Stay ConnectedJoin world-renowned classicist Mary Beard and Guardian chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins for Instant Classics — the weekly podcast that proves ancient history is still relevant.
Ancient stories, modern twists… and no degree in Classics required.
Discover The Odyssey and join the book club at: https://www.exploringtheodyssey.com
Mary and Charlotte explore Medea’s afterlife, from Ancient Athens into the 21st Century - the way her story continues to beguile and challenge us. To do this, they are joined by Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University and renowned author of many books including the recent Medea: A Life (Yale University Press, 2026)
Edith describes her life-long relationship with Medea - from watching the same 1970s production that changed Mary’s life - to this year’s book. Having two children along the way certainly changed her perspective. Ultimately, she understands Medea as a narcissist, unable to connect with anybody’s needs but her own.
Edith also talks about the challenge Medea has always presented to theatre-goers. She believes the reason why Euripides’ play ‘lost’ the Athens theatre competition in 431BC is because Medea knows she is about to do wrong, but does it anyway (tragic heroes are normally convinced of their righteousness until the last moment). With the rise of European nationalism in the 19th Century, directors became interested in the outsider-exile quality of Medea’s story, casting her as a Jewish woman then, in the 20th Century, as a black woman. Feminist (and anti-feminist) readings of Medea date back to the 1850s when changes to the divorce laws in the UK gave women greater rights.
Today, actors and directors have to answer big questions about whether she is experiencing psychosis or a cold schemer. Or both. Edith describes her experience working with the legendary Helen McCrory on her National Theatre Production in 2016.
Further reading:
In addition to the bibliography we gave for our first two episodes on Medea . . .
For Robert Brough’s burlesque on Medea, see E. Richardson’s article, “‘A conjugal lesson’” in the journal Ramus 2003. The text of the burlesque itself is available online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858023958535&seq=3
The career of Amy Levy is discussed by Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy (Ohio UP, 2000)
The Cambridge Greek Play has a really good website, with plenty of detail on its history: https://www.cambridgegreekplay.classics.cam.ac.uk/ For the production of Medea we mentioned, see https://www.cambridgegreekplay.classics.cam.ac.uk/past-plays-0/medea-1974
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In September, Mary and Charlotte appeared at the FT Weekend Festival for a wide-ranging conversation covering Greek tragedy, Ukraine, the Bayeux Tapestry, tech bros and - inevitably - Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Here - as a bonus - is a recording of that event, with our thanks to the FT Weekend Festival.
Further reading:
We both draw on our recent books in this discussion: Charlotte’s Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War (Jonathan Cape, 2026), and Mary’s Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old (Profile Books, 2026)
For the gruesome bits of the Bayeux Tapestry, see the full online version: https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/the-bayeux-tapestry/discover-the-bayeux-tapestry/explore-online/ (we have now posted a podcast episode on the Bayeux Tapestry)
One of the most evocative translations of Sappho is by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter (Knopf, 2002). We discuss Carson, the newest classical Nobel laureate, in a recent episode of the podcast. There is a good new translation of Catullus (with facing Latin text) by Stephanie McCarter in the Penguin Classics series.
Those unfamiliar with the phrase “Caecilius est in horto”, can find it in Book 1 of the Cambridge Latin Course (revised version, Cambridge UP, 2022)
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Recorded at the FT Weekend Festival. © The Financial Times Limited 2026. All rights reserved. Used with permission
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Last episode, we saw how Medea was driven to murder her own children, using Euripides’ famous play as our primary source. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte delve deeper into Medea’s life both before and after this shocking incident. Her earlier adventures are told through Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, written in the 3rd Century BCE.
Prince Jason of Iolcos is sent by his uncle to steal the Golden Fleece from King Aeëtes of Colchis. Knowing his task is impossible, Athena, who is Jason’s protector, makes King Aeëtes’ daughter Medea fall in love with him and betray her own people. Princess Medea is also the niece of Circe and has inherited her aunt’s witchy powers. Medea helps Jason steal the fleece and escapes with him across the Black Sea.
They have many adventures on the way home, many of which involve Medea killing someone. She murders her own brother, when he is sent out to capture her. She tricks the daughters of Jason’s uncle/usurper, King Pelias, into killing their father, which forces her and Jason’s flight to Corinth.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the best source for what happens after she kills her children and Jason’s new bride. She flees again, this time alone, to Athens where she marries King Aegeus. But killing has become an addiction. She tries to trick Aegeus into murdering his son Theseus, but Aegeus uncovers her plot and banishes her. She is never heard of again.
