Mary Beard Keeps History on the Move
If you happen to be speaking with someone who is unfamiliar with Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire Mary Beard, it may take you a few tries to convey her cultural post. “Classicist” doesn’t quite capture it. “Celebrity historian” inches closer. In a Guardian profile, a colleague of Beard’s recalls a crew of English schoolgirls glimpsing the scholar, a longtime pillar of Cambridge’s faculty, as she prepared to film a documentary about the lost city of Pompeii. “They went insane,” the colleague said. “It was like they’d seen a boy band.”
Stateside, Beard may be best known as the author of “SPQR,” a doorstop Roman history, and “Women and Power,” a trenchant study of ancient and modern attitudes toward female speech. She also contributes criticism to the London Review of Books and maintains a blog, “A Don’s Life,” for the Times Literary Supplement. On television, whether narrating the reboot of the BBC’s series “Civilisations,” demystifying classical attitudes toward immigration, or staging cultural debates from her study, Beard, now sixty-six, seems perfectly cast in the role of the public intellectual: incisive, personable, just shy of charmingly unkempt. She exudes modesty—she could not have been more polite when I mixed up Leonidas, the king of Sparta, with Scipio Africanus, a Roman general who lived some three hundred years later—and her voice slips easily into a storyteller’s rhythm. Online, Beard is a frequent user of Twitter, and as Rebecca Mead observed in a 2014 Profile, she’s found an unlikely hobby in taming Internet trolls. (“She should be able to analyze Augustus’s dictums, or early A.D. epithets / Without having to scroll through death, bomb, and rape threats,” a spoken-word poem uploaded to YouTube goes.) Yet Beard seems delighted to edify and even befriend her haters. Several years ago, a former Twitter adversary asked her for a job recommendation letter. She said yes.
In April, Howard University announced that it was dissolving its classics department, a move that punctuates a heated debate about whether Greco-Roman history should be taught separately or differently from the history of other ancient societies. A new wave of scholars, such as Princeton’s Dan-el Padilla Peralta, view the discipline as inextricable from the imperialist mind-set that created it; they claim that classics sustains a mythology of whiteness. As the field’s most famous practitioner, and a dedicated anti-racist and feminist, Beard takes a middle position: she believes neither that classics deserves a pedestal nor that it must be destroyed. Recently, in conversation, Beard defended her stance—and spoke about feminist translations, Internet manners, and the fluid properties of the canon. Our exchange has been edited for clarity.
I was looking over the list of subjects that you specialize in—things like civilization, empire, power, the exile of women from the public sphere—and thinking that this should be a light, relaxing conversation.
Oh, dear!
But you’ve also written about Roman laughter. Do you have a favorite classical joke to start us off?
Don’t get your hopes up—they’re not that funny. But what’s interesting about them, I think, is that they’re not incomprehensible; they fall on a spectrum of what might strike us as humorous today. Here’s a relatively clean one. A man runs into a friend of his in the city. The friend acts surprised; “I thought you were dead!” he says. “No,” the man says, “I mean, here I am. I’m alive.” And the friend gives him a doubtful look and says, “Well, the person who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you are!”
[Awkward laughter.]
No, it’s not going to make you a lot of money in comedy places, is it? But the joke is, for me, quite interesting, because it’s about one of the things that we forget about pre-modern culture, which is how difficult it was to prove who you were. There were no I.D. cards, no passports. The construction of an authentic, authoritative version of “this is me” was actually quite hard.