Mary Beard reveals what President Donald Trump and the emperors of Ancient Rome have in common

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

The thing about Classics is that it’s very zingy at the moment,” says Dame Mary Beard, smiling benignly in her study below a fragmentary William De Morgan tile image of a scene in Italy. “Do you know what I mean?” Er… no. “Yes you do. ‘Zingy’, as in it’s doing well. There are lots of people out there taking Classics to schools. It’s ‘zingy’ as in full of life.”

Sorry, yes, of course. And no, I had no idea. But, I explain, I had also been under the impression that she alone had been tasked with promoting the subject to the mainstream world. “I’m always very anxious to say that Classics is a really live subject,” she responds with a reproving flicker. “There are loads of people writing things just as interesting or more interesting than me.”

But then they’re not known as “the world’s most famous classicist” or any of the other epithets that accompany Beard’s appearances in the media. “Embarrassingly so,” she sighs. “It does make it look as if I’m somehow the only one out there. But it’s only because I was on the BBC and it converted me a little into the public face of the subject.”

She pauses and takes a sip of wine. “I would be very surprised if people didn’t think, ‘Oh God, it’s Mary Beard on the television again’, whenever I’m on. But my colleagues in Cambridge have been so supportive of what I do that I couldn’t possibly complain about whatever they say [about me] when I’m not listening.”

Her latest book, Talking Classics: the Shock of the Old, is essentially a distillation of three lectures she gave at the University of Chicago in 2023 about, as she puts it in the introduction, “Why should we bother about what people did 2,000 years ago; what they made, wrote and thought?” It is a question you would expect her to answer with room to spare. And she does – but with a twist.

“A lecture is different,” she says. “In print, you can’t bring people with you in real time so I decided not to say, ‘The point of Classics is this...’ but, ‘Over 50 years, this is what has interested me’. It’s a bit of a memoir and enables it to be more intimate and personal.”

Before she begins to recount her journey into antiquity, the 71-year-old Professor Emerita of Classics and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, takes pleasure in trashing lazy assumptions associated with her subject.

There is, she says, nothing “uniquely admirable in Greek and Roman culture”; the surprising thing about classical literature is not how much has been lost “but that so much remains”; and the subject needs to face up to “its reputation as a friend of imperialism and fascism, as a bastion of privilege, exploitation and social exclusion”.

But for all that, she has been in love with the ancient world since a chance encounter with a 4,000-year-old piece of Egyptian bread in 1960 – a man in the British Museum opened a display case and held it up for five-year-old Mary to inspect (the book is dedicated to this unknown inspirer).

Decades later, her enthusiasm remains undimmed, and it’s her great gift that she’s able to bring the past to life for a modern audience by way of drawing attention to touching or amusing examples of human imperfection and frailty in the ancient world.

She delights, for example, in the graffiti found next to a lavatory in Herculaneum that reads, “Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus, had a good s**t here”; or the fresco in the Bar of Salvius in Pompeii that records everyday life for the regulars as closer to Coronation Street than the epic poetry of Homer.

“There’s a common humanity which we share,” she explains. “But the intellectual excitement for me comes from the fact that their view of the world, their sense of who they were, how they thought the world worked, is so different from our own that you don’t know which side of the rope you’re on.

“When I talk about revulsion at the killing in the Colosseum I get accused of bringing my own ideas into history,” she continues. “But the past isn’t just a bland landscape which we’re not supposed to engage critically with.” Such interrogation, she points out, can also inform the present.

“Roman analysis of ‘power focused on one man’ helps us understand what’s going on in the US today. When President Trump was recently seen to be issuing contradictory statements about tariffs, he was actually employing a very common weapon used by emperors: you change your mind just to demonstrate that you have the power to change your mind, and everybody has to fall in and say, ‘Yes, Emperor, of course.’”

The “Queen of the Classics” is right. Her subject really is “zingy” right now.

Talking Classics: the Shock of the Old is released on Thursday 16 April and is available to pre-order now.

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