Empire on the Mind: Mary Beard interviewed
Parliament Square in London bristles with so many statues it is like a free version of Madame Tussauds. If you’ve ever wondered why, look no further than Mary Beard’s latest book – Emperor of Rome. Yup it was the hubris and heft of the Roman empire that helped consolidate the aggrandising trend for erecting men (almost always) in stone, marble, bronze and silver. But unlike Madame Tussauds, these statues weren’t warts and all replicas of their subjects but rather instruments via which to consolidate power; in the words of Mary ‘to spread the imperial face around the whole of the Roman world, like never before.’
I talked to Mary, Britain’s most famous classicist, just after the Roman Empire exploded across TikTok. This was the 2023 trend where women asked the men in their lives when they last thought about the #romanempire. The viral phenomenon reached nearly one billion people but I wonder how many of them have since nosed into Mary book or even better, had a chance to listen to her. She has a knack of effortlessly joining the dots of history – from her broad Roman canvass we effortlessly return to London and its oldest bronze statue – Charles I in Trafalgar Square, looking if not Roman (that’s his brother James II a short distance away) certainly very kingly. For Mary this questionable monarch reaffirms the importance of statues.
She explains that Charles ‘is a famous statue of a man who was a bastard. And yet, interestingly, so far as I know, there has not been any campaign to remove him. And it’s always made me think very hard about what is that statue doing? And why do we need a statue of Charles I?’
I wonder if perhaps we feel sorry for his uncouth headless demise? In true Mary-style she pushes that simple statement of sympathy well beyond its boundaries. ‘I would go somewhere along those lines, but I think I would focus it on us. I think he’s a good reminder that we’ve got blood on our hands. We went a different way, we went towards democracy… and he was a victim of that. What human progress should not ever forget are the people who were the victims of it, because progress always has victims.’
Mary often ends her sentences with ‘right’; if I don’t always agree but I’m always impressed. She reminds me of an intellectual prism, casting rays in unexpected directions. Frequently held up as a leading light on the progressive left, (what other woman is celebrated for talking truth to power as an older female academic?) she also enjoys Establishment recognition as a Dame and a trustee of the British Museum. She critiques from the inside which helps to explain her broad appeal. And has an uncanny knack of moving from Roman emperors and the royal family (more on that in a minute) to the benefits of the menopause. (It makes you tougher, apparently).
The end result is a heady, even eccentric, mix that’s inescapably British, or rather English. Mary began life in Shropshire, the only child of a village school mistress in the small hamlet of Church Preen. She recalls collecting milk and eggs from the local farm and the physicality of her parents’ routine, there was a slop bucket and a local stream. In Mary’s words, she began life in ‘unadulterated countryside’ before progressing to the ‘big city’ of Shrewsbury. It is perhaps unsurprising that this rural start led to a career as a classicist at Cambridge University – the pinnacle of academic learning embedded in an airy city renowned for its impressive Georgian architecture, green spaces and cycle lanes.
I first met Mary seven years ago in her handsome Cambridge town house. I was writing Century Girls, a book that featured her erstwhile Classics tutor and dear friend, then ninety-nine year old Joyce Reynolds. Mary granted me a short interview; I can still vividly recall the latter’s reassuring kitchen and dishevelled demeanour from hair to hands. The impression was of a woman almost impossible to place, a chameleon capable of occupying numerous worlds: ancient and modern, domestic and academic, rural and urban, ruling and rebel.
A precocious child, Mary was moved up a class in secondary school and had won a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, by the 1970s. Joyce remembered a very bright girl, Mary remembered Joyce as rather scary – when it came to studying ‘The Greats’ only the best was good enough. Sharing a deep passion for the ancient world, these two ground-breaking classicists with their long silver locks represented different staging posts for women in the twentieth century. Mary, who arrived on our television screens as an ‘older’ person when just half Joyce’s age, is part of a far longer struggle, where small victories can never be taken for granted. (Unlike Joyce, Mary had children and an academic career)
Last year Mary spoke at 103-year-old Joyce’s funeral. On that quiet October day at Cambridge City Crematorium I was struck by the global reputation these two quintessentially English women both enjoyed. Today Mary wryly admits: ‘it’s extremely unfashionable to say you’re English because it has connotations of nasty, slightly too right-wing groups, where waving the flag of St George is not a fashionable thing to do.’ There is also Mary the Brit, and yes, Mary the European. (When I first approached her for an interview she was in Italy). Our conversation comes back to the Romans. ‘They had a vast empire and they were expert in seeing that they had multiple identities. They could be Greek and Roman at the same time.’
