transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Which topics would you most like to see us cover here on the History Extra podcast? Now's your chance to let us know. Have your say by visiting bit.ly forward slash hepodtopics. That's bit.ly forward slash hepodtopics.

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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 8:
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Speaker 9:
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Speaker 5:
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Speaker 8:
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Speaker 2:
[02:04] No, really, stop.

Speaker 5:
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Speaker 9:
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Speaker 1:
[02:20] In our ever-changing, fast-paced, modern world, what's the point of studying the ancient Greeks and Romans? Well, in this episode of the History Extra podcast, internationally acclaimed classicist, Mary Beard, explains why it's so important to understand antiquity today. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper about her new book, Talking Classics, Mary reflects on her long career and her own relationship with the classics. And Mary is one of the headline speakers at this year's Chalk History Festival, which we at HistoryExtra are excited to be partnering up with again this year. It's running from the 22nd to the 28th of June at Broad Chalk in Wiltshire, and other big names on the line up include Tom Holland, Al Murray and Tony Robinson. Tickets are on sale now and you can find out more details and book at chalkfestival.com. But for now, it's on with today's episode.

Speaker 10:
[03:12] You've had incredible career working in the classics for over 50 years, and you've written over 20 books. So I'd like to start by asking, what's different about this book, Talking Classics?

Speaker 11:
[03:25] Well, I don't want to say that it's self-indulgent. I'm not going to say that, but writing it was an opportunity to reflect on a long career, to actually look back and think about, how do you justify what you've done? I spent 50 years researching and teaching and studying what I'm really interested in. Huge privilege, thank you everybody very much. But how do I explain why I think that's worthwhile? Because I think you have to in the end. That's why I say self-indulgence. Well, I'm trying to say, I hope this book shows that it was worth more than just me being given the opportunity to work on what I enjoyed. But there was a point to it, that the subject is important and that I've tried to play a bit of a part in that, I've tried to change things a bit. So I'm looking back, but also, I'm trying to do that not in just an autobiographical way. I'm trying to look at big questions about why be interested in the ancient world. The Greeks and Romans, 2,000 plus years ago, what do we get out of them? And often those kind of big questions, when you're writing books about ancient history or whatever, those big questions do tend to get shelved a bit. You sort of take it for granted. You kind of take it for granted that whoever's bought this book to read is going to be interested in it. So I don't actually have to explain why they should be interested in it because they sort of are. And I've tried to make myself stop a bit and say, what's in it for you? What's in it for us? Why is it important? Why would it matter if nobody studied the ancient world anymore? Would it matter? Well, I think it would. But why would it matter? What do we get out of it? What do we do with all the horrible things that people have used the ancient world for? And there have been quite a lot of horrible things. Really, it's kind of my manifesto. But pointing backwards, it's my manifesto for what I have done. You know, not what I'm going to do. I'm 71. I've not got much time for what I'm going to do. There isn't much what I'm going to do. But it's saying, what was the point of all this?

Speaker 10:
[05:45] As you mentioned, this book is about your relationship with the classical past. So can you tell us about the very first moment when you became interested in the ancient world?

