What Made The Romans Different with Mary Beard

Tom Holland (0:07)

Hello, everyone, it's Tom here with another episode for you, and it's a recording again of a talk that I did at Hampton Court Palace as part of The Rest Is History Festival. And we're putting this episode out because, as I hope that you will have realized by now, we're in the middle of a ancient Roman series on Marius and Sulla, two great warlords who tear the Roman Republic to pieces. And so Mary is the perfect person to provide a kind of interval break. So enjoy.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the last of our interviews with friends of the show, the great Mary Beard, our greatest classicist, whose pitiless gaze on the heroes of ancient Rome is one failing source of delight, star of many, many television shows, star of a magnificent new podcast, Instant Classics, author of a new book, Talking Classics. And so basically, if the word classics appears in the title, Mary is almost certainly behind it. And this afternoon, we are going to be talking not about what the Romans and we in the 21st century have in common, but what separates us. What is it about the Romans that would have made them seem to us alien, different, perhaps just a little bit frightening? So ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together to welcome to the stage, the one, the only, Dame Mary Beard.

Today is the 250th anniversary of some event that happened in America or something like that. And so to mark that, we've done a series of episodes on the founding fathers. And the last one is on Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, or at least most of it. But who, you know, this great hymn of praise to the ideals of liberty, but who kept slaves. And in our episode, we advance the thesis that perhaps this is because Jefferson had, who was a great classicist, a great lover of Cicero. He wanted, in Monticello, his kind of dream villa, he wanted to live a little bit like Cicero. He wanted the life of a Roman gentleman of leisure. And there was a sense perhaps he had that he couldn't do this without servile labor.

And that focuses a profound issue on how different the Romans are to us, because Jefferson was criticized at the time and is criticized very strongly now for his attitude to slavery. There's the sense of hypocrisy, a man preaching liberty who kept slaves. But Cicero, one of his great heroes, Cicero also talked about freedom, kept slaves, and doesn't seem to have felt that there was any tension there whatsoever. It's one of those things that kind of focuses the differences between our moral universe today and those of the Romans. Or do you think not?

Mary Beard (3:35)

Well, I think up to a point. Slavery is one of those extraordinary, horrible, but also puzzling fault lines in Roman culture. Because it makes us face the question of, how could you see other human beings as people like the philosopher Aristotle would say, as if they were just living machines? What would it be to think that?

I think there are difficulties. I think Cicero does have difficulties with slavery, but it never comes down to a kind of abolitionist perspective. Cicero has slaves to which he's devoted, and some of the language in which he talks about that shows that he is treading a very careful tightrope between seeing them as human beings and not human beings.

Tom Holland (4:38)

Well, people who've read Robert Harris' novels about Cicero will know that he had a secretary Tyrone to whom he was very close. He regarded almost as a kind of a son or a member of the family.

Mary Beard (4:51)

But Tyrone started out life as a slave. He was freed by Cicero. He got his freedom. I was reading the letters of Cicero and his family recently and came. There are quite a lot of letters that refer to this slave or are written to him. And one of the letters written by Cicero's brother after Tyrone has been freed and has become a Roman citizen, Marcus Tullius Tyrone. Tyrone has done something to annoy Cicero's brother. And he writes as if it was a joke.

Don't do that again. Otherwise, I'll come and really thrash you. And you think, what Cicero's brother had always done to Tyrone when he was a slave was thrash him. It's about physical violence. Even when Tyrone is freed, he can't stop that language.

And that is kind of where you see that the sort of fragility of these statuses, the difficulty of incorporating change of status. I mean, I don't think there is any slave society that isn't an anxious society. And I think that Rome and the America of Thomas Jefferson, they are anxious societies about slavery. It comes out in different ways.