EP.237 - DAME MARY BEARD

Adam meets leading classicist Dame Mary Beard, who explains what social media tells us about how emperors held on to power in Rome, why shoes are important when talking about power, how many people in ancient Rome really died by being drowned by rose petals, the important roles that apocryphal stories and outright lies play in history and why she replied to every critical message she received following the controversial comments she made soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Conversation recorded face-to-face in London on April 16th, 2024. Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and conversation editing. Podcast illustration by Helen Green https://helengreenillustration.com/ EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal https://nordvpn.com/buxton Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! RELATED LINKS MARY'S ROME PICK 1 - PALAZZO MASSIMO MUSEUM https://museonazionaleromano.beniculturali.it/ MARY'S ROME PICK 2 - CENTRALE MONTEMARTINI MUSEUM https://www.centralemontemartini.org/ EMPEROR OF ROME https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=32007354606&dest=gbr&ref_=ps_ggl_2039220669&cm_mmc=ggl-_-UK_Shopp_Tradestandard-_-product_id=UK9781846683794USED-_-keyword=&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiA9667BhDoARIsANnamQaGHRq4ErcHWW1Zx2PDbpqgAwg7bm6WXcI7dzYOqPaElc8VzTGKacwaAo61EALw_wcB by Mary Beard - 2023 (ABE BOOKS) RORY STEWART AND MARY BEARD ON POWER AND POLITICS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osPnp-pOWDg - 2024 (YOUTUBE) MARY BEARD ON DESERT ISLAND DISCS https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00q9k51 - 2010 (BBC WEBSITE) HOW OFTEN DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE ROMAN EMPIRE https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-often-do-you-think-about-the-roman-empire - 2023 (KNOW YOUR MEME) IN RESPONSE TO 9/11 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n19/nine-eleven-writers/11-september - 4th October 2001 (LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS) JESSE ARMSTRONG'S UPLIFTING MOVIE PICK TURN EVERY PAGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv3CRojrbeE (TRAILER) Directed by Lizzie Gottlieb - 2022 (YOUTUBE) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Adam Buxton?

  I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

• 0:31Adam Buxton?

  Hey, how are you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here, reporting to you from a cold windy farm track in East Anglia. It's just a few days before Christmas as I'm recording this. 4:15, sun's already down. Well, there's a little bit of light on the horizon. It's quite a tasteful sunset, let me tell you. You're dealing with the subtleties of the amber spectrum. My best dog friend Rosie is not with me. She was curled up on the sofa in the warm kitchen and she really looked very keen to stay there. So I took pity on her. But if you'd like a tiny bit of Sonic Rosie time, this was the sound of her this morning,

• 1:15Adam Buxton?

  running down the stairs for some breakfast. Come on.

• 1:25Adam Buxton?

  All right, waggy tail.

• 1:31Adam Buxton?

  Come get your sneaky biscuits and meat. Rosie on the stairs there, she says hello. I don't know how excited she is about Christmas. I'm very excited, although I do have quite a bit of work to do. Between now and Christmas Day, when your festive podcast with myself and Joe Cornish will be plopping into your pod sack, that sounds revolting, I apologise, at midnight on Christmas Eve, at least that's the plan. Right now, let's deal with the matter at hand and me telling you a little bit about podcast number three hundred and thirty seven, which is a little bit like a private tutorial with, I was gonna say one of the world's most famous classicists, but let's

• 2:16Adam Buxton?

  just go for broke, shall we? I'm gonna call her the world's most famous classicist. She's a specialist in ancient Greek and Roman history, ancient art and architecture. She's a writer and broadcaster. It's Professor Dame Mary Beard. Here's a few mainly career-based beard facts. Mary was born in nineteen fifty-five and grew up in rural Shropshire in the West Midlands of England. She studied classics at Newham College, Cambridge, and after completing her PhD, taught at King's College, University in London before returning to Cambridge, where she taught classics from the year nineteen eighty-four to twenty twenty-two. She is also

• 2:59Adam Buxton?

  the author of more than twenty books on classical history, feminism, and academic life, and in titles that include Pompey, Women in Power: A Manifesto, and Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up. Mary explores themes of power, identity, and the intersections between the ancient and modern worlds. Her twenty fifteen bestseller, SPQR, told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome, and in twenty twenty-three, Mary's book, Emperor of Rome, focused on the emperors who ruled the Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar, assassinated forty-four BCE, to Alexander Severus, assassinated

• 3:44Adam Buxton?

  when, class? Anyone? Anyone? That's right, two hundred and thirty-five CE. I have to confess to you that I'm not the greatest historian, and it was reading Mary's book, Emperor of Rome, that really familiarized me for the first time with the whole CE thing. I was always a BC, before Christ, and AD, Han Odomini, man myself.

• 4:08Adam Buxton?

  But we try to move with the times. BCE, before Common Era, CE, Common Era, to make it a bit less Jesus-y. Okay, you're all rolling your eyes at me, but I only got the memo fairly recently about that one. Anyway, Emperor of Rome answers questions like, what power did emperors actually have? And was the Roman Palace really so bloodstained? Emperor of Rome, quoting from the blurb, goes directly to the heart of fantasies about what it was to be Roman. I'm sure many of you remember that meme last year in 2023, asking my husband how often he thinks about the Roman Empire, the answer to which shocked many people. Turns

• 4:50Adam Buxton?

  out that men think about the Roman Empire loads. I have to confess, I'm not one of them, but I really enjoyed reading Emperor of Rome. My conversation with Mary was recorded face to face in London in April of this year, 2024, and Mary told me about the Roman version of social media, why shoes are important when talking about power, whether anyone in ancient Rome really died by drowning in rose petals, and why apocryphal stories and outright lies can be as important a part of history as the truth of what actually happened. Soon after I started the recorder running, I was telling Mary that our conversation

• 5:34Adam Buxton?

  would be edited, and she made a passing mention of a time when one of her comments was taken out of context by a magazine and she got into some hot water. And that led me to ask her about the response to comments she made in the London Review of Books in the days following 9/11, way back in 2001, when she argued that the terrorist attacks in New York were not entirely unprovoked, but instead a reaction to what she described as America's history of imperialism and interventionism. She later clarified those comments, emphasizing that she unequivocally condemned the attacks.

