Mary Beard on the weaponisation of classics

0:00Mary Beard: Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com.

0:29Mary Beard: Hi, it's Ollie. I'm going away on paternity leave for a couple of weeks. So whilst I'm off, we're going to be bringing you some conversations that we pre-recorded and some conversations from my esteemed colleagues at The New Statesman. I hope you enjoy this episode.

0:45Tanjil Rashid: The New Statesman

0:51Mary Beard: What do the classics mean to you? For some, it's a rich field of study, languages, literature, art, spanning continents and centuries from ancient Greece and Rome to the wider Mediterranean and beyond. For others, it can feel distant, even exclusionary, an elitist subject long associated with privilege and access to certain kinds of education. Classics today remains a battleground of ideas. From university campuses to online culture wars, both the political left and right have sought to claim the ancient world, using Greece and Rome to support very different arguments about identity, democracy, empire and belonging.

1:31Mary Beard: For Mary Beard, these tensions are exactly why the subject still matters. Rather than a relic of the past, she sees the classical world as a powerful tool for understanding the present, an idea she has explored in over 20 books on ancient history and numerous documentaries on the BBC and elsewhere, all of which have made her Britain's best-known classicist. I'm Tanjal Rashid and this is The Exchange from The New Statesman. Mary Beard joins me now. So Mary, thanks for joining us. I mean, your book is dedicated to a man who showed you a 4 ,000 year old piece of Egyptian bread. And this was a major event in your life, apparently.

2:14Tanjil Rashid: Yeah, it sounds a bit silly, but it was. Can you tell us about that? Look, I was five. And this is the first time that I remember being remotely kind of excited by the ancient world. And it happened by chance because my mum, we lived in Shropshire. And I'd never been to London before. My mum, village school teacher, said it was about time I went to see London. So, a century or so, particularly laden as a brand for a particular form of right-wing, imperialist, misogynistic microculture within the West. And I think to some extent you could not, you cannot deny that some of the people who tried to storm the capital, did storm the capital on the 6th of January, were holding banners which appealed to classical civilisation in some way.

3:16Tanjil Rashid: That is undeniably true. The question that you have if you're a professional classicist is, A, not to shy away from that. I think you've got to kind of look, you've got to face that. But you have to think, so what do I do about that? Where does that position me? Well, I think that I'm very conscious that now, and I totally understand this, a lot of professional classicists, particularly younger than me, feel ashamed to some extent, as I also do. of the uses to which the classical past has been put.

4:09Tanjil Rashid: That's what my position is. And I think that, look, I'm 71 and you feel a bit calmer about that when you get to my age. It's not that you don't feel opposed to that, but you feel less angry about things. and when I'm confronted by that I think the first thing I do is to show what a skewed vision of the ancient world that is and so you've got far-right, alt-right, racist, white supremacy groups what do they use as their logo? They use white classical sculpture. It doesn't take very long to sit down with somebody and to say, look, we have created a particular image of the classical world as if it's white.

5:08Tanjil Rashid: Let me show you what these sculptures once upon a time looked like. They were, in our view, possibly quite garish. But they didn't have that kind of sense of legitimating any kind of white supremacy at all.

5:27Mary Beard: Is it true that they were commonly painted and decorated?

5:31Tanjil Rashid: Ancient sculpture, not always probably, but it's normally painted. There is a debate about how it's painted because there are only microscopic traces of the paint left and it's quite hard to reconstruct accurately the colour scheme of these statues. But there is one school of thought that does produce what we would think of as a kind of Disneyland version of these sculptures. Now, you have to say, look, I mean, I find that quite reassuring because it's a wonderfully easy way to say to people, stop it. You know, we, you, have invested and invented a kind of classical past that never existed. So you can use it if you want, but don't imagine that the ancient Athenians saw it that way because they didn't.

6:33Tanjil Rashid: I think that's quite important.

6:35Mary Beard: Everyone wants to use the past. I mean, you know, the right seems almost sort of stupidly proud of, you know, of this ancient inheritance. But at the same time, the left seems sort of ridiculously ashamed of some of the, you know, of their relationship with the classical past.

