With the life and literature of the whole ancient world spread before us for our pleasure, we classicists can be said to lead lives of unparalleled hedonism. But the secret is leaking out. The whole world seems to want a taste, and we cannot blame it in the slightest. History has its Schama, maths its Du Sautoy and environmental studies the grand-daddy of them all, the great David Attenborough. So who will risk themselves and their reputation in the hands of the producers with the 42-inch mentality to satisfy this growing appetite?
Bettany Hughes, our first female TV historian, is the doyenne of such ventures, fronting over the past 12 years highly seductive radio and TV programmes on everything from Sparta to Atlantis, from Buddhism and the Bible to Nefertiti and now Divine Women. She tells a terrific story with an enthusiasm that fires people with excitement about the past. If occasionally she comes up with slightly eye-watering assumptions and generalisations, that perhaps is the price a vivacious TV storyteller pays for providing the delectatio (‘delight’) which Romans regarded as a legitimate aim of history.
But enter now a new girl on the block, a bit of a street-fighter too, with her programmes on Pompeii and the Romans — Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge and fellow of Newnham. Ancient history is a broad church, and I want to argue that her main purpose is to bring an important new dimension to the subject on TV. The 5th-century bc Greek historian Herodotus, called the ‘father of history’ by Cicero, will explain all.
Herodotus told the story of the Persian Wars, the Greeks’ finest hour, when between 490 and 479 bc they repelled the onslaught of the mighty Persian Empire, and a cracking tale he made of it as well. But what marks Herodotus as the first real historian, despite the innumerabiles fabulae (‘tall stories’) which Cicero agreed he recounted, is that he quoted his sources (‘I now rely on what the Egyptians have told me, though I add some observations of my own’); doubted much of what he was told (‘I cannot say for sure what happened next’, followed by two different accounts) and sometimes washed his hand of the whole business (‘I am required to report what I was told, but I am certainly not required to believe it’). So there was a serious critical intelligence at work here. For all his weaknesses, Herodotus understood the importance of evidence and its sources, knew how slippery it could all be, and regarded it as a prime duty of the historian to alert the reader to the problems: hence ‘father of history’.
Like Bettany Hughes, Professor Beard has to compromise. It goes with the TV territory. Meet the Romans, for example, claimed to concentrate on ordinary, poor Romans at the bottom of the social heap. But they cannot have been that destitute to be remembered on marble tombstones or memorial plaques, even if they had been saving up in the local funeraticium collegium (100 sestertii plus an amphora of good wine to join, plus c.1 sestertius a month; a soldier’s pay was c.17 sestertii a month). The poet Martial imagined a real derelict’s last hours, as he flapped his rags in an effort to try to keep off the scavenging birds. The only use marble monuments had for him was sleeping under. That’s bottom of the heap for you.
The importance of Professor Beard’s approach is that she brings to the screen the same sort of enthusiasm as Bettany Hughes, but the thrust of her programmes is noticeably different: to clarify, in as far as any TV producer will allow, exactly how we know what we know and what the evidence for it is, and thus to hint at the debate on which our whole understanding of our past depends. No wonder ‘might have’, ‘probably’, ‘my guess’, ‘what looks like’ and ‘the current idea is’ figure so large, followed by ‘what this suggests is’. This, to my mind, gives something of a taste of the business of real history — or as real as it will be allowed to get on the box.
Three things stand out: first, the commitment to the use of hard, written evidence, like the funerary inscriptions recording the lives of dead Romans as spun to their living compatriots, from the plain (opstetrix) to the ornate. For the first time in recorded history too, the TV actually allowed you to look carefully at the Latin. How Professor Beard persuaded the producers to do that is quite beyond me.
Then there was the location. Apart from what felt like the introductory aeons of the professor faffing about on a bicycle telling us endlessly what the programme was going to be all about — tells you everything you need to know about what producers think of their audience — the mise en scène was directly relevant to the topic. In other words, text and image went tightly hand in hand, just like the best Attenborough, and without a scudding cloud in sight. Finally, the detail: conclusions reached through minute examination and enlightening analysis of the artefacts, e.g. the extraordinary stone map of the city (Severus’ Forma urbis, c. ad 200). Every location, every scrap of evidence, was exploited to the full for what it might tell us, with complexities and problems freely admitted, and not without tenderly moving reflections on e.g. the child epitaphs.
This is what makes Professor Beard’s history so compelling. What we know about the ancient world is the result of hundreds of years of dedicated, serious, grinding work. To give the public such a clear and thrilling glimpse of not just what we think we know but the detail of how and why we think we know it, is a fine achievement — a sense of what real historians do.
So we classicists are enormously fortunate to have two such different but passionate and persuasive advocates dedicated to feeding a hungry world — Hughes for the stories, Beard for the stories behind the stories. Herodotus would be flattered.
Peter Jones is an adviser to the charity Classics for All, of which Mary Beard and Bettany Hughes are patrons.
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