• 6:15Adam Buxton?

  But believed it was important to consider the broader context and causes. And one of the people that disagreed with Mary on that occasion and wrote a response in the LRB was the late American poetry scholar and critic Marjorie Pirlo, who I mentioned briefly. Another of Mary's critics back then was the Irish writer Colum Tobin, who was on the podcast a few weeks back and he told me why he disagreed with Mary. And coincidentally, my conversation with Colum ended with some warm praise of Bob Dylan, which my conversation with Mary also does. It all comes back to bobble. So maybe Colum, Mary and I should get stoned and go and see A Complete Unknown together on Christmas Day.

• 6:59Adam Buxton?

  I'll be back at the end to say goodbye and share with you an uplifting film recommendation, which I have seen as well in love, from friend of the podcast and writer on shows like Peep Show, Thick of It and Succession, Jesse Armstrong. But right now, this is a ramble chat remix by Anthony Brown. Thanks, Anthony. Here we go.

• 8:00Adam Buxton?

  I remember you saying that after your 9/11 fracas, you made a point of answering almost all the emails that you got?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Yes, I did.

• 8:10Adam Buxton?

  Oh, I'm fascinated by that. Was that, how do you look back on that now? I mean, that to me sounds like someone who is having a bit of a breakdown over... Being challenged in that way and being upset that she was being misunderstood.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  I don't think it was like that, and I think it would be different now because, you know, that was email. You know, if you said something controversial now, it would be the most horrendous Twitter storm. You know, it would all be social media and it was before that. And I think people were still finding their way about what they, how they dealt with email even. And I think that, well, I suppose I thought, and I still think this whenever I get into this kind of trouble, as I sometimes still do. If you clearly upset a lot of people with a tweet or a post, or in the case of nine eleven, it was an article in the LRB. And you didn't mean to, and you didn't really mean what they said you'd meant.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  I mean, I think you have to fess up that you probably didn't put it right. You know, and I, I, I mean, I still would stand by, I think, what I said about that. And, you know, Archbishop of Canterbury have said much the same in the pulpit. I, I think now that I probably said it too quickly, you know, that, you know, you should let a bit of space go. Before you intervene in a, in what could be seen as a controversial way when it's a kind of international tragedy. So, you know, I think I got all bits of it wrong. But if you do that, I think that gives you more obligation when somebody writes to you to take them seriously.

• 9:47Adam Buxton?

  As long as they're sort of rational sounding.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I can't now remember what the extremes of any of this were. And maybe there were some that were, you know, I want to string you up or whatever, that I just would have ignored.

• 10:01Adam Buxton?

  Sure.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  But actually I made, I mean, I didn't make lifelong friends that way. But I had decent conversations, good conversations, I think. And occasionally there are people when I speak in America who will show up my talks and come up after and say, do you remember I was the guy who wrote to you after nine eleven?

• 10:24Adam Buxton?

  Oh, really?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, you think this is, this is, this is fine, you know, I feel quite warm to some of those people. And I hope, I hope they feel a little bit warm to me.

• 10:38Adam Buxton?

  Because there was a big variety of responses beneath the article, because this was a thing in the London Review of Books. It was a series of, like, a load of letters from writers and academics with their responses to the attacks.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the other thing that, you know, when I look back on that now, you know, this was in a print newspaper, when I gave my response to nine eleven, it's not like doing it on social media. Now, it wasn't instant, it took about ten days to come out. And I wrote it in the forty eight hours afterwards. And if you look back to what those immediate responses were to nine eleven, in the absolute couple of days afterwards, they were all over the place. You know, I was on one side, but there were really kind of, people didn't quite know how to process it. And I mean, I remember now watching that

• 11:34Speaker 01

  famous Question Time after nine eleven, when the American ambassador was pretty well reduced to tears because the audience was saying stuff a lot more hostile than what I'd been saying about America. And I think now, thinking back, was that it took a week or so before people found a way of talking about it. It was so kind of out of anything we'd experienced, that people just didn't have the words, they didn't have the rhetoric, to kind of have a constructive, any sort of constructive response. And of course, by the time my instant reaction appeared, people were beginning to

• 12:16Speaker 01

  see how you could talk about it. So it stuck out, I think, more more than it would have done. And, you know, I think, you, of course, you regret if people got upset and you didn't intend to upset them, you regret that, you know, that, um, and, you know, I still do. And I think people were actually quite generous to me. I mean, you still find it dug out on Twitter every now and then, but.

• 12:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I mean, I I hope you don't mind me sort of asking you about it. But the, as well as the direct emails that you got, did you also respond to some of the people commenting below the, like, some of the comments that the paper got?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Do you know, I can't remember.

• 12:58Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I remember the emails.

• 13:00Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I was thinking about Marjorie Perloff.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Oh, Marjorie Perloff. I've never met Marjorie Perloff.

• 13:05Adam Buxton?

  So that wasn't one of the constructive exchanges.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:11Adam Buxton?