Speaker 11:
[05:55] I can and I start the book with this. And it's a true, true story. And it's actually about the ancient Egyptians, not about the ancient Greeks and Romans. But never mind. It was the kind of start of my interest in what happened a very long time ago. And I was five years old. We lived in Shropshire on the border of England and Wales, quite close to the Welsh border. And I was five and my mum thought I should go to London for the first time. And we were going to have father do all kinds of things. And part of that fun was going to be going to the British Museum. And I was, I mean, I suppose I was a fairly typical five-year-old. And what I wanted to see in the British Museum was the Egyptian mummies, right? And we went to see the Egyptian mummies and it was great. But then my mum, she's a village school mistress, and you can hear the village school mistress in what she then said. She said, if we've seen how the ancient Egyptians died, we ought to go and see how they lived. Right? Good point. So we went to what was the sort of ancient Egyptian everyday life gallery. Some people might remember what museums were like in 1960, and they were not child-friendly, right? The cases were quite high, so if you're five, you can't see into them. And visibility of the object wasn't the kind of prime consideration. And we were walking through this, and I was a bit frustrated, and my mum then said, oh, my goodness, me, or something. What's that effect? There's a piece of ancient Egyptian bread, right? 4,000 years old. Now, my interest was now sparked, even perhaps more than for the mummies. And so I really wanted to see it, but it was at the back of the case. The case was high. I was big five-year-old and wriggly, and she was trying to lift me up to see this piece of Egyptian bread, carbonized and come from a tomb somewhere, and preserved in the heat of the Egyptian sands. And so we were trying a bit unsuccessfully to kind of manage this. When a guy walks past, I thought he was terribly old, I expect he was about 40, and he says, was I trying to see anything in particular? And I said, yes, a bit cross, that piece of Egyptian bread. And he must have been a curator because he put his hand in his pocket. He got a bunch of keys out, he opened the case, and he brought the Egyptian bread out of the case for me to look at. And I think that's the most kind of moving experience I'd ever had. And up to that point, I've had slightly more moving ones since. And it just, it just wowed me. You know, the idea that I was eyeball to eyeball, about, you know, six inches from this 4,000 year old piece of bread, is the closest thing to time travel I could possibly imagine. And it just lit the spark in some way of me wanting to go on wondering what it was like a very long time ago. And that's, I suppose, my whole career really has been going on wondering what it was like a very long time ago. And it was started then. I didn't go on to become an Egyptologist or to learn hieroglyphs, sadly. But I did Greek and Latin, which was the next best thing. And that, that kind of the bread roll spark, because it was little more than a roll really, was always there. And also the lesson that the curator gave, because the lesson I eventually saw was he was sharing what he knew, and he was sharing his objects, and he was opening the case. And it was a kind of, it was a metaphor really, for what you could do in history. You could open the cases for lots of people, either literally in his case or metaphorically in mine, I think.

Speaker 10:
[10:09] I think that moment of discovering ancient Egyptian bread in the museum, it really highlights the kind of ordinary aspect of the classical past. And that in ancient Rome and Greece, there were ordinary people who experienced ordinary things. Elsewhere in the book, you do also suggest that we should see the classical world as quite alien from us. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that contradiction of familiar and unfamiliar.

Speaker 11:
[10:34] I think that that's what keeps the classical world going for me. It's that impossible to resolve paradox between it being very familiar and utterly weird. And it's very easy to fall into the trap, and it's a partly true trap, but it's a trap nevertheless, of say going around Pompeii, looking at the ancient lavatories, going visiting the bars, looking at the bread that survives from Pompeii, if you want to keep the bread theme, and to say, oh, they were just like us. In part, they were just like us. They got sick, they had headaches, they made love, they went to the loo, they had a drink or two. They were just like us. But if they were only just like us, they'd be extremely dull. Why would we bother to study them if they were just like us? But the real allure for me is that they're just like us and completely different and knowing how to draw the line between the complete difference and the utter familiarity is something that nobody's ever going to solve that. But it's the kind of fissure in your understanding that goes on making it feel so pressing, honestly. I mean, when it comes to saying they were completely weird or completely different, I'm not just meaning all the ways in which we sort of know they were weird. You know, they didn't have maps like us, whatever. They didn't know how the sun worked and how the stars worked. They didn't have medicines like us, all that. But for me, it's just as much all the kind of the mundane differences. And it's taken a very long time to realize and never quite get my head around the idea that most people in Rome didn't know what they looked like. Now, there are some mirrors, they're polished metal. And I suppose if you're very, very upmarket, you could have a very, very shiny bit of polished metal. But it's still distorting in a way that our mirrors aren't. And there are kind of pools you can see your reflection in. But ultimately, what we take is the most for granted thing about being us, which is that we recognize ourselves. Yourself would be the last person you'd recognize in the ancient world. Now, that would go along until probably the late Renaissance and Venice and the beginning of mirrors in our sense of mirror glass. But the idea of being a person who didn't know what they looked like, or only knew very sketchily what they looked like, I can't imagine what that would be like. I mean, recently it's been increased by Zoom, of course, that we spend all our time on Zoom calls looking at ourselves. But even so, we have photographs, we look in mirrors, and that's in a way our identity is what we look like, in part, other aspects, of course. It's things like that, what would it be? How could I put myself in the position of not knowing what I looked like? I don't know the answer.

Speaker 10:
[13:50] It's really a stark comparison when you lay out like that, isn't it? I suppose given then that relationship between us and antiquity, that familiarity, but also complete sense of being alien, what do you think is the role or the relevance of the classics in the modern day?

