Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins on how antiquity shapes the modern world (Part Two)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Serenti. Today's episode is part two of our discussion with renowned classicist Dame Mary Beard and chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins. Charlotte and Mary joined us in the studio to discuss how the classical world shapes our politics. culture, language, and lives today.

Let's rejoin the conversation now with our host, Honor Cargill Martin. Because obviously so much of ancient history is trying to work out what we can learn from stories that we don't necessarily really believe, how do our suspicions about the veracity of a story like Nero fiddling as Rome Burns, how does that affect how we might use them to understand our world today? Well, that is Mary Central. Because it well it is, isn't it, Mary? Because it because you proceed with with scepticism.

And I mean, I I find it a f a a tricky forest, you know, Suetonius, who is our source for so much of this kind of gossipy, salacious, but but not all of it's gossipy and salacious material, and and was also You know, he was also the archivist in the Imperial Palace, so he had access to real stuff, ac real documents, like really poised in pole position as a historian, but at the same time an absolutely massive axe to grind. I mean, you know, I mean, there's a lesson about reading critically. But the trouble is it it leaves you it leaves you in a state of n of sort of unknowing about a lot of the uh so then you have to think about like, but ha y we don't know if if literally Nero stood and played the liar uh while Rome was burning, but what does the fact that that was story told about him show us about the the momentum in which it was written and then the subsequent centuries and millennia in which we consider that to be a kind of the extraordinary and you know and um completely kind of symbolic and extraordinary moments.

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