  Marjorie Perloff was upset particularly by the idea that the terrorists should be listened to in some way, or or that people should try to understand the motivations of the terrorists. She was saying, well, you know, you don't want to understand the motivations of Nazis. And we saw what happened when we tried to appease them.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  No, and I see her point, you know, I I I don't think that her point is a stupid point at all. I, that is not what I think. But, you know, in things like this, it's probably a better idea to try to understand where the other person's coming from. You know, rather than just think that they are standing off stupidly. And I think, you know, some of the, you know, modern social media responses would be better if we actually thought, well, I don't agree with that, but it's a fair point.

• 13:58Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, that's not how social media works.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  It is not. That's a fair point is not a phrase often found on social media.

• 14:06Adam Buxton?

  I mean, it does, it is there. There are little nuanced discussions going on, but they don't get traction. Have you ever thought about getting off Twitter altogether?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Um, no. What I did decide is that if Elon Musk, you know, made Twitter impossible or started to charge everybody for it, or press the button and sort of abolished it, you know, in a in a whim. I wouldn't go on any other social media.

• 14:35Adam Buxton?

  Right, okay.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  You know, I thought, well, look, this has been, this is what I've done. The profit loss account has been well on the profit side. And actually, I've made friends, I've learnt things, you know, I'm I'm fine. But would I start all over again? No, I'm going to move on to something completely different.

• 14:50Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  But my tweets were, I mean, it's very interesting because the first days of Musk.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  I think he's been a force for bad on Twitter, you know, you know, I'm fed up with getting porn ads, which I didn't get before.

• 15:04Adam Buxton?

  Right, I didn't realise that was a thing.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  All the time. The librarian at the Bodleian. A guy called Richard Ovenden, who oversees, you know, one of the great libraries of the world, but is very savvy about different forms of knowledge and how you preserve it. It's not just manuscripts and books, he's interested in digital knowledge. And he thought, just like I thought, I suppose, but I didn't see the implications, that Musk could just destroy this, he could just push the button and the whole of Twitter would have gone. And he thought, if that were to happen, this kind of huge amount of the way people talked to each other, you know, in the early 21st century would disappear.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  You know, this was a kind of, there was a librarianship issue in this, you know, not just a kind of what is Musk going to do, but we would want this preserved, at least partially. So he got some of his mates who he knew were active on Twitter and some academics and others to download all their tweets and send them to the Bodleian, so that at least that kind of glimpse of what was going on in that particular medium would be preserved. And I thought, well, that's kind of important, actually, because it was an important bit of culture.

• 16:25Adam Buxton?

  What was the, I mean, to do an obvious segue, what was the Roman equivalent? Was there any point at which ancient Rome started to try and make communication more democratic in a comparable way?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  A comparable way, I think, no, I mean, the Romans would have loved Twitter, they would have been naturals at Twitter, I think. But you see some aspects of Roman political culture, which are not a million miles from it. The obvious example of that is, you know, graffiti, which gets everywhere, clever little witty things scratched on walls, people replying, it's, you know, it can look a bit like a Twitter argument. But the thing that I think strikes me most is really, I'm afraid, goes to Trump. And one of the things that was clearly absolutely central to his rise and in him holding his position.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Is that he managed to communicate directly with the people unmediated. So he used Twitter to speak directly to everybody, not through traditional media, not being edited, not being with him and anybody who would want to read his tweets.

• 17:46Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, it was genuinely him.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  It was.

• 17:48Adam Buxton?

  Typing away in the middle of the night.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yes, it was. And Trump actually saw that the new star political leader needed to speak directly to his popularity base. Now, if you look for an ancient precedent to that, it's very similar to Julius Caesar.

• 18:06Adam Buxton?

  Hmm.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Very similar indeed. I mean, Julius Caesar wrote um works of autobiography, which are, since the mid nineteenth century, I think, have been, you know, the bane of school boys, mostly in the nineteenth century, boys, describing his, particularly his campaigns in Gaul. No, there he was, I mean, not far from committing genocide in Gaul, but he wrote these commentaries, he called the commentary, on his campaigns. I think it is now fairly well argued, may not, it's not absolutely certain, but it's fairly well argued, that these, we have them in written form, but actually Caesar used them by sending his subordinate

• 18:50Speaker 01

  officers to Rome, to street corners with these accounts of what Caesar was up to, and spoke from the street corner, on the soapbox, to the people round about. And it was, in some ways, the same tactic as Trump, that instead of Caesar going through the Senate, putting the report to the Senate, and then it would be mediated outwards, what Caesar does is he uses his officers' voices in Rome, talking to people directly, reading Caesar's words.

• 19:26Adam Buxton?

  Right, standing on a corner saying, news from at Julius Caesar, there is a blue tick.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. I think that's exactly what it was. And it's.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  You can, I think, trace the way many populist leaders in world history have found that, you know, that way of doing what Trump did with Twitter or Caesar did with his subordinate soapbox. The high-flying populist politician needs his support base to be directly in touch with him.

• 20:01Adam Buxton?

  The good thing for Caesar, though, at Caesar with his blue tick, was that he wasn't really going to get any pushback on anything he said. If people objected to any of it or had any comment, then they could pretty much stick it up their arses.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  That is true, but he got pushback in the end because he got daggers in his back.

• 20:21Adam Buxton?

  He got, he got stabbing pushback.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yes, he got, you know.

• 20:25Adam Buxton?

  The ultimate pushback.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, he got the ultimate pushback.