Speaker 11:
[14:06] I think there's lots of resonances and relevances. I think that's what's quite exciting about classics, is that there's all kinds of ways in, from the road system of Britain, which is essentially a Roman road system, actually. We are the direct geopolitical inheritors of the Roman Empire. That's interesting. Why is London where it is? It's because it was the Roman capital. But I think that there's a lot more to it, obviously. What I don't think is that there are any kind of ready-made lessons in antiquity. I don't think that if we're looking at the problems of the modern day and we want a solution, we can go to the supermarket of Roman ideas and pick one off and say, right, okay, that's what we should do. Roman's new best, Greek's new best. What I think it does for us and what really kind of undermines my own certainties quite productively, I think, is that looking at the Greeks and Romans makes you look at yourself differently, makes you look at your age differently. That's not because they've got the answers. 21st century is better at getting answers than the Romans. We really are congratulate ourselves. But we look at things differently if we see it through their eyes or wonder what it was like, and often they're looking at some problems which are similar to our own. I think they give us a place from which we can recognize that we're not the first people on the block. There is a terrible tendency in modern cultural debate, a presentist tendency, to think we're the first people who've ever had this problem. Well, no, Sunshine, normally we're not. It's not that people before us kind of sussed it out and got the answer, but they struggled with it too. It's not just the ancient world, you could say the same for the Middle Ages, for other periods of history and in other places. But it's wonderful antidote to presentism, to the assumption that it's easy to fall into, that we're the first people in the world to have had this problem. And I think that you see issues from a constructively different perspective. I mean, I often think, for example, about Euripides' play Medea in mid-fifth century BC. It's a play about a mother killing her kids. Now, it is absolutely shocking, you know. The idea that the classics are kind of tame and traditional. My subtitle, The Shock of The Old, is really meant here. They are shocking. But the idea of the abandoned woman killing the children is one that we still, we still grapple with. Now, Euripides isn't giving us any answers. In fact, Medea manages to escape at the end to a rather privileged position elsewhere, rescued by her dad, you know, in the chariot of the sun. That's not going to happen, is it? But it's giving us a space to think differently about things that are important.

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Speaker 10:
[18:27] On the topic of thinking differently, I suppose, are there any myths then about antiquity, about the classical past that you think get perpetuated today, that you'd like to challenge? Are there any misconceptions?

Speaker 11:
[18:39] Those go from the tiny to the huge, right? The tiny, if I could stop people saying that a vomitorium in ancient Rome was a place where the Romans went to be sick, in fact, it's an exit passage from the amphitheatre, I would die happy and I'm never going to achieve that. I think that the big myth is that the ancients were admirable, that we should be looking back and respecting the ancient world. We should be grateful to the ancient world, that the ancient world was a wellspring, or sometimes the wellspring of Western civilization. Now, leaving aside the notion of Western civilization, the ancient world is much more interesting than that. It's in part horrible, it's violent, it is not admirable. And when people say to me, you must, you'd really like to go back to ancient Rome, wouldn't you? You love the Romans. No way, you know? The point about the Romans or the Greeks is that they are utterly eye-opening, utterly surprising. They challenge us to rethink things. They are always interesting, just so interesting. Now, people and things can be unpleasant, nasty, which the Romans and Greeks were in ways that we wouldn't really want to be there, but also destabilizing and fascinating. I think this is a conservative myth that, you know, we're all inheritors of the wonderful tradition of the Greeks and Romans to which we are truly grateful. That is my problem. I want my Greeks and Romans to be shocking and difficult and surprising and not very nice, actually. Now, I say that I want my Romans, as I think I say in the book. I'm telling you what I think and what it's like for me. And I'm telling you that I don't think these people are admirable and traditionally good, etc. I'm not going to get into a fight with someone who thinks they are, though I might explain why I didn't think that way. And I might try to explain why I think they're much more interesting if you knock them off their pedestal a bit.

Speaker 10:
[21:03] Absolutely. So then talking about changing our way of thinking about the classical world, has the role or the place of classics in the modern day been the same throughout your career, do you think? Has there been any change in our understanding or approach to the classical past in the last 50 years?