6:55Tanjil Rashid: Yeah, I think that's true. And I think, you know, the past is there for us to use. You know, the job of the historian is not simply to uncover it and show people and then move on. It's about the conversation that we have with it. I think that what some of the critics, and as I say, I totally understand where they're coming from. What some of the critics don't, I think, give enough airtime to is the idea, of course, within the last 300 years, The classical past has been used to legitimate left-wing causes as well as right-wing causes. There isn't an intrinsic inherent politics in the ancient world.

7:37Tanjil Rashid: There are different ways of using it. So Marx famously said that the French Revolution was fought in Roman dress. The American Revolution was certainly fought in Roman dress. The proto, very proto-gay movement in this country in the late 19th century was explicitly using the homoeroticism of 5th and 4th century Athenian culture as a way of stamping its brand on the present. So I think people should just be careful before they assume that the only thing that classics has done has been to support the conservative with both the large and small say. I mean, I think one of the most interesting things you get if you look at Gramsci's letters and papers from prison is in one of his short pieces, he says, we need Latin and Greek in schools.

8:50Tanjil Rashid: There's Antonio Gramsci, the most famous 20th century Italian Marxist thinker.

8:56Mary Beard: And lots of anti-colonial thinkers from outside of the West, from places like India, were immersed in the Western classics. And they used them.

9:09Tanjil Rashid: I think they appropriated them really constructively. Wouldn't it have been nice to have been at the performance of Sophocles' Antigone that Nelson Mandela and co. put on Robin Island?

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10:14Mary Beard: and there's actually so much to work with if you're not from europe actually a surprising amount. I mean, if you're interested in the idea of empires, you know, where is the biggest corpus of thought, you know, about empires and imperialism? You know, or, you know, things like the idea of the West, the idea of the East, you know, is this kind of, these concepts are sort of already there in classical literature.

10:43Tanjil Rashid: You know, people imagine, not that, as I see it, I think that the terrain of the ancient world and then debates about the ancient world is actually a space for argument. They seem to imagine that it comes kind of ready-kitted out with a right-wing ideology. Now, in part, that's true. I mean, it would be hard to look at the culture of Rome under the emperors and not see a culture in which empire was jingoistically proclaimed. It is also the case, and it's actually, we know it's often the case that some of the best critiques of empire come from within empires.

11:38Tanjil Rashid: There were Roman writers who framed a critique of empire that is as powerful as any that have ever been made. I mean, the obvious example is early second century historian Tacitus, actually when he's writing about Roman Britain. Now, he scripts, but it's Tacitus' words. He scripts a denunciation of empire. And, you know, the classic few words are, you know, what's the point of empire? What happens? What do the Romans do? And he says they make a desert and call it peace. Now, I would be prepared to say that within the literature I had read, there was no more correct analysis of what empires did.

12:29Mary Beard: I mean, this quote from Tacitus, they make a wasteland and call it peace, or they make a desert and call it peace, is so often quoted in anti-colonial literature or critiques of imperialism, often without even knowing what the source is. interestingly the writer V.S. Naipaul quotes from Tacitus quite a lot in his writings on colonialism I want to ask you another question can I just say

12:57Tanjil Rashid: if you only need to look around what's happening in the world now exactly to know that making a desert and calling it peace is still going on

13:11Mary Beard: and Gaza of course is a region very resonant in the history of the ancient world. Could you perhaps tell us a little about that?

13:20Tanjil Rashid: Yeah, I mean, one of the things I think that, again, we tend to go wrong about when we're thinking about the ancient world is that we think of classical antiquity being Italy and mainland Greece, right? And a few northern provinces like us, you know, who were brought running water by these brutal but, quote, civilising Romans. I suppose that in terms of popular presentations of the ancient classical world, that would be a pretty clear stereotype. Now, the point about antiquity, classical antiquity, is that it doesn't stop at the boundaries of Greece. and what we now call the Near East or the Middle East are some of the most important areas, the most fruitful for most culturally important areas of the whole of classical antiquity.