• 20:28Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, fair enough. Was the, was that the model for most emperors? Or were some emperors who behaved in an outrageous way, or what would have been considered even at the time to be outrageous? Were they populists in the same way that we think of populists now? Was there a big support for kind of big outrageous, I don't give a shit figures?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Put in those terms, I think the answer's no. But if you were to say, did every emperor have to be in some sense a populist? Then the answer's yes. And, you know, the emperor is very vulnerable, he's living in the middle of a city of a million people, you know, he's not locked up in the palace the whole time, and burly bodyguards don't save you necessarily, they can help. And one of the things that every emperor thought about was how to make sure that the people of the city were on their side. And you'd do that. I mean, in our terms, it would be looked on as bribery. We do that by generosity. The dividing line

• 21:34Speaker 01

  both then and now between generosity and bribery is a very fuzzy one. So you see them.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Giving, you know, these are Bretton circuses, that you see them giving entertainments to the city population, but you see them giving cash, they actually give money. And you find historians, ancient historians, writing about Roman emperors, people like Suetonius, biographer of the first twelve emperors. You see them being quite acute at where the emperor crosses the line a bit. So there are wonderful stories about Caligula, not just that he gave money away, every emperor gave money away. He got up on the roof of a building in the Roman forum, the political centre of Rome, and he threw money at people.

• 22:23Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Now, i- in a sense, as often, those stories about bad emperors are stories not about them just being totally transgressive, but about them going too far in the way that every emperor had to go. So throwing cash is just, in a sense, the kind of, you know, the final crossing of the line.

• 22:49Adam Buxton?

  It's a bit trashy.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  It's a bit, it is a bit trashy. And of course, Caligula was later murdered. But it's, y- you see, you see them very well aware about the relationship between the ruler and the people. The other way that that happens, and again, i- it has resonances for us, is that there was a very, very strong idea that the emperor should be accessible to the people.

• 23:19Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Now, in most cases, I suspect this is more myth than reality, but the brand, the Roman imperial brand, was the emperor is there for anybody. And there's a great story about the Emperor Hadrian, who was off in the country doing something, and an old peasant woman comes up to him and says, excuse me, emperor, you know, I've got a, and he just turns around and says, look, I'm just far too busy, sorry, far too busy. And she said, if you're too busy for me, you're too busy to be emperor. And, you know, hits the nail on the head.

• 23:54Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  And so the idea that the emperor is both populist in the sense of more generous to the people than anyone else can be. But also that he's there for you. And, you know, the idea is, again, you know, how often this really happened and how often it's, well, it's a bit like celebrity gossip, isn't it? How true it actually is, we're not certain. But there are, you know, there are wonderful stories about emperors joking with the people that are supposed to be, and the emperor's supposed to be able to take a joke and, you know, sit down, be the common man. And also be there with the people.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And this goes quite against our own common image of the emperor, far removed from the people. Um, you know, si- sitting in the palace and eating stuffed dormice and having sex in the swimming pool, that kind of stuff. There's a wonderful, another wonderful story about Hadrian is that he went to the public baths one day. Now, how often the emperor went to the public baths? I think it's probably about as often as Rishi Sunak fills up his car with petrol, you know. But you do it occasionally, it's a kind of photo op. Hadrian goes to the baths and over in the corner, he sees a man rubbing his back against the wall.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  And he remembers this guy, I'd met him before, been on military service with him. And he says, well, you know, what's, what are you doing? And the guy says, you see, I haven't got the money to have a slave. So I've got no one who will rub me down or scrape the oil off my skin after I've oiled myself. Um, so I have to rub against the wall. So Hadrian, very kind of generous bloke, um, he says, I'm going to give you some slaves. And I'm not just going to give you some slaves, I'm going to give you money for their upkeep because slaves are expensive.

• 25:52Adam Buxton?

  Blimey.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Great. Uh, so a victory for Hadrian there, you know, he's, he's noticed.

• 25:58Adam Buxton?

  Could have just given him a back scratcher.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Could have just given him, well, you know, you're almost there because the next time Hadrian goes to the baths, there's a whole line of guys rubbing their backs against the wall.

• 26:09Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  And Hadrian's a wily old thing and says, I suggest you try rubbing each other down.

• 26:15Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Adam Buxton?

  And a whole new pastime was created.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  A whole new pastime was created, but the emperor in that kind of that little sort of combination of stories on the same theme.

• 26:31Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  The emperor is both seen to be generous, to be caring, but not an idiot.

• 26:36Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, don't take the piss, guys.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  He's saying, don't take the piss.

• 27:11Adam Buxton?

  Now, when I was reading Emperor of Rome, and at the very beginning, you start by talking about Elagabalus.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:19Adam Buxton?

  And him drowning his dinner guests in petals. So I was thinking, question one, how, I mean, I appreciate you make it clear there was a lot of petals, but how, that's loads, how did they die?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  No, well, I think this is one of the occasions where you see that these anecdotes, these extreme anecdotes, take bits off Roman emperor's behaviour, well-known bits. But in the case of someone like Elagabalus, a pretty unknown third century emperor, but no more than anything else for being completely excessive.

• 28:02Adam Buxton?

  Teen emperor.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a teenager. Yeah, and it's just what happens, you get a teenager on the throne.

• 28:07Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  And the stories that collect around them are about how they never know where to stop, how they they sort of are doing the right thing, but so kind of dramatically magnified that it becomes dangerous, actually. Now. The story is a very simple one, that Elagabalus has invited his mates to dinner and he does what other emperors do and we've got reason to suppose this was truly part of the imperial kind of entertainment ritual, that the ceiling of the dining room is fixed up so that it can open and wow, what could be better?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Petals fall out of it, or sometimes scent falls out of it, so that the guests get showered with perfume or petals, sometimes fruit, which is a bit

• 29:02Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  A bit hard, a bit hard on the head. But what happens with Elagabalus? There are so many petals that the poor old guests die, right? They're smothered, they drown, they drown in petals. Now, if you ask me, do I think that's true? You know, do I really think that happened? All the things that you're going through your head about, this doesn't really add up, does it? All those things, you know, go through my head too, you know. How many petals would you need to actually smother these guests? So, you know, if I was betting on this, I'd say it never really happened, but what it's doing, what that anecdote does and the way it gets repeated, is it's kind of homing

• 29:47Speaker 01

  in on people's fear of emperors. And there is a very, very strong and important message in that story, which is when the emperor looks as if he's at his most generous, he's actually his most dangerous. You know, this is killing with kindness, literally. So then the kind of extraordinary anecdotes that you get about these guys, you know, with Nero locking people in the theatre so they couldn't get out while he was performing, and the lyre, and so women gave birth in front of Nero's performance.

