Mary Beard says history of the ancient world is a ‘good place’ for perspective | Books | Entertainment

Talking in the run-up to February’s hard-fought Gorton and Denton by-election, Reform’s prospective parliamentary candidate Matt Goodwin was at pains to establish his populist credentials in the face of Establishment sniping. “Most of these people criticising me are nerds,” he sniffed. “The last thing I want is to be at some dinner party table with Nick Robinson and Mary Beard. I’d rather shoot myself in the head.”

While he credibly managed to beat Labour and the Tories into third and fourth place respectively, Goodwin was trounced by the Green Party’s jolly plumber Hanna Spencer. In retrospect, the former academic might actually have shot himself in the foot.

Certainly, he should have been less snooty about the nerdiness or otherwise of potential dining companions. For her part, Britain’s best known classicist (and nerd hero) Dame Mary Beard would’ve welcomed the opportunity to debate the would-be MP. “If I was invited to dinner with Matt Goodwin, I’d go,” she insists with a steely glint in her eye.

“Years ago, I had a minor Twitter row with [Leave.EU co-founder] Aaron Banks about the fall of the Roman Empire. I said he was wrong about some aspect of what he was arguing. What did Banks do? He asked, ‘Are we going to discuss this properly?’
“So we had lunch, and we talked and we disagreed about many things but we agreed about others. What was nice is that when the Matt Goodwin comments came out, Banks went on Twitter and said, ‘She was actually really nice to have lunch with’.”

Did Mr Banks persuade her of the benefits of Brexit, I wonder?

“Nope,” she smiles. “But that is what life should be about. It shouldn’t be sitting in an ideological bunker with people who think like you – it should be getting out and about and talking to people who don’t think like you.”

Which brings us neatly to her new book, Talking Classics, and her theories on why the ancient world is more important than ever in our spreadsheet-heavy age of artificial intelligence, automation and data-driven wonkery.

“It’s not because the Romans or the Greeks are so admirable we should sit and worship them,” chuckles Beard. “Reading ancient literature, thinking about ancient art, makes you think about yourself differently. They teach you complexity and they show you people a very long time ago debated some of the issues we’re still arguing over.

“I don’t think their answers are necessarily right, but you can learn from how to argue about it. And then you learn to see what it would be like not to think like you do.

“The two main ways we learn what it would be like not to be us are through history and fiction. You only need to go onto social media to see that people having a few lessons in what it would be like not to be them would be a very good idea.

“There are different perspectives. How do we come to terms with that? How do other people help us refine and nuance our ways of thinking? How do we make our mind up about things? It’s not about agreeing with other views, it’s about trying to understand them.

“It’s important to get a kind of exterior perspective on yourself so that you don’t go into every argument thinking you’re right, everybody else is wrong and there’s only one way of seeing things. The history of the ancient world is a good place to find that.”

While there’s little doubt we have an almost infinite amount of information quite literally at our fingertips, it’s not much of a leap to suggest many of us are in danger of becoming more closed minded than ever.

“Exactly,” beams Beard. “It’s all about the ability to think outside your own box.”

Often described as the greatest champion of the ancient world since Russell Crowe donned toga and sandals as Maximus Decimus Meridius in Ridley Scott’s blockbuster movie Gladiator, of which more shortly, Beard, 71, is utterly engaging. But that doesn’t mean she is dewey-eyed about her specialist subject.

“People say, ‘Oh, you’ve spent more than 50 years studying the Greeks and the Romans, you really must love them’. But they were probably not very nice! I find them interesting, I find them challenging, I find they unseat my assumptions. But I don’t love them.

“You don’t say to a virologist, as I say in my book, ‘Do you love viruses?’. Or to an astronomer, ‘Do you love black holes?’ These are challenging, sometimes upsetting times to study and they can be shocking. I mean, we admire Athenian democracy through rather rose-tinted lenses – 5th century Athens was a really interesting place for political views and innovation, but it was also full of assassinations, coups, and civil wars.”

Beard tells a charming story involving an almost 4,000-year-old bakery product, an enlightened curator at the British Museum and the origins of her love affair – sorry, fascination – with the ancient world. It was 1960 and she was five and growing up in Shropshire, the only child of a headmistress and an architect, when her mother Joyce thought a trip to the museum would be educational. She was not wrong.

“Like a lot of kids I wanted to see the Egyptian mummies,” Beard takes up the story. “But my mum, and this is where the schoolteacher bit comes in, said that If we were going to see how the Egyptians died, we ought to see how they lived.

“I don’t expect many people remember what museums were like in 1960 but they weren’t made for kids and it was a very old-fashioned room. I couldn’t see most of the things on display because the cabinets and the case were too high. But my mum said, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s a piece of ancient Egyptian bread’.

“Suddenly I thought, ‘Well, I want to see this’. But we had a lot of stuff and I was quite heavy and wriggly. She tried to pick me up but it was right at the back of the case and I was getting a bit cross.”

Salvation came in the form of a curator – “he seemed terribly old, but I imagine he was only about 40” – who asked what she was trying to look at

“He went into his pocket and he got his keys out, unlocked the case, got the bread out and held it in front of my nose, I didn’t actually touch it.”

Getting up close to something so old yet ordinary was spellbinding. It’s such a satisfying tale, more so by the fact Beard, a mother-of-two grown up children, and three-times grandparent, who lives in Cambridge with her art historian husband Robin Cormack, is today a trustee of that very museum and the Egyptian bread remains on display.

“It helped an ordinary kid go into a world I couldn’t have imagined. It’s perfectly possible I would have got into what I do via other routes but this guy made a difference,” she smiles.

“It was somehow more wonderful than a piece of gold because this could have been something somebody ate. This was a link between me and that and the past kind of further away than I could possibly imagine. It was that sense of absolute amazement that the past could be so real you could be putting a nose to it.

“A lesson I took from it is get your keys out and open the cases. That’s the way that you reach five-year-olds.”

Though museum curators no longer have keys and cabinets are undoubtedly sealed tight and climate-controlled, it’s the perfect analogy for her career.

Indeed, her new book is movingly dedicated “In memory of the man who opened the case at the British Museum” and she half wonders whether sharing the tale today might spark a memory in someone else and finally reveal his identity.

“I’ve got no idea who he was, he must be dead,” she ponders. “But maybe actually publicising it a bit will solve the mystery.”

Beard retired from Cambridge four years ago after four decades’ teaching but remains busier than ever. She launched a podcast, Instant Classics, with journalist Charlotte Higgins last year and is currently ploughing through a novel a day as chairwoman of the Booker prize.

She is also looking forward to filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey because of the boost it’ll undoubtedly bring to Homer.

“It’s my favourite work of ancient literature. It’s clever, it’s sophisticated, the way it constructs these different stories,” she says. “When somebody says it’s one of the earliest works of Western literature you might think it’s going to be simple but it’s fascinating.”

The trailer, she admits, has a bit too much male flesh for her taste, but she’s on the whole a fan of film representations of the ancient world – with a couple of notable exceptions. Zack Snyder’s 300, about the Spartans’s heroic stand at Thermopylae against the Persian hordes – “awful” – and 2024’s Gladiator 2, starring Paul Mescal.

“Gladiator was absolutely bloody brilliant but I thought Gladiators 2 was a load of rubbish,” she admits. “It was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Too much CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) and decapitation.”

Nearly as bloodthirsty as modern politics, then.

• Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, by Mary Beard (Profile Books, £16.99) is published on April 16. Instant Classics is available on all good podcast platforms