Mary Beard: ‘Nigel Farage is today’s Julius Caesar’
Mary Beard: 'Modern-day populism is taken from the playbook of Caesar' - Andrew Crowley
The other day Mary Beard was reading an interview with the actor Simon Farnaby who appeared as a footman alongside the late Queen Elizabeth in the Platinum Jubilee Paddington Bear video.
“Afterwards he said to her, ‘you really are a marvellous actor, Ma’am’. And she replied, ‘well, that’s what I do’.”
And it tickled me. Because from the Roman Empire onwards, all heads of state are invariably playing a part.”
You don’t get far into a conversation with our leading classical historian without her bringing up her beloved Roman Empire.
Her most recent book Emperor of Rome, a companion piece to 2016’s SPQR and a vibrant alternative history, eschewed chronological biography of the emperors for an often riotous examination of the fine line between power, performance and propaganda that shaped their rule.
Beard, reclining on a chaise longue with an erudite nonchalance familiar to the legions of devoted students who were lucky enough to be taught classics by her at Newnham College Cambridge, has always been fascinated by the dynamics of power – not just the way it relies so heavily on theatre and spectacle, but what the narratives we use to talk about the powerful reveal.
“Take Nero for example: it’s not true that he played the fiddle while Rome burned. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the deep cultural anxiety such stories reveal about entitlement and power.
“Or to take a modern example, the story that sprung up about David Cameron and the pig, or whatever it was that happened [Cameron was alleged to have participated in a bizarre Oxford dinner society ritual involving part of his anatomy and a pig’s head].
“Like the stories told about Roman Emperors, it gets recycled because it tells us something about that particular strata of society as being different from the rest of us.”
We have met at the large, unravelling townhouse Beard has shared for 17 years with her husband, the art historian Robin Cormack, whom she married in 1985, on the outskirts of Cambridge.
The couple have two grown-up children: Raphael, 38, Assistant Professor in Arabic Studies at Durham and Zoe, 36, an anthropologist specialising in South Sudan.
It’s a utopian vision of academia – books in every corner, paintings on every wall and everywhere chairs, that summon idyllic images of afternoons idled away reading.
Certainly Beard, who pads around her kitchen in floaty linen, has the demeanour of someone who spends a lot of time doing precisely that. In between working, of course.
Mary Beard at her home near Cambridge: a 'utopian' academic idyll - Andrew Crowley
Because Cambridge insists on compulsory retirement for dons when they reach 67, Beard hasn’t taught at her alma mater since 2022 but she hardly spends all her time in the garden deadheading the roses – there are literary talks to deliver, pieces of journalism to write, new research to conduct.
“It was quite right that I retired. I was a job blocker. I don’t think old people like me should be running the show.”
Except on one level, Beard continues to do so. Her books, 20 to date, on subjects as varied as pagan priests to laughter in ancient Rome, are gobbled up by classicists and laypeople alike.
Thanks to her singular televisual appeal she remains a regular on the small screen, fronting documentaries on the classics and appearing on quiz shows, both eccentric and everywoman.
She remains central to the cultural conversation because she is genial, witty and level headed, but also because she is so good at exposing the foibles of our age through the prism of her favourite subject.
It becomes clear that as far as Beard is concerned, pretty much every contemporary preoccupation or behaviour, be it the latest culture war spat or modern political tactic, is foreshadowed in the mores of the Roman Empire.
The populism ‘playbook’
Take Nigel Farage for instance, who, in a recent entry on her long running TLS blog A Don’s Life, an incisive bitesized comment on the issue of the day, she compared to Julius Caesar:
“I actually dislike drawing crude lines between the past and today, but a lot of modern-day populism is taken from the playbook of Caesar,” she says.
“Caesar begins his speech by saying I’m going to make Rome great again and I’m going to drain the swamp, and by the way I am talking directly to you. And stuff the metropolitan elite.
“Farage’s speech [when he announced that he was becoming leader of Reform and would stand in the forthcoming election] was pretty much Julius Caesar’s, this idea that I am only intervening because I know you want me to do it. The populist song sheet hasn’t changed very much.”
The day before we meet, hard-Right populist parties in France, Germany and Austria made extraordinary gains in the European elections. Beard (who was a member of the Labour Party until Tony Blair became leader, when she resigned, and who has previously declared support for Jeremy Corbyn) is surprisingly uncritical of their success.
