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
In case you haven’t noticed… the USA is celebrating a special anniversary. Mary and Charlotte talk to one of America’s leading scholars of ancient Rome and its modern reception, Joy Connolly, about why so much of the struggle for independence deployed the words, images and sometimes actual clothing of the Ancient Romans.
They discuss George Washington’s production of the tragedy of Cato in the revolutionary army and Joseph Warren’s donning of a toga to incite the rebels. They ask why the Declaration of Independence and Constitution drew so heavily on Roman writers like Cicero and Virgil, why Cincinnati was named after the authoritarian Cincinnatus, and to what extent the Republicans and Democrats resemble the classical ideologies they named themselves after. Most of all, the big question: did the Founders know that Virgil’s words e pluribus unum (out of many, one), which became a rallying cry for the merging of the colonies into one, actually came from a recipe for cheese spread?
Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:
Joy has written about the use of classics in the revolutionary period and later in: “Classical Education and the Early American Democratic Style” in S. Stephens and P. Vasunia (eds), Classics and National Cultures (Oxford UP, 2010) and “Past Sovereignty: Roman Freedom for Modern Revolutionaries” in Basil Duffalo (ed), Roman Error (Oxford UP, 2017). You can read more about her work at ACLS.
There are many useful introductions to different aspects of the Romanness of the American Revolution. We have enjoyed:
C. J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics (Harvard UP, pb, 1995)
M. Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Wiley Blackwell, pb, 2008)
M. N. S. Sellars, “The Roman Republic and the French and American Revolutions", in H. Flower (ed), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (Cambridge UP, pb, 2004)
More focussed on cultural influence than any directly political impact is W. L. Vance, America’s Rome (Yale UP, 1990)
An article on Joseph Warren’s toga.
A 1903 letter to the New York Times discussing the tracing of “e pluribus unum” to “Moretum”, the poem once attributed to Virgil that offers a recipe for herby, garlicky cheese spread.
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Nearly 2000 years before Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, a sage in Ephesus (now in Turkey) wrote a book whose title translates as… The Interpretation of Dreams. Armed with Artemidorus’ book, Mary and Charlotte dive into the surreal and revealing dreamscape of the Ancients.
If you’ve ever had a dream about flying or losing teeth or sex with a stranger, well… Artemidorus has a view about what this really means. Today, we might find his interpretations a little too neat and prescriptive, but they provide a fascinating insight into life on the edge of the Roman empire, including what people chatted (or sang) about at the public baths, the prevalence of mice in the home, and the hopes, aspirations and fears of household slaves.
As with our episodes on Roman joke and cook books, we discover that the Ancients were simultaneously more like us and more dissimilar than we might expect.
Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:
The best translation of Artemidorus is by Martin Hammond in the Oxford World’s Classics series (OUP,pb, 2020) with an introduction by Peter Thonemann.
Thonemann discusses the text and its context in his An Ancient Dream Manual: Artemidorus’ The Interpretation of Dreams (OUP, 2020)
A classic article is by Simon Price, “The future of dreams: from Freud to Artemidorus”, originally published in Past and Present for 1986, reprinted in R Osborne (ed), Studies in Greek and Roman Society (Cambridge UP, pb, 2012)
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Mary and Charlotte talk to Professor Maria Wyke, classicist and film historian, about Cleopatra’s rebirth on the screen. By far the most famous Cleopatra film is the 1963 epic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton - at the time the most expensive film ever made and with a steamy on-set love affair between the two stars to match that of the characters they were playing. Almost as brilliant, in its way, is the parody made the following year - Carry on Cleo - giving Kenneth Williams, as Julius Caesar, one of the greatest lines of all time: “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.”
This pair of films hog the limelight, but Maria shows how cinema’s fascination with Cleo goes right back to the early years of silent film through to the 21st Century. Why? On one hand, the Cleopatra story is an opportunity for spectacle and sex appeal - in other words, good business. On the other, the story is reinvented by each generation, playing on the anxieties and desires of the age. Looking at Cleopatra films tells us a lot about changing attitudes to sex, race and politics over the last 100+ years.
Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:
Maria has written about Cleopatra on film in her books Projecting the Past (Routledge, pb, 1997) and The Roman Mistress (OUP, 2002).