Speaker 11:
[21:22] In all kinds of ways. I mean, I just, one way of me trying to calibrate that is to think what I learnt when I was a student, what I first taught when I was a teacher, and what I ended up teaching in the last years that I was teaching. And the obvious case is the history of women. I was at a women's college in Cambridge, so we were very attuned to women. And that meant very occasionally in the summer term, when it really didn't matter, we would do an essay about women, right? But otherwise, it was posh blokes history. It was beginning to change already. When I was an undergraduate, I was taught for a little while by Moses Finley, who had come to Cambridge from the United States and was radicalizing the discipline. I mean, there were courses on slavery, which there had never been before. But that was only at the radical fringe. It wasn't the kind of mainstream. And over my career, that has changed dramatically. I mean, so that courses on women, essays on women, essays on slaves, essays on the poor, on the disadvantaged, and not what you see on the margins. They are central to how you understand the ancient world. Now, that doesn't mean you got rid of Julius Caesar and the Roman emperors. They're still there too. But I think there's a much more nuanced and richer idea of how you could understand antiquity. I think many people would say that there's also a move in the study of the ancient world, or a move away from the Greek and Roman heartlands of the subject to Egypt, the Near East, the Semitic cultures, whatever. That there's a kind of broadening in the terrain. Now, I think that that's in part true. Certainly, when I was a student, Egypt didn't come into Classics, Christianity didn't come into Classics. Yeah, Christianity is a religion of the Roman Empire, but we never touched it, right? I think, however, there are ups and downs here. Because had we gone back to the 19th century, a period where quite a lot of people think that Classics was its most hidebound, in the 19th century, people were looking at the history of the Near East, how that related to the Classical world. They were doing Egypt. And in some ways, there have been periods of opening up and closing down the kind of terrain that what we call the ancient world occupies. And there are different emphaticies for that. I mean, in the late 19th century, there was very much a sense that was reinvented in the late 20th century, that Classical culture owed so much to the Asian seaboard, West Asia. So I think Classics has never stood still. And people think of it as a kind of subject, which has always been the same. That's another myth about it. It has always been the same. I can't think of a subject that's been more different over the period of its history. And, you know, our kind of sense that we're the first people to think that we should expand the frame of reference of Classics to modern Turkey, modern Syria, et cetera. We're not the first people by any means. But I think perhaps in the early 70s, it was a moment when the focus very much was on 5th century Greece, really 5th century Athens, and Rome between the 2nd century BC and the 2nd century CE.

Speaker 10:
[25:10] Is there anything specific or any factors then that you think helped make that change of opening up the Classics and expanding the narratives which are brought into the centre of study?

Speaker 11:
[25:19] I think there's two things. I think that, again, despite its image, Classics is a very quizzical discipline, and it's always kicking itself. It's always saying we could do this better. And it's been doing that since the 2nd century CE, honestly. It's, you know, how do we understand the ancient world? How do we get it right? Could we do it in a different way? And so in part, that accounts for the cyclical nature of this. I think more recently, you can see micro-political reasons for wanting to change the definition, say, the geographical definition of Classics. And you've got to be careful here, but I think people have said, look, if we want to see this as a much more diverse subject in terms of the people who study it and the people who teach it, then maybe you have to kind of move away from the white European heartlands. So you more obviously give people who are not of that heritage and not of a white European heritage, so you more obviously give them a stake in it, a foothold. I see the force of that argument and I'm sure I've made it from time to time. I'm slightly suspicious of it because I think that if there has been a central problem with how classics in the UK, let's say, and I don't think it's that different elsewhere, but classics kind of does change as you go to different national traditions. If you say, what's its problem here? It has been that elite men have seen themselves as Romans. They've seen that they had a stake in the ancient world. Go to the foreign office and look at the status of the governors and generals and whatever, and there they are. They're dressed in their Roman togas and Roman battle dress, et cetera, et cetera. There has been an attempt to say, we, the elite, we are Romans, and that comes from both a rather conservative tradition, but there's also Shelley, this old Percy B Shelley saying, we're all Greeks, you know? Uh, hang on. And I suppose one of the things I've always wanted to fight, or I've come to, I think perhaps I learnt to want to fight, was I don't think any of us find ourselves in the ancient world. We're not Romans. We're not Greeks. We aren't there. And I think that problem of the temptation to identify yourself as Roman or as Greek is not helped. In fact, I think it's worsened by saying, no, more people can find themselves there. You know, we could, more Egyptian students would do classics if Egypt was part of the classical world. That's what I want to stop. No, not Egyptian students doing it, but the idea that it's somehow it's part of you. Because actually, the real privilege of doing classics is it's not about us. That it is a subject where you can't find yourself. That's what's so exciting. And that's what puts you on a level playing field. And there's a very nice lecture that I quote in the book from an American classicist who taught in apartheid South Africa. And she said, one of the most moving and productive things was teaching slavery in a mixed group of black and white students in South Africa, and being able to talk about slavery, and in a sense to talk about some of the power structures that these people were up against, in a way that didn't mean that they had to identify. That it was this modern terminology, it's a safe space for having an argument. And we want to keep people, to stop people from identifying as Greeks and Romans, not encourage more people to do so. So that's my slightly contrarian view of that.