Mary frequently pushes back against Roman stereotypes. She talks down ideas of a large scale, industrial ancient lifestyle. Epic Roman battles with locked shields recast through Hollywood should not be conflated with the average inhabitant of an empire predominantly made up of peasant farmers in small holdings across Europe. And then in a classic Mary move we swiftly find ourselves in north Africa with an emperor intervening over a land dispute between his tenants. A reminder that ultimate power sat back in Rome with the Emperor, be he Nero or lesser known Pertinax, revered and recast across the ancient city in statue form.
I suggest there are striking parallels with our own royal family. (King Charles III has a property and land portfolio to rival the mightiest and there is bound to be a statue one day….) Mary extends that idea with a couple of analogies; the first involves a very famous scene from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Twelve wild boar are being prepared for a party of just eight. Mary laughs ‘They put each boar on at a different time to make sure one was perfectly cooked! Now if you go to a certain biography of Charles, there is a story in there, utterly denied by Buckingham Palace, about Charles having seven boiled eggs cooked for him in the morning because they don’t quite know which one is going to be done to his taste.’
With Mary as the canny guide, there are plenty other parallels in her book, opening as it does on teenage Emperor Elagabalus and his party tricks including feeding exotic (revolting) delicacies – camels’ heels and Wamingo’s brains with foie gras – to his pet dogs. Fast forward to the more recent past and rumours that the late Queen fed her precious corgis from silver bowls. According to Mary in both cases through the pet anecdote we can think of royalty and emperors on our own terms, irrespective of whether the stories are little more than myths. In the case of the late Queen, it perhaps shouldn’t surprise us that Mary has filmed inside Windsor Castle and spotted dog bowls littering the hallway. They were plastic. How reassuring, and perhaps just a little bit disappointing.
I am fortunate to interview Mary; the queue was long; nowadays she is much more than Britain’s best known classicist, she has become a national institution. One that is contrarian but not always confrontational – regarding the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles still holed up in the British Museum, Mary, a trustee of the latter, is uncharacteristically hazy about their return to Greece, suggesting something about museums sharing their collections. She is more forthright on royalty; certainly the Windsors are a bountiful reference point to help make sense of the ancient world. Roman emperors were ‘basically ordinary blokes’, who had to imagine themselves as rulers of the world, effortfully trying to embody popular ideas of their rule. A bit like the late Princess of Wales. Mary recounts the story of Diana checking her own image in the newspapers before breakfast, not just because she was vain (Mary’s first thought), but because ‘what Diana needed was to see images of herself which confirmed her view that she was that image.’
I wonder what Mary sees her own image as. We meet on zoom but her camera is turned off, she has a long book tour ahead and one senses that the academic in her must sometimes get tired of being on show. She didn’t acquire her mainstream media profile until her mid-50s and these days Mary is sixty-eight with a merciless schedule. Aware I am eating into a Sunday afternoon with our chat, I tentatively approach the subject of slowing down. She concedes: ‘It would be nice sometimes to get up in the morning and think, ‘I wonder what I’ll do today, instead of it being mapped out.’’ And there is the rub – the older Mary gets, the more her reputation grows, the more in demand she becomes. And as she admits herself, ‘when you get to my age you don’t have all that much time… I lose out on spending Saturday putting my feet up with the newspapers and a cup of coffee until half past eleven.’ The professor’s all-conquering nature is still trumping her inner philosopher-king. But the effort is not in vain. Her impressive fat book Emperor of Rome went straight into the Sunday Times bestseller list. In years to come perhaps there might even be a statue.
Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard is out now.
Tessa Dunlop is a historian and the author of Army Girls: The secrets and stories of military service from the final few women who fought in World War II.
