Mary Beard on Ancient History in Modern life

I’m going to start by throwing down the gauntlet. You teach Classics at Cambridge – in these recession-hit times, when students are struggling to get work, is a degree in Classics still relevant?

Well, it depends what you think education is for. There’s a terrible tendency for the present government and some mums and dads to see university as some kind of professional training. Of course, there are some excellent subjects like that – say, medicine and law. But for me university is all about training the brain. With Classics you are studying so many things, philosophy, archaeology, language, all of which help you in almost any job you want to go for. I know I would say that, but Classics is inherently interesting and absolutely relevant!

Can you describe what your first book, The Greeks and the Irrational, is about?

This is one of the books that made me decide that Classics was worth spending a lifetime on. It starts with this extraordinary anecdote which is very meaningful for many readers. Dodds was at an exhibition of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and he got talking to a schoolboy. The boy told him: “I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t really like this stuff – it’s all so rational.” Well, that got Dodds thinking about this common idea that the Ancient Greeks were all very cerebral, gliding about in white gowns. But was Greek culture so fantastically rational? So Dodds wrote the book to explore that idea.

But why should it matter to us if it is rational or not?

It mattered to me because in order to understand about us, we have to understand what was at stake in the past. What is interesting is that you can take one of the most formative intellectual cultures and show that just underneath that sparkling surface is a seething heart of irrationality that results in madness and murder. Dodds wrote this book just after the Second World War and I think one of the questions in his mind was, not just that nice encounter in the British Museum, but how could European Society have gone so mad that it did what it did. I wouldn’t say there are direct links between Hitler’s Germany and Ancient Greece but there are indirect links about where the non-rational elements are in any culture, and how they work, how you can understand them and what difference that makes.

From Greeks to Romans – tell me about The Annals.

This is the best work of history ever written – that’s a big claim.

It’s been described as tragic historiography and full of dramatic events.

Oh yes, just take the murder of Nero’s mother. There is no better story than Nero’s attempts to murder his mother with whom he is finally very pissed off! Nero the mad boy emperor decides that he is going to get rid of mum by a rather clever collapsible boat. He has her to dinner, waves her fondly farewell. The boat collapses. Sadly for Nero, his mum, Agrippina, is a very strong swimmer and she makes it to the land and back home. And she’s clever, she knows boats don’t just collapse like that – it was a completely calm night, so she works out Nero was out to get her. She knows things are going to end badly. Nero can’t let her off, so he sends round the tough guys to murder her. Agrippina looks them in the eye and says, “Strike me in the belly with your sword.” There are two things going on. One is: my son who came out of my belly is trying to murder me. But the other thing we know is that they were widely reputed to have had an incestuous relationship in the earlier days. So it’s not just Nero the son murdering his mother, but Nero the lover murdering his discarded mistress. And if you read Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, some of it comes directly from this.

It’s better than a Hollywood plot.

Yes but it’s not just that. What he does is seduce you with an extraordinary tale. But, there is also a cynical, hard-hitting analysis of corruption. Reading Tacitus in Latin is like reading James Joyce. It’s language which is really at the margins of comprehensibility as well as being very exciting. But, actually, he wants to talk about the corruption of autocracy. It’s about one-man rule going bad.

Your next book gets a bad press. I’m talking about The Last Days of Pompeii, with its much quoted and ridiculed opening… “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Bulwer Lytton has this terribly bad press and there is even an annual competition in his name to find the worst opening to a book!

Considering it has been so marginalized, why defend it?

Well, I’ve been drawn into this, partly because I’ve been writing about Pompeii. But also there is this incredible influence it has on anyone studying Pompeii. It’s the classic Pompeii disaster story everybody replays when they write about Pompeii. When he went to Pompeii it was a ruin. These days they’ve done a lot of work on it. What Lytton did was build it up layer by layer.