uh very white ight wing appropriation of classics to to to look in any way plausible. Now if we had gone to Italy in the first century C E I think we would have found it a far more diverse culture than we imagine. But you know, I I always feel really excited when I go to Hadrian's Wall and at South Shields . There is the tombstone of a woman who had, and it's probably a nasty story, who had once been the slave of, and then became the wife of and you know how that happened, you know, we can all imagine, um, of a guy who's on Hadrian's wall, who's from Palmyra. And he puts up a tombstone to this woman, partly in Latin, but he adds Aramaic as well. And you think actually it isn't, you know, I'm often accused I think slightly bizarrely really, of you know, of being a kind of classics wokery gourmet . Um but the everywhere you go in the ancient world, in the ancient classical world, you find those kind of issues about cultural movement, movement of people , divers ity, and and parts of the world not being not obeying the kind of boundaries that that we think that that we treat treat as almost quotes natural. What usually happens here, as well, as you can imagine, what usually happens is an ultimately fruitless attempt to pin down the exact ethnicity of these people. And then not just that, but to try to pin down their skin colour. And that but that becomes an interesting exercise in working through ideas of ethnicity and comparing our different notions through time. See, that is what I I think that that what the ancient world does, what the ancient Roman world does. And that's what I was meaning by I suppose getting a different perspective on our on ourselves. That the idea of thinking about in Rome a ruling class actually that just didn't look that didn't look like us that was incorporating that actually boasted of its far-flung origin. Rome is a culture. I think this is less true in most of classical Greece, but not entirely. Rome is a culture which celebrates its i its origin as as migrants and refugees. The stories they tell about themselves are stories of being migrants, you know, how was the Roman race founded ? It was originally founded in myth, I underlined, not in reality. It was founded because Aene , a Trojan from the coast of what we would call Turkey, had left the burning city of Troy and founded a new race in Italy. So you I mean you've mentioned this idea of uh you know this criticism that people have of you of classics workery. But I want to ask you I mean is it not true to an extent that because you are left leaning, you are more sympathetic to certain uses of the classical past and certain narratives? And if you then, you know, admit to using the past in that way, does that not then justify the right using the past to their ends? Um I think the answer to that is is kind of yes. I mean I think that it would be uh a very odd world in which we said that our own views or our own politics had nothing to do with how we examined and explored the past. I mean, before, you know, if if the past if history is a conversation with the past, you're bringing something to it. You're not you're not simply providing a voice for actually those who can no longer speak. And uh history in its forever, right? And you can go back to you know th the origins of Western history certainly and I'm sure elsewhere has you know, it's it's been in it's been politically and culturally engaged. The best sort of history has been that. No, I think that you you then have to say um this is where you know, um I kind of feel um less rigid than I used to . I don't own that past . I have I I'm I am constructing a version of it, and I want to share my version of it, and I want to share what I think of the problems, and I want to use it to open a space of debate . I would like to persuade people who are using it for far-right causes that it's that that's a sticky intellectual wicket to try to bat on. I would like to persuade them of that. But I don't want to remove their right to do that. You know, the the past is out there for anybody to come and and engage with and to talk about. And it it's it's up to people like me, I think, not to act as gatekeepers for our own vision of the past, to say, sorry, you know, you're not allowed to use it in that way. Everybody's allowed to use it. All I can rely on is um is persuasion. Yeah. And and and to hope that actually the past can be a good place where we can talk about some things that are perhaps more difficult to talk about when we're talking about the here and now. Of course they would say that you know people on the on the on the left leaning side of the spectrum are also on a sticky wicket. Is it that everyone's on a sticky wicket and you just sort of play the game, try to persuade each other and That's you know, in in a sense that's all we can do. Yeah that's all we can do. And I I I don't feel I don't feel that's therefore been a failure. I feel that if you think that the past is inevitably part of the way the present makes sense to itself. This there's never going to be an authorised version. We're never going to be able to say, so that's the way it happened. And uh you know I I can get quite sort of touchy when people say to me there were no people of colour in Roman Britain. I mean it's it is impossibly hard to pin down the number, and it's probably very small. But um uh it i it I think is important to undermine those those certainties about what say the British past looked like. What I've discovered when I've been talking about divers ity in history is that there is still a quite strong embedded view that there were no people of colour here till Windrush that um actually that is simply wrong . But I I d I do think it is really important for s for , you know, particularly university academics, not to claim they own things, not to claim they own the subject or the past. They've got uh I think a responsibility to intervene and to argue . But they people like me have long claimed that and deplored the way that uh that university professionals have acted as gatekeepers for a particular view of things. Um and in that case it would be often a conservative view of things. I'm afraid now you have to say we are not policing the boundaries of this subject. Stay with us, we're going to take a quick break. Remember, you can listen to the New Statesman podcast ad free by downloading the New Statesman app. It's available on iOS and Android. Links are in the show notes. We are excited to announce that we have launched a new podcast called The New Society, exploring life and culture in Britain and beyond . Wherever you listen to your podcast, subscribe to the New Society feed. In