14:22Tanjil Rashid: I mean, Syria, for example, is the fount of some of the most exciting, imaginative writing in ancient Greek. The coast of Africa is where some of the best, most influential Latin comes from. Now, Gaza is in a sense, as you say, it is central in the ancient world. It's not the ancient classical world. It's not marginal. And I think that it's partly that in the popular imagination, those bits of the classical world are not thought of as being part of the classical world that has enabled the very white right wing appropriation of classics to look in any way plausible. Now, if we had gone to Italy in the first century CE, I think we would have found it a far more diverse culture than we imagine.

15:31Tanjil Rashid: But, you know, I always feel really excited when I go to Hadrian's Wall at South Shields. There is the tombstone of a woman who had, and it's probably a nasty story, who had once been the slave of and then became the wife of, and, you know, how that happened, you know, we can all imagine, of a guy who's on Hadrian's Wall who's from Palmyra. And he puts up a tombstone to this woman, partly in Latin, but he adds Aramaic as well. And you think, actually, it isn't, you know, I'm often accused, I think slightly bizarrely really, of being kind of classics, to Okeree go mad. But everywhere you go in the ancient world, in the ancient classical world, you find those kind of issues about cultural movement, movement of people, diversity, and parts of the world not obeying the kind of boundaries that we think, that we treat as almost, quote, natural.

16:58Mary Beard: Is it true that one of the Roman emperors was an Arab, so-called Philip the Arab?

17:02Tanjil Rashid: That's Philip the Arab, and Septimius Severus was certainly born in what we call Libya. Now, what usually happens here, as you can imagine, what usually happens is an ultimately fruitless attempt to pin down the exact ethnicity of these people. And then not just that, but to try to pin down their skin colour.

17:28Mary Beard: And that becomes an interesting exercise in working through ideas of ethnicity and comparing our different notions through time.

17:35Tanjil Rashid: That is what I think, that what the ancient world does, what the ancient Roman world does, and that's what I was meaning by, I suppose, getting a different perspective on ourselves, that the idea of thinking about, in Rome, a ruling class, actually, that just didn't look like us, that was incorporating, that actually boasted of its far-flung origins. Rome is a culture, I think it is less true in most of classical Greece, but not entirely. Rome is a culture which celebrates its origin as migrants and refugees. The stories they tell about themselves are stories of being migrants. How was the Roman race founded?

18:31Tanjil Rashid: It was originally founded in myth, I underline, not in reality. It was founded because Aeneas, a Trojan from the coast of what we would call Turkey, had left the burning city of Troy and founded a new race in Italy.

18:53Mary Beard: I mean you've mentioned this idea of you know this criticism that people have of you of classics wokery but I want to ask you I mean is it not true to an extent that because you are left-leaning you are more sympathetic to certain uses of the classical past and certain narratives and if you then you know admit to using the past in that way does that not then justify the right using the past to their ends?

19:24Tanjil Rashid: I think the answer to that is kind of yes. I think that it would be a very odd world in which we said that our own views, our own politics had nothing to do with how we examined and explored the past. Before, you know, if history is a conversation with the past, you're bringing something to it. You're not simply providing a voice for actually those who can no longer speak. And history in its forever, right? And you can go back to, you know, the origins of Western history, certainly, and I'm sure elsewhere, has, you know, it's been politically and culturally engaged. The best sort of history has been that.

20:15Tanjil Rashid: Now, I think that you then have to say, and this is where I kind of feel less rigid than I used to. I don't own that past. I am constructing a version of it, and I want to share my version of it, and I want to share what I think are the problems, and I want to use it to open a space of debate. I would like to persuade people who are using it for far-right causes that that's a sticky intellectual wicket to try to bat on. I would like to persuade them of that. But I don't want to remove their right to do that. You know, the past is out there for anybody to come in and engage with and to talk about.

21:14Tanjil Rashid: And it's up to people like me, I think, not to act as gatekeepers for our own vision of the past, to say, sorry, you know, you're not allowed to use it in that way. Everybody's allowed to use it. All I can rely on is persuasion. Yeah. And to hope that actually the past can be a good place where we can talk about some things that are perhaps more difficult to talk about when we're talking about the here and now.