Films also figure in Lucy Hughes Hallett’s, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (Fourth Estate, pb, 2026)
A discussion of the Taylor-Burton film on its 60th anniversary: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jun/12/cleopatra-60th-anniversary-elizabeth-taylor-richard-burton
And for the fashion aspect: https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1963-mankiewicz-cleopatra/
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Mary and Charlotte talk to Lucy Hughes-Hallett, acclaimed biographer and author of ‘Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions’, about Cleopatra’s afterlife on the page. Lucy begins by observing that “the people who write about her aren't interested in describing her as a real person. They use her as a kind of mirror onto which they can project their own prejudices and anxieties and often erotic fantasies.”
In the 14th Century, Boccaccio mined the old evil temptress angle. Geoffrey Chaucer, however, went the other way: she was a martyr to love, choosing to kill herself rather than consider life without Antony. For Shakespeare, she provided the perfect character to study the effects of unbridled passion. After Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, Cleopatra was orientalised - her skin and hair became darker in pictures and she indulged in decadent acts of cruelty.
In recent decades, she has been framed as nationalist freedom fighter and feminist hero, but it feels like - even two thousand years on - there is more to explore in this most elusive of historical queens.
Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:
The new edition of Lucy’s book is just out: Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (Fourth Estate, pb, 2026). It has discussion of all the texts we mentioned, and more (plus further bibliography).
In the modern Egyptian tradition, the best known representation of Cleopatra, the freedom fighter is Ahmed Shawqi’s play, The Death of Cleopatra (there is a recent English translation by Jeanette Wahba Sourial Atiya, though not easy to get hold of).
Cleopatra in modern painting and sculpture is the subject of a useful illustrated essay online”
https://artuk.org/discover/stories/cleopatras-legacy-in-art-famous-pharaoh-and-femme-fatale
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Another trailer for Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey has just been released, giving more insights into the world the cast and crew have created. Mary and Charlotte give their quick-fire response.
Have your say at…
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For many years, Cleopatra and Mark Antony lived a life of extravagance and passion - or so we’re told. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte look at what happened next. Mark Antony, with Cleopatra, met their enemy Octavian in a sea battle off the coast of Greece - and lost. The Battle of Actium was a turning point for Rome. After this moment, Octavian rebranded himself as Emperor Augustus, bringing an official end to many centuries of republican rule.
Rather than face capture and humiliation, both Antony and Cleopatra took their lives. The story of their final days survives through Plutarch, but how much of this official Roman version can we trust? Was Cleopatra really an exotic temptress who seduced Mark Antony into treason? And did she really kill herself with a poisonous snake? Accounts of her death are so tied up in the wider propaganda legitimising Augustus’ rise to Emperor that it’s impossible to know what really happened.
Soon after her death, she began to haunt the imagination of writers and artists. Mary and Charlotte believe she probably inspired the figure of Dido of Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid, written only a decade or so later. The North African queen who takes her life for love of a Roman. But Virgil was by no means the last to take inspiration from her story, as we will be discovering in the next episode….
Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:
The poem by Horace is his Odes 1.37 (Nunc est bibendum, “Now is the time for drinking”) with a decent translation online.
(Charlotte's school song, oddly based on this poem, began “Nunc canendum, nunc laetandum” – “Now is the time for singing, now is the time for rejoicing,” all prime examples of gerundives of obligation, for the Latin nerds)
Maria Wyke (who we will meet later in this Cleopatra series, talking about Cleopatra movies) explores the propaganda of the emperor Augustus and the figure of Cleopatra in this article available online: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10143408/1/Augustan%20Cleopatras.pdf
And more on Augustan propaganda: https://cleopatradigitized.wordpress.com/cleopatra-and-augustan-propaganda-after-the-battle-of-actium/
The links between Dido and Cleopatra are discussed here: https://womeninantiquity.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/cleopatra-and-dido/
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If it hadn’t been for Rome, Cleopatra’s sole claim to fame may have been that she married two of her brothers. But then Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria… In this episode, Mary and Charlotte recount what happened next. Caesar came to Egypt in pursuit of his great enemy, Pompey the Great, and became Cleopatra’s lover. They embarked on a cruise of the Nile, during which Caesar created the modern calendar system.
