Instant Classics

In this episode, Mary and Charlotte’s special guest is… Mary Beard! On the day of publication of her new book, Talking Classics, Mary does just that - talks classics with Charlotte. 

Talking Classics is a summation of Mary’s 50 years study of the ancient world. In this intimate conversation, Mary talks about discovering a fascination with history as a child and her teenage delight in joining the local dig (and, more importantly, apres-dig) in Shropshire. She also discusses the value she finds in studying the classical world - the way we’re forced to acknowledge kinship and difference with other cultures, develop empathy, tolerate difference and reflect upon our own values. 

In the second half, Mary and Charlotte look at how the classical world has been adopted by different causes throughout history. Some we might approve of - like resistance to tyranny and gay rights - others which are more uncomfortable, like fascism and imperialism. And we hear the fascinating story of Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, a left-wing classicist in Italy, who had to show Hitler and Mussolini around the sites of Ancient Rome. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

This isn’t meant to be an advert (!), but the new book is Talking Classics (Profilebooks). By the way, this is Charlotte writing, I highly recommend it!

The story of Hitler’s visit to Rome is told by Bianchi Bandinelli, not available in English, sadly. The Italian version is Hitler e Mussolini, 1938 (E/O pb, 1995) but it has been translated into French and German. There is a collection of photos of the visit here: https://www.europeana.eu/en/collections/person/165124-ranuccio-bianchi-bandinelli A documentary film has also been made of which there is a short trailer online, with 1930s footage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3WdVcSybG4) 

On Classics and the proto-gay movement of the the 19th century, there is a chapter by Philip E Smith in Powell and Raby (eds), Oscar Wilde in Context (Cambridge UP, 2013) and a book by Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Cornell UP, 1994)

The appropriation of classics by far right and misogynist “causes” is the theme of Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men (Harvard UP, 2018), and Curtis Dozier, The White Pedestal (Yale UP, 2026)

Mary writes of the ambiguities of Roman Britain in the story of the British Empire, in “Officers and Gentlemen?”, in A Swenson and P Mandler (eds), From Plunder to Preservation (British Academy, 2013)

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Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole 

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

 

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Mary and Charlotte explore the story of Perpetua, a young Christian woman tortured and murdered in the Roman arena in Carthage (modern day Tunisia) for her faith in the 3rd Century CE. Astonishingly, Perpetua kept a diary during her last days - right up until the point she was led into the arena - recording her life, dreams and fearless conviction that death was better than renouncing God. Even more astonishingly, this diary survives, incorporated into a longer account of her martyrdom narrated by another hand.. 

Perpetua describes the attempts by both her father and the presiding Roman official to convince her to just say the words that will save her life. She describes her inability to do this, even though it means depriving her baby of its mother. She also describes several of her dreams in the days before her death. The narrator takes over to recount what happened next. Perpetua was mauled by animals and finally despatched by a gladiator. 

Perpetua’s account is so remarkable, many have questioned its authenticity. The current scholarly verdict is that it is real, providing a rare insight not only into female experience in the Roman Empire - but a woman living through extreme circumstances. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

You can find an online translation of Perpetua’s diary here: https://www.ssfp.org/pdf/The_Martyrdom_of_Saints_Perpetua_and_Felicitas.pdf

Barbara Gold, Perpetua: Athlete of God (Oxford UP, pb, 2021) and Sarah Ruden, Perpetua: the woman, the martyr (Yale UP, 2025) are accessible introductions to Perpetua (both including translations of the whole or parts of the text)

More specialist studies include; 

Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano (eds), Perpetua’s Passions (Oxford UP, 2012)

Thomas J. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (Oxford UP, 2012)

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Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole 

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

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Antigone is one of the most regularly staged Greek tragedies with great actors lining up to play the part. Juliette Binoche, Juliet Stevenson and Gillian Anderson have all had a crack in recent years. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte look at why Antigone is such an enduringly interesting role. She is sometimes framed as a female Hamlet caught between family loyalties and the needs of the state. 

Antigone was written by Sophocles in the mid-5th Century BCE. It tells the story of King Creon’s attempts to restore order to the city of Thebes following a civil war. He orders that the body of the defeated rebel Polynices should lie unburied as punishment. Antigone, sister of Polynices, disobeys this order and gives her brother proper burial rites (as the gods demand). Creon sentences her to death for betrayal. 