21:48Mary Beard: Of course, they would say that, you know, people on the left-leaning side of the spectrum are also on a sticky wicket. Is it that everyone's on a sticky wicket and you just sort of play the game and try to persuade each other?

21:59Tanjil Rashid: In a sense, that's all we can do. That's all we can do. And I don't feel that's therefore been a failure. I feel that if you think that the past is inevitably part of the way the present makes sense to itself, there's never going to be an authorised version. We're never going to be able to say, so that's the way it happened. And, you know, I can get quite sort of tetchy when people say to me there were no people of colour in Roman Britain. There were. I mean, it is impossibly hard to pin down the number and it's probably very small. but it I think is important to undermine those certainties about what say the British past looked like and what I've discovered when I've been talking about diversity in history is that there is still a quite strong embedded view that there were no people of colour here till Windrush and actually that is simply wrong but I do think it is really important for particularly university academics not to claim they own things, not to claim they own the subject or the past.

23:32Tanjil Rashid: They've got, I think, a responsibility to intervene and to argue

23:41Tanjil Rashid: but people like me have long claimed and deplored the way that university professionals have acted as gatekeepers for a particular view of things. And in that case it would be often a conservative view of things. I'm afraid now you have to say we are not policing the boundaries of this subject.

24:09Mary Beard: Stay with us. We're going to take a quick break. Remember, you can listen to the New Statesman podcast ad free by downloading the New Statesman app. It's available on iOS and Android. Links are in the show notes. We are excited to announce that we have launched a new podcast called The New Society, exploring life and culture in Britain and beyond. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, subscribe to The New Society feed. In the latest episode, we spoke to James Baldwin's biographer, Nicholas Boggs, about the life and times of the great African-American novelist. Save 75 % off a New Statesman subscription this spring.

24:46Mary Beard: Go to newstatesman.com slash spring26 to subscribe today. We'll be back after this.

24:55Mary Beard: Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com.

25:25Mary Beard: How do you feel about the idea of expanding the classics to the study of cultures beyond Greece and Rome? I mean, why not ancient Egypt? Why not Mesopotamia? Why not, you know, the study of Sanskrit, which is related to Greek in its own way?

25:39Tanjil Rashid: I think that's been on the agenda. Those questions of, OK, you're studying classics, where does the boundary lie, has been on the agenda for as long as classics has been a professional subject, a university academic subject. And I say somewhere in the book that I was surprised to discover, but it was interesting, that in Cambridge, in the arguments that they were having at the late 19th century in Cambridge about what a subject called classic should look like, there were some people who were determined to make it a three language subject, which was Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. Now, what's interesting is that you look at that to start with and you think, oh, that's rather enlightened.

26:34Tanjil Rashid: Right. How interesting. It was actually a view put forward by the rather conservative people in Cambridge who really wanted to make classics a subject which you studied language only. They weren't trying to broaden the cultural horizon of their students. They wanted to add another language. They particularly didn't want people studying archaeology. So these boundaries change and are disputed constantly.

27:10Mary Beard: Surely it had something to do with the existence of India as a colony as well. I think it would be hard to extract it from that.

27:21Tanjil Rashid: But they were concerned most of all with a particularly Indo-European set of linguistic forms. They were not trying to get people to read early Sanskrit poetry. They were trying to get people to understand the linguistic forms that are fundamental to Indo-European. Now, you know, you can second guess forever what it would then have looked like if that had been the way things had gone.

27:52Mary Beard: Yeah, it seems very interesting. I mean, it seems to me like a missed opportunity almost.

27:55Tanjil Rashid: But when you, that's what I thought when I first of all saw it, when I saw who the spokespeople were for this. Yeah. You know, it was what it was. It was there was a whole load of people who said, look, material culture, the art, the pottery, the archaeology of the ancient world is so important to understanding it. But what the Sanskrit brigade wanted to do was keep archaeology out. So they were like, no, if we're going to expand this, we don't do it that way. We do it this way. Now, of course, that would have given all kinds of opportunities for later expansion in different ways. But every time you kind of parachute into some debate about classics or what it should be like, you find those strange anomalies.