• 30:27Adam Buxton?

  Because they couldn't get out of the theatre.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  They couldn't get out of the theatre because their doors had been locked, and then, you know, pretending to be dead so they could be carried out. If you want to sit down and say, look, you know, how many of these things do we think were true? Well, Maybe some, maybe some are exaggerated, but literally true, I would say not very many. However, I think that they are hugely important tales in thinking about how people thought about emperors and about the whole sort of thought world of the Romans when they were confronting one man rule and autocracy. And I think they're not wholly different from our own celebrity

• 31:13Speaker 01

  or royal gossip. You know, we know that what we read in some of the tabloids probably not really true. I mean, might have an element of truth, but it's been incredibly embellished.

• 31:25Adam Buxton?

  Yes, I'm thinking of Mariah Carey now. All the legends surrounding, well, she was another petal person.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:32Adam Buxton?

  She liked, so we're told, to have petals scattered in her hotel rooms and would get very angry if they weren't.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:40Adam Buxton?

  But that's probably bollocks.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's probably bollocks, but it tells us.

• 31:45Adam Buxton?

  Not to mess with Mariah.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it tells us about what we think, those of us who tell the story or read the story or say, I'm not sure I believe that. It still tells us about how we think people who have more money than we could ever possibly have, what would they do? There's sort of stories about us, you know, who would I sleep with if I could sleep with anybody in the world? And that's what people project onto Roman emperors and also onto some modern celeb stars. And there are kind of similarities all the way along the line, I think, between modern images of power and ancient ones. And, you know, even the little anecdotes

• 32:30Speaker 01

  that we sometimes tell. Are very similar to some ancient ones. There's a another thing that Elagabalus is supposed to have done or not done is that he never wore the same pair of shoes twice.

• 32:45Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Now, I'm old enough to remember Imelda Marcos, the wife of the dictator of the Philippines, who, you know, after her death, it was supposed that their cupboards were open and there was three thousand pairs of shoes, you know. So shoes become a wonderful emblem, footwear excess.

• 33:03Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Both was and still is a fantastic marker of what the most extravagant person in power does.

• 33:14Adam Buxton?

  And you can actually identify yourself in opposition to that as well with shoes. Cause I remember I interviewed Werner Herzog, the director, and he's he's very proud of the fact that he only I only have one pair of shoes.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  That's right. Yes. And they're they're a wonderful bit of um dress uh for debating and playing with because they're absolutely essential within these modern western culture, particularly when it's cold and wet and snowy, right? They are functional. They get bashed around, you know, they're and yet there's also this kind of image of

• 33:59Speaker 01

  the shoe extravagance, you know, I've got pearls on the soles of my shoes. So they're they're fantastic mix of total functionality, the Werner Herzog line, you know, why do you need more than one pair? They're doing a job, aren't they? And the idea that the clearest mark of luxury is to turn that functional object into something which is almost non-functional.

• 34:23Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  You know, you can't walk around with pearls or diamonds on the soles of my shoes.

• 34:27Adam Buxton?

  Yes. And for my dad and people of his generation, he was always like, well, you can tell a lot about a person by their shoes.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Shoes, yes.

• 34:36Adam Buxton?

  He would always say. And so you've got to polish those shoes, you've got to he was absolutely appalled by the attitude of me and my brother and sister to our shoes.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:48Adam Buxton?

  How can you go around? He was he would get so embarrassed if we were in a restaurant or something and our shoes were not shined.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  No, it is, they are the most kind of interestingly signifying.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Bits of clothing.

• 35:03Adam Buxton?

  Going back though to tales of apocryphal things or not apocryphal things. How do you then deal with that? And I'm interested to know in the actual nuts and bolts, and sorry if this is a very dry question, but when you are sat there writing your books, how does it work? You're presumably reading a great deal of stuff. Do you consider a story worth retelling if you've read it in several different sources? Are you sort of joining up facts from one book to another and filling in gaps? How does it work?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  I'm looking for patterns, I suppose. I mean, I've changed my view over my career. I mean, I think that when I was young, I was taught that my job was to look for what really happened. So if I was confronted with an anecdote, like smothering guests to death with rose petals, that the historian provided reasons why that might or might not have happened. And the kind of reasons that we'd all think that you'd need too many rose petals to do it, and it's totally implausible, whatever. And you you kind of ended up going through the things that ancient writers said, and either giving them a tick or a cross. Now, the problem about that is that very few things get, you know, a complete double tick.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  And I got more and more frustrated by the fact that, you know, so much rich literary evidence survives from the Roman world and the Greek world. You know, it's simply not true that we don't know much about the ancient world. We know a huge amount. But I I kind of realised that the way I'd been taught to handle this meant kind of getting rid of a lot of it by saying, look, that's not true. That couldn't possibly be the case. He couldn't possibly have done that. And I suppose over the last thirty years or so, I've become more and more interested in how important lies and fictions are to history, just as much as what is really

• 37:04Speaker 01

  bona fide true. And so what I'm always trying to think is about why would anybody want to tell that story? Forget about whether it's true or not. What's the point of the story? What is it telling us? Either about the teller or about the person it's told about? And That's quite liberating and it opens up a different avenue into history. And I think that there's many stories there are about Nero's acting habits. There's a good case of that, the lock in the theatre door, nobody can escape. The emperor kind of thinks of himself as an actor and people are forced to listen to him or to watch him, they're forced to applaud.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  And if you're caught going to sleep, that's dangerous, don't go to sleep. I mean, it's all wildly over the top, some of it may be a bit true. Why were they so interested in that? And eventually it dawned on me that what's that issue there in the idea of Nero acting or not acting or forcing us to watch him? Is the question of, is the emperor actually just an actor anyway?

