I am out on the ran-tan with Mary Beard. She is, as you must know, a quite unlikely celebrity classicist don, because that is a quite unlikely description of a classicist don. Or an equally unlikely celebrity telly star. Unlikely because she does seriously clever and seriously companionable telly shows about the classics and the people who lived in ancient worlds. She wants to know, and for us to know, the answers to whether, say, these people brushed their teeth and what made them laugh.
So, who wouldn’t want to bar-hop around seedy bars in ancient Pompeii with her? Would she join me?
“I’d be very, very happy to come with you, Michele. Very happy, because there are plenty of bars to hop between in Pompeii. There’s something like 100 bars. We’d be, I think, pretty drunk if we got around even half of them.”
We start at our local. We are drinking “the local plug, from the slopes of Vesuvius”. Will it be disgusting? “That’s a very good question. I think that what is interesting about ancient Rome is that there is a little bit of wine snobbery. And most talk about wine is not about its quality, it’s about quantity. It’s about how much you have, not about how good it is. And so, when people are talking about Roman emperors, they don’t say, ‘Oh, he served himself far better wine than the rest of his guests.’ They say, ‘He served himself far more wine that the rest of his guests.’”
The bar we’re sitting in will “have a kind of takeaway counter on the street. But we’re not just going to do the takeaway. We’re going to go into the back room. We’re going to spend a bit of time in there, aren’t we? In the back room there will be chairs and tables, and there’ll be sausages and dried fruit hanging from the ceiling. And there will be a pretty feisty waitress.”
We’re getting sloshed. “It’s a tough, competitive bar culture. Everybody’s having a joke. The waitress is taking the piss out of us. We’re taking the piss out of the waitress. It’s cut and thrust, larky humour. It’s where people like us get together and so the Roman authorities were always pretty suspicious of the kinds of things that went on in bars. They thought … revolution might come from the local bar because it was where we got together and we were the ordinary people. We had a good time and we got pissed and we might do naughty things. They were places of slight danger.”
Our dive bar in Pompeii will, to us, be instantly recognisable and also utterly foreign. “The seedy bars or the family quarters of Pompeii and Herculaneum, [modern visitors] will almost always be taken aback by the familiarity. There is huge pleasure, and something of a relief, in recognising common humanity across the centuries. At the same time, those people from the ancient past were utterly different too, in ways that are now almost impossible to comprehend – and we can only pretend that this is not so. One big intellectual buzz of antiquity is that it is unforgettably under our noses and, simultaneously, further away than we can ever imagine, almost out of our grasp.”
Power of the pub
Beard grew up in a tiny hamlet of Church Preen, in Shropshire, and later in Shrewsbury. Her mother Joyce was a village school headmistress and father Roy an architect. Being a tourist inside her childhood leads us to yet another local: another also still recognisable but now foreign pub, a British bar in the late 1960s. You can imagine there were also bar snacks: curling cheese sandwiches, ancient pickled onions in jars of festering brine, dubious scotch eggs. Beard says the bars of the ancient world were like British pubs used to be.
“I remember when I was a kid, we lived opposite a very old-fashioned pub in Shrewsbury, and above the bar there was a sign saying ‘Men Only’. And if women came in, they had to go to a little room off to the side. I remember my mum, who was a pretty feisty woman, used to enjoy going to the bar and standing underneath the sign. She was wonderfully stroppy.”
Her father used to spend “quite a lot of time in the pub”. He was an architect who, she has said was a complete wastrel. Now she thinks “he was a wastrel in the best sense. Life is for having good time, right? He would put in a good morning’s work and then a long lunch at the pub, then a bit of a snooze, and then home and another trip to the pub. I think that sounds sort of all right.”
Beard is talking to me from her writing room in the late-19th century house in Cambridge she shares with her husband, the classicist and art historian Robin Cormack. They have two now grown-up children, Zoe, an anthropologist and historian, and Raphael, a writer and translator in Arabic cultural history. In other words, her house is a brainy house, a house packed with books. Because, as she agrees, books breed in the night. She quite recently added on a library which is “absolutely, completely lined with books and, you know, sometimes they’re a bit accusatory because there are books you’ve read and books you haven’t read and there are books you feel a bit guilty about not having read”.
She has her writing room but really where she chooses to write her books (her newest, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old takes her tally to more than 20; she also co-wrote The Colosseum with Cambridge professor of ancient history Keith Hopkins) is dictated by which particular chair feels right. She wrote her 2015 book SPQR in a green Victorian chair. “And it took me so long that by the time the book was finished the springs were coming up out of the seat.” Oh dear. Springs up her bum! “That’s right! And I don’t want to get it mended because somehow it’s a kind of memory of the book writing. But I always have to warn people when they come and they sit on the chair. I have to say, ‘That’s got springs coming up into your bum.’ I’ve got a sentimental attachment to it.”