28:53Tanjil Rashid: you find people are in some ways seeming like they're prequels of us, but then for different reasons. And I think ancient Egypt will be one place here. When I was an undergraduate, ancient Egypt had a strange mini foothold in Class X. So you left behind the pharaohs, you sort of allowed Cleopatra and the Ptolemaean dynasty a walk-on part. And then there were all the papari that were being found or looted from Roman Egypt that were actually giving us more classical literature. And we were taught to kind of treat those in a vacuum, really. You lifted them from Egypt. You didn't think about what the culture of Greco-Roman Egypt had been.

29:45Tanjil Rashid: Now, in my lifetime, the boundary between, quote, the classical world, in inverted commas, and the North African shores has changed unbelievably, as with Christianity. You know, when I was a student, we never looked at the Acts of the Apostles. Now, you might say, The Acts of the Apostles is a most valuable ancient text. It is written within a provincial community of the first century of the Roman Empire. It is a provincial view upwards and outwards. But we didn't do it. Why didn't we do it? Because it belonged in theology. And so there are always these pushes and pulls at the margins. So I think it's healthy for a subject.

30:37Tanjil Rashid: Where is the boundary of my subject? Is the boundary as conventionally put? Is it preventing me seeing some things that would be useful to see? Or what is it helping me see?

30:51Mary Beard: I mean, in your presentation of it, it seems like classics can be a device for understanding almost any kind of social or historic phenomenon. And that sounds great. And it's also interesting to note that that was kind of how it worked in that if you go back a few generations in academia, almost everyone had a solid grounding in classics before they went into some other kind of discipline, even the social sciences. Well,

31:19Tanjil Rashid: Fraser, J.G. Fraser, now rather unfashionable founder of modern anthropology. Actually, he was a classicist at Trinity College, Cambridge. And in fact, he was one of those guys who was very keen on getting archaeology in, not so keen on the Sanskrit.

31:35Mary Beard: Can I ask you about how you feel about basically the complete evisceration of the study of classics in state schools? And the cause of sort of reviving classical education seems to be very much a sort of right wing cause. So how do you navigate this issue?

31:54Tanjil Rashid: I think in many different ways. I think that classical learning, classical languages, but also classics in translation, has not been quite as eviscerated from the standard curriculum as we might imagine. You're absolutely right that you still stand a better chance of being introduced to the Greeks and Romans if you're at an independent school. or if you're at some independent schools, because there are plenty of independent schools that have no Latin and Greek whatsoever. But I think that there is, A, some really effective work actually being done in helping, I think not directing, but helping schools, and many of them do want to do this, who'd like to include a classical element in their curriculum, helping them do that and providing the funds to do that.

32:58And it's a great charity, Classics for All, which is directing hard cash to schools that are wanting to often bring back a classical element.

33:10Tanjil Rashid: And I think that is hugely important. I mean, there is no way and I'm sure there are some ideologues, I'm sure, who would like to have every child learning Latin. You know, that would be so stupid. It would be so stupid. And it was never the case. It was only the rich people that learned Latin anyway.

33:32Mary Beard: But why was the reaction against Latin and Greek so strong in Britain? Because in other European countries that have had left-leaning governments, sometimes even sort of socialist or communist governments, and they did not attack the study of Latin and Greek in the way that Britain seems to have done.

33:48Tanjil Rashid: I think that's true, although there are very different patterns in different European countries about different complaints about how or praise for how Latin and Greek is part of the curriculum. I think that there was something in the UK, particularly actually in England, really. I think Scotland's probably separate from this, where because Latin in particular, Greek has always been a minority language. But Latin in particular was used to fix the boundary of elite culture. so that, for example, up until the 1960s, if you wanted to go to either Oxford or Cambridge and some other universities to study any subject at all, you had to have Latin O level.

34:45Tanjil Rashid: So you wanted to study physics, you needed Latin O level. As you look back on it, and this is within my lifetime, and it looks barking mad, but it was an inheritance of the way I think rather more edgily than elsewhere and there were different patterns elsewhere in Europe partly because of the different patterns of Catholicism versus Anglicanism. I think that there was a different route in say France or Italy for Latin than there was here But it became the symbol of how the elite kept women in the working class out. And it therefore prompted, as it's held weakened in those very formal ways, it prompted the kind of reaction to it that I think we've seen.

