Why Your Vision of Ancient Rome Is All Wrong, According to Historian Mary Beard

Every­one in ancient Rome wore togas, sur­round­ed them­selves with pure-white mar­ble stat­ues, bayed for blood as glad­i­a­tors fought to the death in the Colos­se­um, pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly imi­tat­ed the Greeks, and, after each and every debauch­er­ous feast, excused them­selves to the vom­i­to­ria, where they rit­u­al­ly vacat­ed their stom­achs. Or at least that’s the pic­ture any of us here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry might piece togeth­er out of the impres­sions we hap­pen to receive from a steady flow of sword-and-san­dals movies and TV shows — not to men­tion the count­less ref­er­ences that pop­u­lar cul­ture makes to the Roman Empire, which inevitably make their way into the con­scious­ness even of those of us who don’t think about it every day.

In the new, almost 80-minute Big Think inter­view above, Mary Beard explains some of the ways in which we’ve been “pic­tur­ing ancient Rome all wrong.” The ancient Romans lived in a world in which men kissed each oth­er as a stan­dard greet­ing (at least until a mas­sive out­break of her­pes put a stop to it it), stat­u­ary was paint­ed in all man­ner of gar­ish col­ors (though just how gar­ish remains a mat­ter of schol­ar­ly inquiry), cit­i­zens rich enough to wear togas need­ed the assis­tance of slaves even to get dressed in the morn­ing, and Greece took cul­tur­al influ­ence as well as gave it. These may not yet be fea­tures of the Rome we imag­ine, but they could be if we make a habit of lis­ten­ing to Beard’s new pod­cast Instant Clas­sics.

What­ev­er lib­er­ties they take, the depic­tions of the Roman Empire that enter­tain us today also remind us that, as Beard puts it, “Rome has nev­er gone away in the mod­ern world.” Nowhere is that clear­er than in ever-more-fre­quent dis­cus­sions about the fate of mod­ern glob­al pow­ers. If we look at our sur­round­ings and see Rome, per­haps that’s because the Eter­nal City has “giv­en us an image of what it is to be pow­er­ful, what it is to be larg­er than life, what it is to be fun­ny, what it is to be an empire, so it’s pro­vid­ed many of the build­ing blocks we need to think about our­selves.” Even if we’re not the mod­ern equiv­a­lents of Augus­tus, Vir­gil, Cicero, or even Nero — to name a few of the Romans Beard name as, for bet­ter or worse, the most impor­tant — we could all stand to make our image of Roman life a lit­tle more real­is­tic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Empire With­out Lim­it: Watch Mary Beard’s TV Series on Ancient Rome

Mythol­o­gy Expert Reviews Depic­tions of Greek & Roman Myths in Pop­u­lar Movies and TV Shows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.