• 38:16Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  You know, that the difference between an emperor and someone who is playing the part of being an emperor is miniscule. And the fantasy is, so what if the emperor really is nothing more than an actor? So I came to see that those apparently kind of silly, sometimes lurid stories about what Nero did on the stage, but actually about how you might fantasize about imperial power being no more than play acting.

• 38:55Adam Buxton?

  Right, subversive fantasies, because what was the process for creating an emperor? How did someone like Elagabalus arrive at that position?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  A big mixture. I mean, I think that we tend to look at modern royal families or medieval royal families and we imagine a fixed process of succession.

• 39:16Adam Buxton?

  Primogeniture.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Basically eldest son, and if you haven't got a son, well eldest daughter then, or you kind of go to the cousins. And that we have this vision that you can, as we do, you know, say, he is fourth in the line of succession, you know, and that you can. Plotted and there isn't any doubt about, you know, we know that if he's still alive, William is going to be the next king. It's quite a convenient system. The problem about it is that if the first born son happens to be completely useless, you get him as king anyway.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  So as where you're trading certainty, system, predictability against the possibility that the guy is useless. Now, Rome doesn't have a system of primogeniture, doesn't have it in really in any sphere. I mean, in terms of, for example, the becreathing of property, that kind of stuff. It's much more fluid than we are. And there are advantages in that. You get a wider choice. Now, that's not to say that any Tom, Dick and Harry in the Roman terms could hope to be emperor, but within the court circle, within the circle of the aristocracy, there's much more possibility for making an interesting and inspired choice.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  The downside of this system, this Roman system, is that everybody's always jockeying for position because succession is never fixed and you're always trying to make a good impression, to make sure that you get over your rivals, to come to the emperor's eye, to suggest that maybe it should be me. And the favoured candidates then get, you know, metaphorically or literally stabbed in the back because of the rivals clustering around them. And when it actually comes to the moment when the emperor dies, it's all a bit improvised. I mean, what you've got to do is you've got, if you're in Rome, give some money to the

• 41:16Speaker 01

  people quick, give some money to the soldiers quick, because you don't want an army uprising. And you kind of butter up the senate, you buy off. The others, and you just hope it works.

• 41:30Adam Buxton?

  Right, but is there a formal process where everyone sits around and say, well, we've made our decision. We've heard what you all have to say. It's gonna be elegabulous, even though he's a teenager and a petal murderer. We think he's the guy for the job.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  And it's got the soldiers behind him and mum's very well connected.

• 41:48Adam Buxton?

  Right, so mum was well connected, was it?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  In this case, mum was well connected.

• 41:51Adam Buxton?

  So he had a momager who was pulling the strings.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yes, although one always has to be careful. That is certainly what Roman writers would say, look to mum. And they said that about Nero's mum. Um, there's always a touch of misogyny in that, I think. You know, that if you don't quite know how somebody managed to be the guy that was eventually proclaimed.

• 42:16Adam Buxton?

  Scheming woman.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Scheming woman is always a good way of explaining it.

• 42:19Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. And then I'm interested to know about the actual books that you're looking at and the actual sources. Have you ever been in a position to look at things that no one has translated before? Or no one has investigated, for example?

• 42:34Speaker 01

  You certainly have to read things for which there are no decent translations. There's very few things for which there's no translation whatsoever. But one of the most extraordinary writers in the ancient world, and you know, should be much, much better known, is the second century doctor writing in Greek called Galen.

• 42:55Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah, I wanted to ask you about that.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  He is, you know, if you, if you say, oh, let's go through the household names of ancient authors. You'd have to go a very long way before anyone said Galen.

• 43:05Adam Buxton?

  Aelius Galenus.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  That's right, Galenus, everybody calls him Galen. He is responsible, directly responsible for 10% of all surviving literature in ancient Greek.

• 43:20Adam Buxton?

  Wow.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  You know, so, you know, roll over Plato, Euripides, Homer, right? Galen wrote more than all of you combined. And it is.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Some of it is pretty hardcore medical stuff, you know. How does the heart work, this kind of thing. And you can perhaps see why it wasn't the most attractive to translate, although it had a very big role in the Islamic medical tradition.

• 43:50Adam Buxton?

  Huh.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  And some of it, some of Galen now only survives in Arabic translation. But you also get most, if you, if you can kind of beam down into bits of this. You can pull out sorts of nuggets that people haven't really ever pulled out before, or at least have never kind of become widely known. Because Galen was actually the sort of top doctor, Dr Michael Mosley sort of figure, I think, to Roman emperors and the imperial family.

• 44:23Adam Buxton?