Speaker 10:
[29:22] No, absolutely. That's really interesting. I'd like to ask you about your experience of working in the classics. As you mentioned in the book, there's long been an association between classics, privilege and status. We've just talked about it. So what's your experience been working as a woman in the field of classics for over 50 years?

Speaker 11:
[29:42] Very interesting. I mean, I need to preface that by saying that I was a student and then later a fellow at an all-women's college. That has been hugely important to me, Newham College, Cambridge. In Cambridge, there was a kind of odd barrier, really a barrier between college and the university faculty, in this case of classics. So I was in a college full of women. In the classics faculty in the university, there were a couple of years where I was the only woman on the faculty. There was 26 or 27 blokes and me. I think I handled that much more productively because I was at a woman's college, because there was a woman's power structure that I related to. So in a way my experiences are very dependent on that. I think that I was extremely warmly supported by my male colleagues. Now, I know that not everybody is as lucky in that, but I never felt that they were not on my side. That was really important. That said, there was a feeling that in order to be a successful classicist, you had either to be a man, or you had to pretend to be a man, all right? And at the beginning of my lecturing career, I went through 10 years, maybe more, in which really I pretended to be a man in terms of rhetorical style, and what I said, what my lectures sounded like. You know, I had a version, and it was a very masculine version of what it was to be authoritative in classics, what it was to make people listen to what you had to say. And so I sort of aped that, really, I think. And I never felt very comfortable aping that. I never felt very convincing in my own ears, but I thought that that was how you spoke, right? It took me some time, and partly, you know, I have to say, helped by my male colleagues, with whom I did talk about this, you know. They were interested in what I feel, a huge amount of gratitude to them. I suddenly saw that I had to sound like me. I had to be me. It's a bit of a romantic view. And I sort of managed to find a way of getting up, particularly to start with in front of a group of 100 undergraduates and speaking differently, just saying what I wanted to say about this, you know, and not saying. Now, I want to start with a difficult question that has been much debated over the last 50 years, going back in time to Hugh Last, etc. etc. I started to kind of get up and say, look, I think there are some questions in ancient history which really aren't worth asking. And, you know, I might have been wrong, you know, I'm not saying that I was right, but I actually thought, right, that's what I want to say, that's me. And I'm not claiming it's correctness, as I say, I mean, I might sometimes have said some very stupid things, but it was me talking. And I think the biggest, the biggest hurdle of being a woman in classics, it's not all the little anecdotes you can come out with, you know, you answer the phone in the office and people assume you're the secretary because you're a woman. You know, there's all that, but that's in the end trivial. It was whether there was a place, whether there was a voice for a woman who was not pretending to be a man.

Speaker 10:
[33:21] Thinking about them, making the classical past accessible, could you suggest two or three maybe entry points into the subject for anyone who might be listening that would like to start learning about the classics?