the latest episode, we spoke to James Baldwin's biographer Nicholas Boggs about the life and times of the great African American novelist. Save seventy-five per cent off a new statesman subscription this spring. Go to NewStatesman.com/slash spring twenty-six to subscribe today. We'll be back after this. How do you feel about the idea of expanding the classics to the study of cultures beyond Greece and Rome? I mean, why not ancient Egypt? Why not Mesopotamia? Why not, you know, the study of Sanskrit, which is related to Greek in its own way. I think that's that's been on the agenda. Those questions of okay you're studying classics, where does the boundary lie? has been on the agenda for as long as classics has been a a professional subject, you know, the a a a a university academic subject and and I say somewhere in the book that I was surprised to discover, but it was interesting that in Cambridge in the arguments that they were having at the late nineteenth century in Cambridge about about what a subject called classic should look like, there were some people who were determined to make it a three-language subject, which was Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Now, what's interesting is that you look at that to start with and you think, oh, that's rather enlightened. Right? How interesting. It it was actually a a a view put forward by the rather conservative people in Cambridge who really wanted to make classics a subject which you you studied language only. Right. They weren't try they weren't trying to broaden the cultural horizon of their students. They wanted to add another language and they particularly didn't want people studying archaeology. And also th so these boundaries change and are disputed uh constantly. Surely had something to do with the existence of India as a colony as well, then. extracted from that, but they were concerned most of all with a particularly Indo European set of linguistic forms. Yeah. They were not they were not trying to get people to read early Sanskrit poetry. They were trying to get people to understand the the linguistic forms that are fundamental to Indo-European. Now I you know you can second guess forever what it what it would then have looked like if that had been the way things had gone. Yeah, it seems very interesting. I mean it seems to me like a missed opportunity almost it but when you s we I that's what I thought when I when I when I first of all saw it when I when I saw who the spokespeople were for this. Yeah. It you know, it was uh what it was, it was there was a whole load of people who said, look, material culture, the art, the the the pottery, the archaeology of the ancient world is so important to understanding it that the what what the Sanskrit brigade wanted to was keep archaeology out. So they were saying, no, if we're going to expand this, we don't do it that way, we do it this way. Now, of course that would have given all kinds of opportunities for um uh later expansion in different ways. But it's every t every time you kind of parachute into some debate about classics or what it should be like, you find those those strange anomalies, you find people are in some ways seeming like they're prequels of us, but then for different reasons. And I think I think ancient Egypt will be one would be one place here. When I was an undergraduate, ancient Egypt had a strange foot a l mini foothold in classics. So you left behind the pharaohs, you sort of allowed Cleopatra and the Ptolemaic dynasty a war compart . And then there were all the pap ari that were being found or looted from Roman Egypt that were actually giv ing us more classical literature. And we were taught to kind of treat those in a in a vacuum, really. didn't think about what the culture of Greco Roman Egypt had been. Now in my lifetime, the boundary between quote the classical world in inverted commas and the North African shores has changed uh you know uh unbelievably as as with Christianity. You know, when you know when I was a student, we never looked at the Acts of the Apostles. Now you might say the Acts of the Apostles is a most valuable ancient text. It is written within a provincial community of the first century of the Roman Empire. It is a provincial view upwards and outwards. But we didn't do it. Why didn't we do it? Because it belonged in theology. And so there there are always these um pushes and pulls at the margins. I think you're healthy for a subject. Where is the boundary of my subject? Is the boundary as conventionally put? Is it preventing me seeing something so it would be useful to see? Or is it what what is it helping me see? I mean in your presentation of it, it seems like classics can be a device for understanding almost any kind of social or historic phenomena. And that sounds great. And it's also interesting to note that that was kind of how it worked. And that if you go back a few generations in academia, almost everyone had a solid grounding in classics before they went into some other kind of discipline, even the social sciences. Actually, he was a classic ist at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in fact he was one of those guys who was very keen on getting archaeology in, not so keen on the Sanskrit. Hmm. Um can I ask you about how you feel uh about basically the complete evisceration of the study of classics in state schools and the cause of sort of reviving classical classical education seems to be very much a sort of right-wing cause. So how how do you navigate this issue? I think in in many different ways. I think that um c classics classical learning, classical uh languages, but also classics in translation has not been quite as eviscer ated from uh the standard curriculum as we might imagine. Um you're absolutely right that uh you still stand a better chance of being introduced to the Greeks and Romans if you're at an independent school, or if you're at some independent schools, because there are plenty of independent schools that have no Latin and Greek whatsoever . But I think that there is a some really effective work actually being done in helping , and I think not directing, but helping schools, and many of them do want to do this, who like to include a classical element in their curriculum, uh helping them do that and providing the funds to do that. And it's a great charity Classics for All, which is directing hard cash to uh schools that are wanting to often bring back a classical element. And I think that is hugely important. I mean there is no way, and I'm sure there are some kind of some ideologues I'm sure who would like to have e every child learning Latin, you know, that would be so stupid. It