She is doing this interview lying on her chaise longue, a reproduction of the famous Le Corbusier chair. It is where she wrote Talking Classics. She writes her books by hand. At Cambridge, she famously and eccentrically delivered tutorials from another chaise longue, sliding further and further down as the tutorial progressed, until all that could be seen of her was her feet. She is the epitome of the eccentric English don except for the fact that eccentric English dons are stereotypically male, are unlikely to be a telly star and very unlikely to have been awarded The Oldie magazine’s pin-up of the year in 2013. She found this very funny and said, “But Beard would be very, very stupid to take it very seriously, would she not?”
Another of her eccentricities is that she frequently talks about herself in the third person, even more poshly than she speaks, which is quite poshly. This might be a bit weird. “Well, it’s partly a joke. But it’s partly about recognising that people have multiple identities. I think that people should look at themselves from the outside a bit. You know: not just I did this, but she did that.”
A little piece of bread
Her “very first, eye-opening encounter” with the ancient world was with something just out of her five-year-old grasp: a very stale bread roll. That bread roll, 20cm x 20 cm, was in a locked glass case at the British Museum. It was excavated on the site of a temple in ancient Egyptian Thebes.
“It was far too high to see into easily if you were small.” Her mother lifted her up. “But I was a heavy and wriggly child -- it seemed as if I would manage little more than an uncomfortable, fleeting glimpse. At that moment a man walked past … and asked what it was exactly I was trying to see. ‘That piece of bread,’ I squeaked. He must have been a curator, for he reached into his pocket, opened the case, took out the bread and held it in front of me, a couple of inches from my nose.
“To put it another way, I did not get introduced to the world of antiquity by learning Greek at home at some precociously early age, or by clambering over the remains of classical temples.”
She is still spellbound by the memory, by the wonder invoked, of that little piece of bread. The dedication in Talking Classics reads: In memory of the man who opened the case at the British Museum.
She could find out who that man was. “I kind of think it’s a bit like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, isn’t it? There’s a kind of pleasure in the fact that we don’t know who he is. Because he becomes every curator. He’s everybody. He’s become a wonderful metaphor for what academics, experts, historians should be doing: opening cases for kids. That’s our job, really.”
21st century girl
After our session in the bars of Pompeii, we might stagger about as tourists, gawking at what she calls the “scurrilous graffiti” – filthy descriptions of sodomy and defecation but mostly, banally, “we wuz here” scribbles. This is another trip in time. She is game enough. With a proviso.
“Well, I don’t particularly fancy a trip to the past very much, so you have got to promise me that I’ve got a ticket back, a very short visit and a ticket back. I feel extremely lucky that I’m living in the 21st century, not any previous age.
“And, of course, in some ways I would like to go to Pompeii. I spent such a long time working on it. I’d really like to go and see how far I got it right and where I got it wrong, and I’d like very much to go and talk to some of the people in the ancient world. I’d like to go and talk to a slave woman who cleans the public baths at the end of the day. What she thought of all these blokes whose mess she was cleaning up after; what her version of the world was like. You know, we’re never going to hear that. But it’s a very academic interest.
“But I have really very little touristic desire to go anywhere in the past, you know. There are lots of places in the world of the 21st century I’d much rather see.”
The big questions
The late TV and restaurant critic AA Gill, in a lame attempt at laceration, wrote that she was “too ugly” to be on television and banged on about her “tombstone” teeth. She has said that this was like being punched. I want to know why she gave a shit. But who wouldn’t? She does, by the way, have an impressive repertoire of swear words. “I say fuck too much.”
So, she could have just told him to fuck off. She is cleverer than that. She suggested that he should be made to sit through her telly series and be force fed his least-liked dishes “like a goose destined for pâté de foie gras”. That is how you outwit a wit.
On our pub crawl, we have reached that sloshed stage of the night when the big questions start to be slurringly raised. What is a human being? “That’s what Plato was asking, and so are we.” Okay. What is his answer and what is hers?
“I’m not going to tell you that in the next minute, Michele. Sorry, I’m not going to. You can say Mary Beard refused to give an answer to what a human being is. She proudly refused to give an answer to what a human being is.
“We think about it the whole time, don’t we? We think about it in relation to AI, we think about it in relation to abortion, you know, we think about it in relation to assisted dying. One of the big questions that we live with, not to be summed up in a sentence, is: what is a human being? That is important. There isn’t an answer to that, but there are important questions there.”
This is fair enough. Her job is to open the glass cases, peer inside, and ask the big and small questions. It is late. We are tottering off into the night. I like to imagine that we stop at a wall to scrawl: “Beard and Hewitson wuz here on the ran-tan.” They had a very jolly time.
Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, by Mary Beard (Profile Books, $39.99) is available now.