Professor Dame Mary Beard
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Professor Dame Mary Beard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Oh, the ancient Greeks thought it was foundational too.
It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that ancient Greece and Rome, they were very backward-looking cultures in some ways.
They didn't look forward to the great progress.
They tended to look back to the greats of the past.
Look, for the Greeks and Romans, it would be a contradiction in terms to imagine that there had ever been any better literature than Homer, the best.
You couldn't better Homer.
And do they think it was true?
Do they think it was history?
The short answer to that is yes.
And the idea that the Trojan War happened and the idea that the Greeks, after the Trojan War, had trouble getting back home, that's sort of historical.
Now, I don't actually think that everybody did think that there were one-eyed giants waiting to eat you up.
And like us, there's a blurry boundary between the history and the fantasy and the myth.
What the Odyssey does is it provides a way of thinking about big questions of classical Greek, later Roman, and indeed our society.
We discover that she's been sending little notes to the suitors.
Come on notes.
Okay, she's been, you know, sensibly very good.
She's refused to marry any of them.
But there's a very strong sense that maybe the similarities between Odysseus and Penelope are a bit deeper than they look.
What does it tell us about women in this world?
I think that is very puzzling.
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