Further reading:
A good recent translation of Apollonius with a very helpful introduction is by Richard Hunter, in the Oxford World’s Classics series
One innovative discussion of Medea in Apollonius is R. Buxton, “How Medea Moves” in Bartel and Simon (eds), Unbinding Medea (MHRA, 2010). Online: https://classics.domains.skidmore.edu/lit-campus-only/secondary/Apollonius/Buxton%202010.pdf
For Ovid, we concentrate on his treatment of Medea in Metamorphoses VII, 1-424; but he also focuses on her in his Heroides 12 (an imaginary letter from Medea to Jason).
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Medea is one of the most intriguing characters in Greek mythology: a sorceress, scion of the sungod, and a serial killer. In the first part of a new series, Mary and Charlotte begin with the incident for which she is most famous: the murder of her own children.
The main source for this version of her story is Euripides’ play of 431 BCE. Mary and Charlotte both have powerful memories of encountering the play for the first time, just at the age when they were first becoming interested in ancient Greece, and how it shaped their understanding of the classics.
In the hands of another, less brilliant playwright, the story could be single-noted. Medea, jilted by Jason (of Argonaut fame), murders his new spouse and her father, then murders her two children with Jason, seemingly out of spite. But Euripides asks us to sympathise with Medea at crucial moments in the play, going out of his way to show how unfair Athenian society was not only to Medea but to all women. The men in the play - King Creon, Jason and the King of Athens - are truly dreadful and Medea is articulate about the prejudices of the patriarchy, the institution of marriage and the domestic responsibilities of wives.
Finally Mary and Charlotte ask why Euripides has Medea kill her own children, because there are other accounts of her story in which this doesn’t happen. Is he asking us to see how far we are willing to go in our sympathies and reflect on our own capacity for violence?
Next week, we’re looking at Medea’s early life and how she helped Jason in his search for the Golden Fleece.
Further reading:
Euripides’ Medea is available in multiple translations, online and in Penguin Classics etc. Charlotte used the one collected in the useful recent anthology of Greek tragedies under the title The Greek Plays, edited by Mary Lefkowtiz and James Romm (Modern Library, 2016).
W. Allan, Euripides Medea (Bristol Classical Press, 2002) is a short introduction to the play .
Edith Hall’s recent book Medea: A Life (Yale, 2026) offers an intriguing ‘biography’ of this mythical figure.
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It’s not every year that a classicist wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (in fact, it hasn’t happened since 1959), so Mary and Charlotte interrupt the schedule to reflect on Anne Carson’s extraordinary career as both a classicist and a poet.
Carson is most famous as a poet, but her work is rooted in her scholarly essays and translations of Ancient Greek. Mary and Charlotte talk about how her pioneering book Eros the Bittersweet (1986, based on her phd thesis) linked Sappho to love poetry throughout the ages, including Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf - at a time when ‘Comparative Literature’ was a dirty phrase. This book also informed Carson’s own bittersweet love poetry in books like Glass and God and The Beauty of the Husband.
Mary and Charlotte also discuss Autobiography of Red, her bold re-interpretation of Stesichorus’ account of the monster Geryon and Heracles, which not only responds to an Ancient Greek poet most people haven’t heard of, but brings the story into the present day.
Further reading:
We discussed in particular, Eros the Bittersweet (available in many different editions) and Autobiography of Red (available online here: https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PSPA254/AUTOBIOGRAPHY%20OF%20RED.pdf)
H of H Playbook is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by New Directions in the US.
Her full (immense) biography has its own wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Carson_bibliography
The interview with Carson in the Paris Review is here: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson
The 2013 New York Times profile is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutable-brilliance-of-anne-carson.html
And in the Iowa Review, here: https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/iowareview/article/id/15965/ (there’s a download link)
Daniel Mendelsohn engaged with Carson on Sappho in the New York Review of Books 14 August, 2003
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We think of cancel culture as a 21st-century phenomenon, but it’s been going on since the ancient Egyptians (if not earlier) and the Romans were enthusiastic adopters as a strategy for control. Mary and Charlotte discuss ‘damnatio memoriae’ (condemnation of memory) - the practice of erasing a person from public life and history, usually after their death. (Pedant alert: Romans didn’t use the term ‘damnatio memoriae’ - it was coined much later - and Mary and Charlotte admit straight up that to use the phrase ‘cancel culture’ is a cheeky, and inaccurate, anachronism.)
