Mary Beard

People visit Delos now.

It's one of the glorious islands of the Mediterranean.

Its past is absolutely admired in slavery and its profits.

And certainly a lot of that comes from war.

But when we were talking about Julius Caesar, we talked about pirates.

I mean, one of the ways that the pirates in the Mediterranean arrived

are making their living is they kidnap someone, they might kill them in the end.

More profitable, if they can't get a ransom, is to sell them into slavery.

Absolutely.

I mean, Caesar has kind of branded his name onto modern politics.

And we still do that in the UK.

We have a, you know, a drug czar.

Yes.

You know.

Caesar would be a bit surprised, I think, to discover the kind of slight domestication of Tsar.

I mean, Caesar is very different from what we looked at Alexander the Great last time.

And Caesar and Alexander the Great have often been compared.

By Plutarch, the great biographer.

Plutarch, when he's doing his series of lives of people of the past, writing the second century CE.

And I mean, we tend to read these lives as singletons.