Talking Classics by Mary Beard

Mary Beard is a well-known figure in the UK media, with TV programmes and regular newspaper columns. She was a professor of Classics at Cambridge University, amongst a host of other academic posts, and is a best-selling author. It is wonderful, therefore, to hear in this book what it was that first drew her to this lifelong fascination with classical history.

As a young girl, she was taken to London for the day, and among the various treats was a visit to the British Museum, where the displays were not as child-friendly as they are today. Struggling to be lifted to see a piece of baked bread from Ancient Egypt, a passing man asked what they were trying to look at. He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, opened the glass case and took out the bread to hold right in front of her. She goes on to say:

‘Never underestimate how powerful the simple act of unlocking a museum case can be. This is a moment whose excitement I can still recapture more than sixty years on: eyeball to eyeball for the first time with such an ordinary fragment of everyday life made by, and for, people who were unimaginably distant from me. I have never forgotten that feeling of being so perilously close to the lost world of the past…’

A few pages later, we are given our first of many lessons in Latin or Greek. In ancient Greek, the experience with the piece of bread would be called thauma, a wonder or a wonderment. But the word has more meanings. 'At its simplest, it could describe the feeling of being amazed, as well as referring to the object that caused the amazement.’

‘But thauma does not stop there. Among its range of ancient meanings was another more surprising and more cerebral one. For thauma also signalled intellectual puzzles and problems which engaged the brain, and made you wonder (here English shares some of this double sense with Greek) about what exactly the object of amazement was, what it meant and how to explain it.’

Talking Classics especially resonated with me, because many years ago I studied Ancient History at university. On all sides, the progress of my study, in particular the wish to take things further, was stymied by the fact that I had never studied Latin or Greek. Beard talks on this at length in this book, reminding us that such linguistic ability used to be essential for anyone wishing to pass through Oxford or Cambridge. It helped to foster an elitism which probably wasn’t necessary. Beard is honest when she uses the word pomposity. This discussion evolves into a discussion of the benefits of studying Classics in the twenty-first century. When the ‘man from the administration’ at Oxford asked the question and talked about transferable skills, he was told by one of the members of the Classics faculty “It teaches you to read difficult things.” It teaches you to grapple with ideas you don’t understand, from an alien world you have never visited.

One of my personal fascinations with Classical history is how some parts have survived to this day, while others have been lost. This is most obvious in written texts, where we know about certain books or plays, but a copy never made it through the medieval scriptoriums into modern times. My own fascination was scenes from Homer’s epics, of which we no longer have the text, but we do have vast numbers of Greek pots, vases, and amphorae which show the scene. We have so much, but we are missing lots as well.

The survival of so many classical images can also be wholly down to later copies. Beard quotes the naked statue of Aphrodite by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Made in the town of Knidos on the coast of modern Turkey, it became renowned in the ancient world and was copied countless times by the Romans. The original did not survive, but many Roman copies did. It seems that the original caused quite a stir, since up until that point, all life-sized statues had been of men or male gods. Aphrodite was the first naked woman. The statue drew visitors from across the Mediterranean and was regarded as one of the most radical and unsettling pieces, even though there had been many two-dimensional representations of naked women on pottery for centuries. This is part of what Beard calls ‘the shock of the old’. Another shock was that most sculpture was brightly painted, not the aesthetic of bare marble we see today.

Beard also spends some time discussing the way classics have been used by subsequent generations. Not just as a way to weed out the best of the scholars, but also for propaganda. There is a picture of Mussolini and Hitler being shown the Emperor Augustus’ Altar of Peace in 1938, exploiting the symbols of ancient Rome. I learned that the ruined circular Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum dates mostly to the 1930s, when it was reassembled and held up by lots of' 30s-era brickwork at the back. We also have the story of John F. Kennedy’s speech in Berlin, saying ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (I am a Berliner), which echoed the classical phrase ‘civis Romanus sum’ (I am a Roman citizen). Unfortunately, the true origin of the quote is Cicero, who reports a Roman citizen saying it as he is crucified, a punishment the laws of the time forbade for a citizen. It is always good to know the context of the quote you are using.

So many things in the ancient world seem foreign to us, but others feel amazingly contemporary. In Homer:

‘We find military defences destroyed as easily as a child wrecks their own sandcastle on the beach; a grieving warrior likened to a tearful little girl pulling at her mother’s dress, to be picked up; and Odysseus tossing and turning in bed over his dilemmas brilliantly compared to a black pudding (‘a stomach stuffed with fat and blood’) being turned round on a roasting spit. Sandcastles, whining toddlers, and black pudding almost 3,000 years ago’.

I enjoyed this book for all its classical stories and their links to the modern day. There are plenty of black and white photographs too, to help bring the narrative to life.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Allen & Unwin