Further reading:
The classic study of this is Harriet Flower The Art of Forgetting (Univ of NCarolina Press, pb, 2011)
The full text and translation of the senatorial decree on Cn. Piso is in A Cooley, The Senatus Consultum de Cn Pisone patre (Cambridge UP, 2023)
On recarving, see E. R. Varner, From Caligula to Constantine (Uni of Washington Press, pb. 2000).
Charlotte writes about Carausius and the Tullie House inscriptions in Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain (Vintage paperback 2014)
We refer again to the Severan Tondo, now in Berlin: https://search.smb.museum/object/obj-681547
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There are thousands of surviving busts and sculptures of Roman emperors, but… do we actually know what they looked like? The problem is that the function of these statues was less to do with realistically representing the supreme ruler (if at all), and more about asserting his power over the empire. Mary and Charlotte delve into the complexities of representation in ancient Rome.
People across the Roman Empire certainly had an image in mind when they thought about Augustus, because it’s estimated there were over 50,000 sculptures of him – and his profile was on millions of coins. But these idealised images are very different to Suetonius’ descriptions of an almost toothless, blotchy-faced man with various skin conditions. And, of course, Suetonius had his own agenda when it came to describing the emperors of the past. So where does the truth lie? The buff hero of sculpture, the dermatologically fascinating figure of Suetonius, somewhere in between, or none of the above?
There are clues, from documents and other sources, which suggest some attempts at resemblance were made in official portraiture - for some emperors at least. And a remarkable surviving painting of Septimius Severus suggests he may have been black, despite the lack of any written commentary on this subject. But even here… the skin tone may have indicated patriarchal seniority rather than ethnicity. As ever, if we leave you more unsure of your history then when you started, we feel we’re doing our job!
Further reading:
Mary has written about Roman imperial portraiture in several places. Try her Emperor of Rome (Profile, pb. 2024), especially the chapter “Face to Face”; or The Twelve Caesars (Princeton UP, pb, 2023) (most of the book is concerned with modern images of emperors, but it starts with Roman versions of emperors)
An important turning point in modern studies of Augustus’ portraits was P Zanker’s The Power of Images (UMichigan Press, pb, 1990)
One useful discussion of Hadrian’s beard (and there are many others) is C. Vout’s “What's in a beard? Rethinking Hadrian's Hellenism” in S.Goldbill and R. Osborne, Rethinking Revolutions (Cambridge UP, pb, 2010)
Lea Cline and Nathan Elkins (eds), The Oxford handbook of Roman imagery and iconography. (Oxford UP, pb., 2025) offers a series of more theoretical approaches.
The Severan Tondo is in the Antikensammlung in Berlin. Here is the object webpage: https://search.smb.museum/en/object/obj-681547
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Mary and Charlotte delve into the stitching of the Bayeux Tapestry, a 224-foot long narrative embroidery charting William the Conqueror’s successful invasion of England in 1066. Little is certain about the creation of the textile, but it was likely commissioned by one of the Norman victors, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who was granted lands in Kent by his half brother William the Conqueror, shortly after the conquest, and it is widely believed the actual labour was primarily done by women in Canterbury. An English story told by English craftspeople - no wonder England is so excited about its temporary visit to the British Museum.
But what does the Bayeux Tapestry have to do with ancient Greece and Rome? Well, quite a lot actually. There are 338 Latin words on the tapestry, providing added context to the images. The words say things like ‘HIC HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST’ (Here King Harold was killed). Those words also give names to participants lower down the social scale, like Turold and Wadard, who were retainers of Bishop Odo and - who knows? - might have been the Laurel and Hardy of their day.
The Latin words provide a vital piece of evidence to the ‘Made in England’ argument because the Latin is particular (and contains one or two telling inaccuracies). It includes some Norman variations, but also - and here’s the smoking gun - Anglo-Saxon variations too, suggesting that both Norman and Anglo-Saxon hands and minds were involved at various stages. Surely the greatest English-French collab until the Channel Tunnel?