would be so stupid. And it was never the case. It was only the rich people that learnt Latin anyway, you know. But why why was the reaction against Latin and Greek so strong in Britain? Because in other European countries that I've had left leaning governments, sometimes even sort of socialist or communist governments, and they did not attack the study of Latin and Greek in the way that um Britain I think that's that's true, although there's a there are very different patterns in in you know in different European countries about uh about and different complaints about how um or praise for how Latin and Greek is part of the curriculum. I think that there was something in the UK , particularly actually in England, really, I think Scotland's probably separate from this. Um where because Latin in particular, Greek has has always been a minority language , but Latin in particular was used as to fix the boundary of elite culture . So that for example, up until the nineteen sixties , if you wanted to go to either Oxford or Cambridge and some other universities to to study any subject at all , you had to have Latin O level. So you wanted to study physics, you needed Latin O level. Now this is this as you look back on it, and this is with in my lifetime, and it looks barking mad . Um but it it was an inheritance of the way I think rather more edgy than elsewhere, and there were different patterns elsewhere in Europe, partly because of the different patterns of Catholicism versus Anglicanism, I think that there was a different root in In say France or Italy for Latin than there was here . But it it became the symbol of how the elite kept women and the working class out right um and it it therefore prompted as its hold uh weakened in those very formal ways. It prompted the kind of um uh reaction to it that I think we've seen. And I suppose the logically there are two reactions to that, you either you get rid of the uh get rid of in the insistence on learning Latin, or alternatively you could make the study of Latin completely democratic and universal and available to all. And we chose the former option. I think when you put it in terms of choice I w I'm not sure how conscious the choice was, and I think it went along at certain points with as often happens with moments of economic stringen cy. Um and so that it became the acceptable victim of of cuts . But I think that the other pathway that you suggest is that what you want is classics to be you want classics and the opportunities classics offers you to understand what it's like to be in the present as well as in the past. You do want that to be available to everybody. You don't want to f it down their neck. So I say in the book somewhere it's you know I think it's it it's a terrible shame not to be interested in the ancient classical world, but you know, it's not compulsory . And I I think that that is increasingly I don't know hard work, but it's increasingly the case. And I think that I mean, you can now get up in front of a a you know a hole full of of sixteen, seventeen year olds thinking about what they might want to do at university. Some of them might be interested in the classical world because they visited a museum or they've gone to Fishbourne Roman villa or whatever. And you can honestly tell them what you couldn't tell them when I started at univers ity, that there isn't a university in the country where you cannot learn Latin and Greek from scratch. Right? So the there is no entry requirement anywhere that you have to have Latin and Greek language. Now why that's important is that Latin and Greek language, of course, Latin in particular was that, that idea of the kind of qualifying step for the elite. And it became hugely mystified because of that. And that um the idea of it being um the what what only they're really clever brackets and privileged could do. And it it's taken a very long time to get that stereotype out of Latin. You know, I because I I I don't go round to to so many high schools as I used to to before I retired. But there is still a view out there in the world, that if you want to study classics at university because you're really interested in it, you'd certainly need Latin already. That is not true. So finally, Mary, I want to ask you, I mean, let's say you you are um you have an audience of high school students. Um what is the one classical text that you would recommend they read, whether at school or in their own time or you know, what what's your strongest recommendation for The Odyssey. The Odyssey. Most of my life I spent not entirely, but I mostly worked on Rome. But I think that uh Homer's Odyssey is a work of literature which introduces you at the very origin of Western literature to so many of the big questions that we still face. Now, I'm not saying it's got the answers. I mean I think there's a real danger, and this is the right wing danger, I think, to imagine that th th the classical world has the answers. It doesn't have the answers, it's got the questi ons. And Homer's Odyssey raises issues about how do you know you're civilized? What's the difference between civilization and barbarity? Can you ever see things from the other point of view? And what is it to be? A man, to be a person, to be a wife, to be a leader? And how can you ever tell the stor y of how do you tell big stories like that? And what I think is amazing about the Odyssey is that as we have it is whenever exactly it was written down , is the second work of literature in in in the West . And you kind of think when you pick it up, you think it's gonna be quite simple then, isn't it? You know? That's what you know, doesn't surely literature start simple and gets more complicated and by the time you get to postmodernism, um you know, we're really complicated in our and but but back two two and a half thousand years ago it was kind of simple. You've got the most complicated, intricate tale where you don't even meet the hero for six books of this poem. Um you know that he is the hero, but you don't see him. And you've got stories within stories. Um I'm not surprised. You know, when Bob Dylan got his um his Nobel Literature Prize, one of the works he picked out was The Odyssey. It's you know, it's Travelling Man, he said, Travelling Man. Yes. So I suppose that's what you mean by the the shock of the old. When you encounter the old and and you you you you're s just shocked by it by by its complexity and strangeness and also familiarity. Yeah. It's not ever quite what you think it is. You've been listening to the exchange from the new statesman with me, Tanjil Rashid, and Mary Beard. This episode was produced by Kathryn Hughes and Bieba Kang .