“I worry about the word populism because occasionally it’s used for the sort of democracy we don’t like. A populist uprising could also be painted as a democratic uprising. Nor does it come from nowhere. It comes from dissatisfaction and discontent.
“I can be as damning of Farage as the next person but we still have to look ourselves in the mirror and say ‘is some of this discontent real and justified, and if so, how am I responding to that?’
“It’s very easy to be a comfortable member of the liberal elite and say it’s all very vulgar, but look at the people who follow Trump. Who else is responding to them?”
The wonderful, infuriating thing about Mary Beard is that she is entirely uncompromising in her willingness to see the other point of view. Sometimes she evades the question all together.
She is, for example, tricky to pin down on the question of whether the British Museum, of which she became a trustee in 2020, should return the Elgin marbles to Greece.
“If we all agreed about museums we would be in a real pickle. If we said, together the British Museum and the V&A represent our view of history, we would think that was the death of the museum. I think we should celebrate our disagreements.”
When I suggest that this might not be considered an adequate answer by those who have passionate views on the return or otherwise of colonial spoils, she agrees.
“But these things have been argued about for 200 years. And that’s because there are very big and complicated issues about the very nature of ownership of cultural property. We cannot magic these issues away.”
In 2002 she wrote a book, The Parthenon, in which, as she puts it, she sat on the fence. Now her preferred solution is a system of shared ownership of cultural artefacts between museums across the world.
Even when she takes a firmer line, she is unfailingly reasonable. At the end of last year she tweeted, with the permission of the trustees, to say she disagreed with the decision of the British Museum to enter a new 10 year partnership with BP.
The museum has been in the crosshairs of climate change protesters for years over its relationship with the oil giant, and a couple of weeks ago the Tate director Maria Balshaw accused the museum of being out of touch.
“I would not have made that decision,” Beard reiterates. “On the other hand, it’s a decision I can live with. The British Museum is more important than my personal views. I have to face my own hypocrisy: that I am calling in at the local BP station to put fuel in my car. I travel by air. There is a degree of having to accept your own implication in this.”
Beard remains 'unfailingly reasonable' in her views - Andrew Crowley
She draws comparisons with the recent controversy surrounding Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment fund that within the space of a week withdrew or had dropped their sponsorship deals with eight literary festivals in the UK following protests at Hay over the firm’s investments in the petro-chemical industry.
“As far as I can see, Baillie Gifford are not a big culprit when it comes to climate change. They are also being criticised for their investments in Amazon. Well, we all buy our books from Amazon.
“The danger of pushing Baillie Gifford to one side is that you no longer have these festivals. Obviously, if we want to get to the place on climate change where 99 per cent of us want to be, we need literary festivals where we can discuss it. Similarly we have got to take BP with us. They have to be part of the solution.”
Yet, perhaps surprisingly, she also has sympathy for climate change protestors who splatter paint over priceless works of arts. “Let’s be honest, the amount of damage done is very little.”
Isn’t the point that those who protest in this manner are happy to take the risk that quite a lot might be? “My answer to this is to point to Mary Richardson and the slashing of the Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery [Richardson, a suffragette, slashed the painting in 1914 in protest against the treatment of suffragettes in prisons]. The slash marks have become part of the history of the painting.”
Does this mean she would defile the Parthenon marbles in the name of a cause she believed in? “Would I say to students that a really good way of protesting is to duff up some art? No. I’d say, can’t you think of something a bit more productive?”
What about the Energy Embargo for Palestine protestors who, the day before we meet, forced the British Museum to close early?
“The museum’s position on this is that peaceful protests are legal. But if [a protest has] stopped people from actually entering the museum, then obviously we need to make museums not just a site of protest, but the place where these things can be discussed.”
Beard, an only child, grew up in Shropshire. Her father was an architect and her mother was a schoolteacher. She won a scholarship to Newnham in 1973 to study classics and, after graduating and lecturing for a short period at King’s College London, became a fellow of Newnham College – the only female lecturer in the classics department.
Her achievements are entirely her own, but one wonders to what extent she has also used them as a way to honour her mother.
“My mother was a standard first-wave feminist. She would have loved to have gone to university, but her parents couldn’t afford it. When people today mock the fact that everyone now goes to university I think about my mum.”
She has also battled sexism for most of her career: after fronting a documentary about Pompeii in 2012, the late journalist AA Gill famously made vile comments about her appearance.
She has received appalling abuse on social media, often prompted by something she has said: her defence of a 2017 BBC schools video that suggested ancient Rome was ethnically diverse sparked a slew of aggressive insults.