35:51Mary Beard: And I suppose logically there are two reactions to that. You either get rid of the insistence on learning Latin or alternatively you could make the study of Latin completely democratic and universal and available to all. And we chose the former option. And I wonder if maybe it would have been more fruitful to choose the latter option.

36:17Tanjil Rashid: I think when you put it in terms of choice, I'm not sure how conscious the choice was. And I think it went along at certain points with, as often happens, with moments of economic stringency. And so that it became the acceptable victim of cuts. But I think that the other pathway that you suggest is that what you want is classics to be, you want classics and the opportunities classics offers you to understand what it's like to be in the present as well as in the past. You do want that to be available to everybody. You don't want to ram it down their necks. I've seen the book somewhere. I think it's a terrible shame not to be interested in the ancient classical world, but it's not compulsory.

37:12Tanjil Rashid: And I think that that is increasingly hard work, but it's increasingly the case. And I think that, I mean, you can now get up in front of a hall full of 16, 17 year olds thinking about what they might want to do at university. Some of them might be interested in the classical world because they visited a museum or they've gone to Fishbourne, Roman Villa or whatever. And you can honestly tell them what you couldn't tell them when I started at university, that there isn't a university in the country where you cannot learn Latin and Greek from scratch. So there is no entry requirement anywhere that you have to have Latin and Greek language.

38:07Tanjil Rashid: Now, why that's important is the Latin and Greek language, of course, Latin in particular was that idea of a kind of qualifying step for the elite. And it became hugely mystified because of that. And the idea of it being what only the really clever brackets and privileged could do. and it's taken a very long time to get that stereotype out of Latin because I don't go around to so many high schools as I used to before I retired but there is still a view out there in the world that if you want to study classics at university because you're really interested in it, you'd certainly need Latin already.

39:03Tanjil Rashid: That is not true.

39:04Mary Beard: So finally, Mary, I want to ask you, I mean, let's say you have an audience of high school students. What is the one classical text that you would recommend they read, whether at school or in their own time? What's your strongest recommendation for?

39:22Tanjil Rashid: The Odyssey. Most of my life I spent, not entirely, but I mostly worked on Rome. But I think that Homer's Odyssey is a work of literature which introduces you at the very origin of Western literature to so many of the big questions that we still face. Now, I'm not saying it's got the answers. I mean, I think there's a real danger, and this is the right wing danger, I think, to imagine that the classical world has the answers. It doesn't have the answers. It's got the questions. And Homer's Odyssey raises issues about how do you know you're civilised? What's the difference between civilisation and barbarity?

40:13Tanjil Rashid: Can you ever see things from the other point of view? And what is it to be a man, to be a person, to be a wife, to be a leader? And how can you ever tell the story of, how do you tell big stories like that? And what I think is amazing about the Odyssey is that, look, as we have it, it's whenever exactly it was written down, it's the second work of literature in the West. And you kind of think when you pick it up, you think it's going to be quite simple then, isn't it? Surely literature starts simple and gets more complicated. And by the time you get to postmodernism, we are really complicated.

41:06Tanjil Rashid: But back to two and a half thousand years ago, it was kind of simple. you've got the most complicated, intricate tale where you don't even meet the hero for six books of this poem. You know that he is the hero, but you don't see him. And you've got stories within stories. I'm not surprised. When Bob Dylan got his Nobel Literature Prize, one of the works he picked out was the Odyssey. It's travelling man, he said. Travelling man.

41:42Mary Beard: Yes, so I suppose that's what you mean by the shock of the old. When you encounter the old and you're just shocked by its complexity and strangeness and also familiarity.

41:54Tanjil Rashid: It's not ever quite what you think it is.

41:57Mary Beard: You've been listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman with me, Tanjal Rashid and Mary Beard. This episode was produced by Catherine Hughes and Biba Kang.

42:33Mary Beard: Thank you. com.