Antigone is often portrayed as a proto-feminist icon - the brave woman standing up to the patriarchy. But is this really what Sophocles intended? King Creon has far more lines and is, like Antigone, caught in an impossible situation. There’s even one way of viewing the play as a parable on what happens when women meddle in the affairs of the state. 

It is, of course, precisely these ambiguities that make Antigone so popular. It raises questions that can never be answered and its relevance shifts from generation to generation. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

There is a big book by George Steiner on the history of Antigone: Antigones (Oxford UP, pb, 1986), including Hegel and much more.

More approachable are sections of Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: the subversive power of Greek myth (Wildfire, pb, 2021) and the video lecture by Simon Goldhill, https://www.cambridgegreekplay.com/talk-wheres-the-tragedy-in-antigone-by-prof-simon-goldhill

Nelson Mandela mentions the performance on Robben Island in his Long Walk to Freedom (Back Bay Books, pb, 1995).

Mary describes her own changing views of the play in Talking Classics (Profile books, 2026)

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Expressions of love, bawdy jokes, political satire or even just saying so-and-so was here - few things bring us as close to the Romans as their graffiti. In large part, thanks to Vesuvius preserving the streets of Pompeii and Herculaneum under rock and ash. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte look at what graffiti tells us about Roman society - both the relatable aspects and the unfathomable. 

Perhaps the biggest difference is the enhanced role graffiti played in a society which did not have forms of mass communication. Roman graffiti is like graffiti today, but also like social media. In both cases, nobody thought anyone would be looking at it 2000 years later. Roman graffiti goes beyond the official documents. It’s a rare glimpse of daily life and opinions that we today weren’t intended to see. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

A searchable database of graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum: https://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/

Charlotte’s article on the Spanish amphora scratched with a Virgil quote: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/24/ancient-roman-pot-virgil-poetry

Charlotte discusses the ‘conticuere omnes’ Virgil quote found in Silchester in her book Under Another Sky, Vintage, 2014

Kristina Milnor discusses Pompeian graffiti in detail in Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (Oxford UP, 2014); there’s a chapter devoted to Virgil.

For the brothel graffiti, see Sarah Levin-Richardson, The Brothel of Pompeii (Cambridge UP, 2019), chap 3.

The classic study of Greek and Roman literacy is W. V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Harvard UP, pb. 1991), developed in Alan Bowman and Greg Woolf, Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge UP, pb, 2008)

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Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole 

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

 

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In 430 BCE, Athens was hit by a terrible plague that ultimately claimed around a third of the population. All the social niceties we associate with Ancient Athens collapsed. Citizens turned on one another. The dead were left unburied. Mary and Charlotte both recount and question the ‘facts’ of the epidemic as told by historian, eyewitness and plague survivor Thucydides. 

Thucydides’ account is remarkable in that it aligns with the emerging science of medicine in ancient Athens by focusing on the symptoms and natural causes rather than framing it as  divine retribution from the gods. Yet, for all this, the truth is hard to pin down. We still don’t know what exactly the plague was. And Thucydides’ claims to be an objective historian are undermined by the way he presents the plague as a possible response to Athenian arrogance and hubris. 

Yet for all the gaps, we see many of the social characteristics of epidemics that have recurred throughout history. Social collapse, finger pointing, moralising, and arguments about which ‘truth’ to believe. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

Thucydides describes the plague in his History 2, 47 - 55  Plutarch describes Pericles’ death from the plague in his Life of Pericles 38.

There are plenty of translations of Thucydides available online. But NB one of the most often used (a nineteenth-century version by Richard Crawley) is also one of the least reliable. 

Thucydides, Apollo, the Plague and the War, Lisa Kallet, The American Journal of Philology, Fall 2013, Vol. 134, No. 3, pp. 355-382 (an interesting article in which Kallet casts doubt on the purely objective, scientific account Thucydides purports to give of the plague)

A Plague Like no Other: Beyond the Buboes in Thucydides' account of the Plague of Athens, by Pere Domingo, Paula Prieto, Lluis Pons, Clinical Microbiology and Infection, May 2025 (a useful round-up of the latest medical thinking on the Athenian plague)

J Longrigg, ‘Death and Epidemic Disease in Classical Athens’ in V Hope and E Marshall, Death and Disease in the ancient city (Routledge, 2000)

Emily Greenwood: https://yalereview.org/article/thucydides-times-trouble (a classicist reflects on the Athenian plague and Covid)

@instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube

@insta_classics for X

email: [email protected]

Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole 

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

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