Most, though, are a direct attack on what she looks like as a highly successful woman in the public sphere who refuses to conform to conservative notions of femininity. She has admitted to finding it extremely hurtful.
Yet in her short 2017 book Woman and Power, which draws lines of continuity between modern misogyny and that of the ancient world, she also tries to understand, arguing that one reason behind the Twitter vitriol is because when Twitter first came along, it deluded users into thinking they had a voice they didn’t previously have.
The vitriol, she suggests, is partly an expression of profound and toxic frustration. “We were all told we could talk truth to power through Twitter,” she says now. “But we can’t.”
Decency and debate
Still, as a passionate advocate for the power of civil – and civilising – debate, Beard must be frequently disgusted by the simplistic rancour that so often passes for argument on social media.
“We live in a world where everyone is judged on one error,” she agrees. She points to Rishi Sunak, and the criticism that came his way when he left the D-Day commemorations in Normandy early.
“I’m no Sunak supporter but I can’t see how you can argue he is disrespectful of Britain. We are all allowed to make wrong judgement calls every so often. It’s not a hanging offence. I do think a bit more forgiveness wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
Beard feels like such a loss to education, you almost want to petition Cambridge to change their position on retirement. Does she miss academia? “I’m not sure giving book talks is that much different to lecturing,” she says.
She dismisses with a laugh the idea that universities have been “captured” by woke ideologues. “There are cases in some pockets of our culture where that’s happening but it didn’t impact on my career. You can sometimes get the impression that people are walking about university towns in fear. It’s not my place to generalise, but I can tell you that I didn’t.”
What she does take umbrage with, as an academic, is when history is co-opted to advance a cause du jour. In Emperor of Rome, she mentions the oft repeated speech Elizabeth I allegedly delivered at Tilbury at the sailing of the Armada where she declared she had “the body of a weak and feeble woman” but “the heart and stomach of a king”.
Some trans historians have argued this provides proof that Elizabeth I was trans. But Beard points out that the only account of that speech is a letter written 40 years after the event, and therefore cannot be trusted. “I don’t think there are stories about trans people to be found in history or in the ancient world,” she says.
She is wary of wading into the modern trans debate. “Just because I write about gender, it doesn’t mean I need to have a view about it. Sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut.”
Is she simply being diplomatic? “I don’t think so. But what is clear is that the ancient world in particular was doing it very differently. A lot of the storytelling and myth that took place is wondering about the boundaries between men and women.
“If there is a lesson, it’s that we are not the first to have had these questions. One of the besetting sins of modern cultural debate is that we think we are the first. Well, no. We are not.”
Beard draws lines of continuity between modern misogyny and that of the ancient world, but remains wary of wading into the trans debate - Andrew Crowley
She is, however, a defender of textual revisionism. “Some of this anxiety about content is good,” she says. “When I was a student and we read Ovid’s Metamorphosis [which includes stories of male violence against women] there was no discussion at all.
“We didn’t even call it rape, we called it ravishing. For me, it’s been one of the great triumphs that people started saying, me included, that this is a book that is all about rape.
“It has changed the way we read it. Now, we can’t now be surprised when people say, ‘well why should we read it?’ Yet my answer would be: ‘know the bloody enemy, darling’. Also, we don’t read in order to be made comfortable.”
She brushes aside the suggestion that her feelings about this have been shaped by her own rape, on a night train in Italy in 1978 when she was a graduate student. “Actually, that has nothing to do with it. I would love to know why it was that I managed to get over that. I know that some people would say, ‘oh, if you say that, then you didn’t’.
“But it doesn’t feel like that to me. I feel angry, and I feel a bit stupid, which of course is a form of self victim blaming, but it hasn’t blighted my life. Which is not to say I am not aware that rape blights other peoples lives.”
She credits her mother for her intellectual resilience. “She taught me that you fight your battles and you don’t lose your sense of humour,” she says. Perhaps just as importantly, her mother taught her about the importance of human decency.
“She believed most people are decent human beings. She taught me it’s always best to approach an argument on the basis they too are trying to do their best.” She laughs. “And I think that’s one reason why I haven’t become more crotchety as I get older.
“I just think: we’ve seen this before. And we did get through it because we listened to each other and perhaps sometimes we even changed our minds.”
Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World is published in paperback on 4 July price £12.99 and is available to buy from Telegraph Books
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