Speaker 11:
[33:33] I think museums are great resources, actually. That's partly because my first encounter was in a museum. Not everybody's encounter with the classics in a museum is as happy as mine, I accept that. And in fact, I end the book with a very sad cartoon story about a boy who also went to see the Egyptian mummies, breathed on the glass, and was taken off to prison. So there are sad stories about museums. But I think it is where you can get up close. They are different. And I was very impressed recently, and I'm declaring an interest here because I'm a trustee of the British Museum now, which is a nice way to end one's career. I think the Legion exhibition about the Roman army, which was on last year, I suppose, I thought that was absolutely exemplary in saying, most of us have kind of come across asterisks. What were the Roman legions really like? And it went out and it grabbed you whether you were an eight-year-old or an 80-year-old. With all sorts of things that you didn't know about the world of the Roman army. Like, you know, there was plenty of women on the Roman army bases, by the way, and we know that because we found their shoes. Right? And there was a marvellous trail. This is a great example of how museums have changed. Instead of being not child-friendly, there was a sort of a low-level trail for kids, which was all about a rat, a rattus. And getting over a lot of stuff about the Roman army, but it was a kind of parallel universe for the kids. And I think that in some ways, the Roman army is one of the most traditional things that you could ever think about. And you'd think, I'm not interested in the Roman army. But I don't see that anybody could not go there and have their eyes opened. And also because it's a British museum and they've got a kind of great commitment to letting you take it further. You know, there were books in the gift shop that you could go on. There were ways of following it up. And there were lectures and workshops, things like that. So I think I would go to a museum. It's hardly a museum in the country, a general museum that doesn't have a bit of Roman stuff. I suppose also I kind of think, and you know, this is teaching Granny to suck eggs here, that the podcast world is absolutely teeming with good things. There's some rubbish as well, I have to say, there's some rubbish. But you'll soon find out what the rubbish is, you don't need a kind of star rating. Self advert, I've just recently started one with Charlotte Higgins of The Guardian called Instant Classics. But there's loads. I mean, if you put ancient world pod into Google, you'll have, there'll be too many. I think also it's just following your nose and allowing not to feel embarrassed about not knowing things. Curiosity is a great driver. And there are wonderful books that can take you into the classical world. There's novels that can take you into the classical world. There's Christopher Nolan's Odyssey movie is about to be released in the summer. And there's going to be a huge amount of arousmatas around that. And I think you don't have to be interested in every bit. But I think that I would challenge anybody to say they found the whole of the classical world boring. So just take advantage of what you see in front of you. And if you don't find something interesting, you don't have to persevere with it. You know, I say at one point in the book, it's not compulsory to be interested in the classical world, but you're going to be missing out on something if you don't give it a try.

Speaker 10:
[37:19] So then if we are making our way into the classical world and starting to explore it through many different avenues, what do you think then is the value of having knowledge of the classics today?

Speaker 11:
[37:30] I think it helps you understand yourself differently. Now, that's not saying I don't find unpicking the evidence for the classical world. I think all that delving into the dirt of classics, I find it absolutely fascinating. How do you piece a vision of the ancient world together from what's left? That's intellectually, I think, very interesting. But it actually makes you re-think you. And if you say, look, history is in part finding out what happened. It is in part wondering what it was like to be there. But it's also, it's a conversation. And it's a conversation which is asking you to think what difference that conversation makes to you. How do you understand modern politics differently? If you think about Roman autocracy, well, you do. How do you understand all kinds of topical debates? Like, you know, really, really tough debates about gender politics. It really helps to see that there are ways that the ancient world can open your eyes to the depth of that. And I think it's quite useful because it helps you see the bullsh**t. When some pretentious politician says, as the Romans said, you could be one up on them, right? Because they do tend to do that. And I think it's always worth being able to say, it wasn't exactly like that. But it's about rethinking the way the world is and taking some of the certainty out of it.

Speaker 10:
[39:10] Finally, then, I know we have touched on this a little bit, but what do you hope that readers will take from your relationship with the classics? What does your understanding of and connection to antiquity mean for others?

Speaker 11:
[39:23] I'm not asking them to share my experience entirely. And I'm certainly not saying that it's compulsory for them to be interested in the bits of the classics that I'm interested in. And I try to say that very clearly. And I also try to say that classics isn't the only show in town, right? It's not, they're all kinds of, even restricting it to history, there's all kinds of deep pasts that will inspire some people in the same way that the classics has inspired me. I suppose I think very, this is a bit very practical, but I'd like to live in a world, not where everybody did classics. That'd be awful. That would just be awful. But I would like them to think it was complete rubbish when some government minister got up and said, well, one thing we don't need is the study of ancient Rome. I would like everybody to think, I know enough to know that's not true.

Speaker 10:
[40:24] Thank you very much. That's a brilliant note to end on. Thank you very much for speaking to us today about your new book.

Speaker 11:
[40:31] Thank you, Charlotte.

Speaker 1:
[40:34] That was Mary Beard speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Mary is an internationally acclaimed classicist, a trustee of the British Museum and the author of more than 20 books, including her latest work, Talking Classics, The Shock of The Old. As I mentioned, she's also set to be one of the headliners at this year's Chalk History Festival. Find out more and book tickets at chalkfestival.com.

Speaker 3:
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