  Gut health, was that one of his big ones?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  He is very keen on gut health. And he describes his imperial patients and what he did to them as a wonderful bit, where the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, you know, the one who's still so popular because of his meditations, surviving, you know, still a bestseller, Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius got some terrible tummy problem and his junior doctors who'd been treating him think he's going to die. So in the end, it's like getting the consultant and they telephone Galen and he comes rushing around to the palace to see what's going on and discovers that the junior doctors have been treating the emperor with porridge, awesome version of porridge, which has really gummed him up, you know, he was gummed up anyway. And then they give him more sort of sticky sludge to eat.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  So Galen says, no, no, I've got to stop that. And he prescribes an anal suppository, which works a treat. Marcus Aurelius recovers and it is, so far as I know, though other people might know better, the earliest reference to an anal suppository in at least Western medical literature.

• 45:31Adam Buxton?

  Right. And do we know what the content of the suppository was? What was he sticking up there?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Uh, we do know because we know a bit of it, because he also has a cheaper version to be taken by mouth. I can't remember exactly what goes into his suppository, but it's really absolutely top of the range private medicine stuff.

• 45:50Adam Buxton?

  It's going to be sort of herbs though, isn't it?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yeah.

• 45:53Adam Buxton?

  When you go to Rome, how often do you go to Rome?

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Well, I've started going again. Covid just interrupted that for me. I mean, I used to go several times a year. It's a very good place to work, you know, I didn't just go to eat the pasture or see the archaeological sites. There are wonderful libraries in Rome you couldn't work in. I've gone several times in the last year or so.

• 46:16Adam Buxton?

  Where are your favourite places to go if someone listening to this has never been to Rome before?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  I can tell you where not to go and I can tell you where I like.

• 46:24Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, great.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  I found the Vatican. Everybody wants to go and see the Vatican. I find that absolutely dreadful. I've never been to the Vatican except in the middle of a vast queue, kind of being pushed around. You can't. The Sistine Chapel is wonderful, but seeing it with five hundred other people, I tell you, it's no fun. So I try to keep away from the really big hotspots like that. I like going to the sites or museums just a little bit off the beaten track because they have wonderful things in them, but you can kind of see them and you can sit down and you're not surrounded by everybody else trying to photograph the same object. And one of my favourite museums is the so-called Palazzo Massimo

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Museum, which is quite near the central station, so it's very convenient. It has in it one of the most famous and glorious works of all Roman art. The painted so-called garden room of the Emperor's Livia. It's been removed from its site and put into the museum. It's a dining room on a villa owned, we believe, by the Emperor's Livia, but the walls were painted as if you were in a garden. And there are flowers and birds and leaves, bees, and you go into this room and it's kind of just the garden, this fake garden envelops you and you think, you know, how could they do it? It's just amazing.

• 47:55Adam Buxton?

  Hmm.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Now you can usually see it almost on your own, you know?

• 47:59Adam Buxton?

  Really? Do you have to book for that place then?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  You used to be able, you used to have to book, but now you can, I mean, you can buy the ticket online, but I have never seen it full. And there is another wonderful museum called the Centrale Monte Martini Museum, which is a bit less central.

• 48:19Adam Buxton?

  I'll put links to these in the description.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  That would be great, because this is a museum which is, it's in an old power station. And there is the most eye-watering Roman sculpture, all arranged in front of these great turbines. And the juxtaposition is just absolutely amazing. And it's got, you know, a whole lot of just really surprising things in it. And again, not many people were, I mean, most people, the school parties have been brought to see the turbines, not the sculpture. Yes, it's Rome's first power station.

• 48:59Adam Buxton?

  Oh, those are great recommendations. I wanted to ask you to conclude then about Bob Dylan.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  One of my favourites.

• 49:07Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, because I heard you on Desert Island Discs and that was the first track that came up. It made me quite emotional hearing It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, you know, which I've heard many, many times. But maybe I hadn't heard it for a while and suddenly it was like, oh yeah, but he's so good, isn't he?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  He's so good. And I chose it for all sorts of reasons on Desert Island Discs. Partly I had a very eccentric old teacher at my school, who was absolutely convinced in the virtue of poetry as language and as words and as recited. And he had a very amazing, for the 1970s, very capacious version of poetry. So, yeah, we did bits of Wordsworth, we did, you know, whatever, and learnt them all by heart. But we also learnt Bob Dylan, because he thought, and he's later been, as it were, joined by many others. He thought Bob Dylan was a great poet and I remember we had to learn The Carpet Too Is Moving Under You

• 50:08Speaker 01

  and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.

• 50:10Adam Buxton?

  True.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  You know, I kind of, that was, I learnt that as an English lesson.

• 50:15Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  When I was sixteen or seventeen. You know, that's where it kind of enters the soul. But then, as I think I've already said on Desert Island Discs. It's something that the whole family liked, you know, you know, my husband, a bit older than me, he loves Bob Dylan, our kids love Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan is somebody that, that again crosses the generations.

• 50:41Adam Buxton?

  It sounds pretty timeless. That was the thing that struck me. It was like, yeah, this is good to go for whichever age you're.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. And I think, you know, there's long car journeys. There's a lot of things that one part of the family could never stomach, you know, you know, please turn the opera off, Dad, you know, but Bob Dylan kind of fits for everyone.

• 51:10Adam Buxton?

  Wait. This is an ad for Squarespace.

• 51:14Adam Buxton?

  Okay, we'll return to the AI apocalypse in just a wee wee moment, but first I wanted to talk about Squarespace. Do you know about Squarespace, Steve? Uh, yes, Monty. I think I might even be a little bit more tuned into modern tech, websites, et cetera, than you. I don't know, just guessing. Oh, Steve, I love this dynamic. I'm old and conservative and you're young and progressive and that's what makes the Newswind podcast such great listening. But yes, you're right. I must admit, I didn't know much about Squarespace, but because my new grumble book, Hell in a Handcart, is out this month, and I look forward to getting enraged by that, so I should hope.

• 51:45Adam Buxton?