After Caesar returned to Rome, Cleopatra bore a son, who she named Caesarion. She followed Caesar to Rome and was there at the time of his assassination. Afterwards, Caesar’s ally Mark Antony and great-nephew Octavian defeated Caesar’s assassins, then turned on one another. Mark Antony formed an alliance with Cleopatra and became her second Roman lover. Together, they embarked on one of the most famous romances in history. Passionate, extravagant, and - spoiler alert - doomed.
Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:
Plutarch’s Life of Mark Antony (the main ancient source for his relationship with Cleopatra) is available online: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Antony*.html
In addition to the books we recommended for the last episode, Adrian Goldsworthy’s Antony and Cleopatra (Weidenfeld & Nicolson pb, 2011) focuses in detail on the politics of their relationship.
For the complexity of the Roman calendar (and be warned it is complex), see Jörg Rüpke, The Roman Calendar (Wiley Blackwell, 2011), or more briefly Robert Hannah, Greek and Roman Calendars (Bristol Classical Press, 2005). You can find an online discussion of Caesar and Cleopatra’s Nile cruise online: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/miscellanea/cleopatra/egypt.html
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In the first episode of a five-part series, Mary and Charlotte tell the story of Queen Cleopatra’s early years. Forget, for the time being, Elizabeth Taylor rolling out of a rug, poisonous asps and baths of asses’ milk. Focus instead on inbreeding and incest, because Cleopatra, child of Ptolemy the Flute-Player, married her brother, Ptolemy 13th. When he died in suspicious circumstances, she married another brother, Ptolemy 14th.
Mary and Charlotte discuss why the Ptolemy dynasty of Egypt was so fixed on keeping it in the family. In the second half of the episode, they explore the controversial issue of race in Cleopatra studies. On one hand, she was born into a dynasty from Greece which prided itself on inbreeding. On the other, it seems likely that beneath the official accounts, a great deal of cavorting went on beyond the royal household. The main reason it is so hard to reach any definitive conclusion is that ancient writers were uninterested in race as we understand it. They seemed not to fixate or even be interested in skin colour.
The episode ends with Cleopatra primed to meet Julius Caesar.
Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:
There is a whole series of reliable modern biographies of Cleopatra (as well as many more unreliable accounts). This is a short selection of the trustworthy:
D. Roller: Cleopatra: a biography (Oxford UP, pb, 2011)
S. Schiff, Cleopatra: a life (Virgin books, pb, 2011)
J. Tyldesley, Cleopatra: last queen of Egypt (ProfileBooks, pb, 2009)
For the wider history of the dynasty:
Alan Bowman: Egypt after the Pharaohs (British Museum Press, pb, 1996)
L. Llewellyn-Jones, The Cleopatras (Wildfire, pb, 2025)
For Alexandria and its culture:
E. Richardson, Alexandria: the quest for the lost city (Bloomsbury, pb, 2022)
Islam Issa, Alexandria: the city that changed the world (Sceptre, pb, 2024)
For Cleopatra and race:
In addition to the biographies cited, you can get an idea of the debates, here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/black-cleopatra/
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Mary and Charlotte talk to artist Grayson Perry about why he hates classical civilisation. Grayson is one of Britain’s most famous artists - he won the Turner Prize in 2003, has been exhibited in major exhibitions across the globe, published books and presented television programmes.
Earlier this year, Grayson delivered the Rumble Fund Lecture 2026 at King’s College London, entitled ‘Why I hate classical civilisation’. Needless to say, Mary and Charlotte want to know why - and also see if they can encourage him to think more positively about his relationship with the ancient world.
Grayson talks about the tedium of learning Latin at school, his irritation at the endless classical imitations in British architecture and asks why bad people - names are mentioned - hold up the classics as the peak of civilisation.
Mary and Charlotte hit back. Just as many radicals and revolutionaries have been inspired by the classics as dictators or would-be dictators. Mary wishes she’d had the chance to teach Latin to Grayson. There’s a thought…
Content warning: This episode features bad words beginning with the letter ‘f’.
Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:
The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, a book accompanying Perry’s British Museum exhibition, was published by the British Museum Press, 2011.
An image from Perry’s The Rap of the Sabine Women (1981) can be seen on the Stedelijk Museum website.
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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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