The Latin language is one classical presence in the tapestry, but so too is the narrative form. Scholars have identified several ways in which the tapestry seems to refer to and even verbally echo Virgil’s Aeneid. There are other resonances too, such as the presence of Halley’s Comet (not called Halley’s Comet at the time, of course), which passed close to Earth in 1066. The sighting of a comet early in the Aeneid is one of inciting incidents that sets Aeneas off on his long journey to Italy.
Further reading:
A fantastically detailed and well informed series of podcasts from History Extra brings together scholars to talk about the tapestry in 5 episodes - highly recommended if you are lucky enough to have bagged tickets for the British Museum exhibition
The Bayeux museum has a wonderful version of the complete tapestry online: https://www.bayeuxmuseum.com/en/the-bayeux-tapestry/discover-the-bayeux-tapestry/explore-online/
There is a vast bibliography on the tapestry itself. A major study has been produced by the BM to accompany the show, with more reading suggestions than any could need! The Bayeux Tapestry, edited by Sue Brunning et al (British Museum Press, 2026)
The studies of the Latin itself are usually very technical. One of the more approachable is: Gale Owen-Crocker, "The embroidered word: text in the Bayeux Tapestry." , in Signs on the edge: space, text and margin in medieval manuscripts, edited by Sarah Keefer & Rolf Bremmer, (Rodopi, 2007).
On the influence of Virgil in particular, there are two notable articles in journals: N. Rollason and M Lewis, “Harold-as-Aeneas”, Greece and Rome 2020.
T. A Heslop, “Regarding the spectators of the Bayeux Tapestry”, Art History 2009
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Mary and Charlotte talk to Daniel Mendelsohn, one of America’s most revered classicists, whose new translation of the Odyssey was published last year.
Daniel’s decision to translate the Odyssey occurred rather unusually. In 2011, his 82-year-old father decided to attend his weekly Odyssey seminar at Bard College. In his memoir An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic (2017), Daniel recounts how through his father’s eyes he came to see the Odyssey differently - as well as their own relationship. In the book, he translated short passages which led to a commission from University of Chicago Press to translate the entire poem.
Daniel talks about the decisions he made in his translation - and, of course, how he tackled the word polytropos. He also talks about the response to his less than enthusiastic review of Nolan’s adaptation, why it’s nevertheless been a great moment for the Odyssey, and why literature is sometimes best when it’s NOT relatable.
Further reading:
Slightly confusingly, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is published by University of Chicago Press in the USA and by Penguin Classics in the UK (adding to Penguin’s array of Odyssey translations).
Daniel has his own website: https://www.danielmendelsohn.com/ with links to many of his great classical (and other) essays.
Emily Wilson reviewed An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and and Epic in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/13/an-odyssey-a-father-a-son-and-an-epic-by-daniel-mendelsohn-review
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Last episode, Mary and Charlotte looked at how Homer’s Odyssey was reinterpreted in the Ancient World by writers like Euripides, Virgil and Ovid. In this episode, they show how it shaped English fiction - from Shakespeare through to Madeline Miller. They are joined by Jonty Claypole - Instant Classics producer and co-host of the Secret Life of Books podcast.
One of the great turning points of English literature was George Chapman’s translations of Homer in the 1590s and 1600s which introduced a new generation to Homer’s writing - including Shakespeare who seems to respond to Chapman (and Homer) in plays like Troilus and Cressida and The Tempest.
A hundred years later, the novel emerges with a series of books - Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews - which are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, responses to The Odyssey. Homer also inspired some of the greatest poems in the English language, including John Keats’ On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and Tennyson’s Ulysses.
Finally, Mary, Charlotte and Jonty look at how The Odyssey continues to inspire revision and reinterpretation - whether Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad or Madeline Miller’s Circe.
Further reading:
Richard Holmes’ recent book The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief (Harper Collins, 2025) contains a brilliant description of Tennyson’s Ulysses and the circumstances behind its competition.
Several modern versions of Homer are discussed by Henry Power in his Homer-Haunted: the many after-lives of an ancient poet (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Edith Hall explores how the various themes of the Odyssey have been adapted by many modern authors in The Return of Ulysses: A cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey (free online).
Jonty’s podcast is Secret Life of Books, which he co-hosts with Sophie Gee. Recent episodes go into more depth on some of the topics above - including whole episodes on Tennyson’s Ulysses and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
There is a free online text of Chapman’s Homer here
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