  Anyway, the publishers, Bluestar and Dogwhistle, made a beautiful website for the book using Squarespace. I know, I got the newsletter that you sent out using Squarespace and the website does look great. Videos of you airing your views, members' areas for your mad fans. You've even got a merch store, I see. That's right. The Union Jack top hat is a big seller, but they constructed it all so fast with Squarespace. They did most of it over one lunchtime, Steve. Well, you wouldn't want to spend much longer on it, would you? Shut up, Steve. But here's the thing. Anyone listening to this can start a free trial right now at Squarespace.com/BUXTON and see how easy and versatile Squarespace is. And when they're ready to launch a new website or domain, they can save 10% off their first purchase by using the offer code BUCKSTON at checkout. Right, well, maybe I'll visit Squarespace.com/BUXTON and start a new website just to refute all the nonsense in your new book.

• 52:29Adam Buxton?

  Oh, don't do that, Steve. I will. Oh, shut up, Steve. Uh. Shut up. Now, back to more depressing matters on Newswind.

• 52:49Adam Buxton?

  Hey, welcome back, podcasts. That was Mary Beard talking to me there. Thank you so much to Mary for making the time to come and give me a private tutorial. Really appreciated it, and I highly recommend her book, Emperor of Rome. There's a link in the description, as well as links to a few other bits and pieces that we talked about, those museums that she recommended. There's a link to the London Review of Books, where you can find Mary's diary piece that she wrote after 9/11 and all the responses to it, including the one from Marjorie Perloff and Colum Tobin. Wow, it's really got quite inclement out here.

• 53:29Adam Buxton?

  The sun is gone, and there's just about enough light to see by, but it's just very dark grey and raining. And I'm glad for Rosie that I didn't make her come out in this. And I'm looking forward to going home, getting some tea. But before I do that, here is an uplifting film recommendation from friend of the podcast, Jesse Armstrong.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Hi, Adam. My recommendation is for Turn Every Page. It's a documentary about the relationship between biographer Robert Caro, author of the as-yet-unfinished multi-volume biography of LBJ that every serious person has to pretend to have read, and Bob Gottlieb, the super-editor to everyone, from Joseph Heller to Toni Morrison. I don't re-watch films much, but this one I like very much. I watched it with my fellow writer, Toni Roach, in New York City when we were having a particularly tense time making Succession, and it felt like a sort of consoling and charming film about growing older, about collaboration, and about the grind that you have to go through

• 54:42Speaker 02

  sometimes for creative work, which we hear less about than flashes of inspiration. It also ends, as Toni noted, with one of the lowest-stakes chase scenes in history, as the author and the editor, both in their 90s, conduct a slow-motion hunt for the appropriate pencil. Hope you like it, too.

• 55:01Adam Buxton?

  Thank you very much, Jesse. Put a link in the description to the trailer for Turn Every Page about Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. And I think that you would find it interesting, even if you hadn't read any of Robert Caro's books.

• 55:18Adam Buxton?

  But I guess it would be particularly interesting if you had. The big one from Robert Caro, they talk about at the beginning of the documentary. Uh, the one that made his name was The Power Broker. Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Which chronicles the rise of urban planner, Robert Moses and his transformation of New York's landscape. However, Caro's magnum opus is that multi-volume series, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. And I heard Rory Stewart talking about it. In fact, I'll tell you where I heard him talking about it. It was in a onstage discussion with Mary Beard. And I've put a link to that conversation about power.

• 56:03Adam Buxton?

  That Mary Beard and Rory Stewart had. And at one point Rory Stewart says, oh, I would recommend everybody read Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. And I thought, okay, I'll take that challenge. I looked up just the audiobooks. I thought, well, you know, let's not go crazy here. I can listen to the audiobook while I'm doing other things. But just the first volume of the audiobook is over forty hours long. So it's going to take you a long time if you really want to munch through the whole lot. But I've almost finished the first volume and uh there's been some great times. There's been some slightly more dense than I would prefer times

• 56:48Adam Buxton?

  about some of the technicalities of policymaking and bill passing, et cetera. But there's also so many amazing sections where Robert Caro talks about the Texas Hill Country.

• 57:05Adam Buxton?

  Where LBJ grew up, what the land was like. He talks about the actual soil and the composition of the land and how it changed when people began farming there. And that might sound a bit dry, but it's not. It's just, it's like an adventure story. And his descriptions of the conditions in which people grew up around those times, people with no electricity, right up until the early thirties, up in the Texas hill country, what their lives were actually like. Grinding, backbreaking work that particularly the women had to undertake as part of their daily lives. It's quite amazing.

• 57:47Adam Buxton?

  So if you've got a spare forty plus hours for volume one and another two hundred for the rest, dive in. But if you're on a bit more of a budget time wise, I think you'd really enjoy Turn Every Page. Okay, I'm being heavily rained on now. I don't know if you can hear, but I'm going to head back. Thank you so much once again to Mary Beard. Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for all his production support and conversation editing. Thanks very much to everyone at Acast for keeping the show on the road. Thanks to Helen Green, her beautiful artwork. Thanks most especially to you, podcasts. Hope you enjoyed this one.

• 58:30Adam Buxton?

  Thank you very much for coming back. And I mean, I'm a little damp, but I don't think the dampness will come through the headphones. I hope not anyway, if I reach over and give you a bit of a hug. Hey, good to see you. All right. Until Christmas Day, if you're joining myself and Joe for some stupid live waffle from the Royal Festival Hall. And if you're not joining us for that, well, I'll see you in 2025. But whatever you're up to.

• 59:05Adam Buxton?

  Go carefully, take care, and for what it's worth, I love you, bye! It's a long one.