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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
With my historian's hat on, I've said I'm not sure how far you can historicise the Odyssey, but there is something very funny about the social structure of Odysseus' palace because the old king, Laertes, Odysseus' dad, is sort of in retirement, like a modern pope somehow, and yet the person who is going to rule Ithaca, it's made quite clear it's the man who marries Penelope.
Yeah, and getting straight with all the lines of succession here is quite hard.
I think there's all kinds of ways in which you see, I mean, there's the canniness of Penelope, you know,
Decius is best known, really, for being a trickster.
Well, so is Penelope because Penelope is saying to them eventually, look, okay, I'll decide to marry you when I've finished weaving the shroud for my father-in-law Laertes, who's very old.
He's going to die sooner.
And Penelope's trick is that she unpicks the shroud every evening so she never finishes it.
And so there's a canniness to Penelope, which I find very appealing.
And yet there is also the sense that...
She is disempowered and I suppose one of my least favourite bits at the beginning of the Odyssey is when Penelope has been doing her weaving upstairs and she comes down and she finds the bard singing a rather sad song about the trouble that Odysseus and the other Greeks are having when they're coming back home from the Trojan War.
Penelope totally reasonably says, you know, can we put on a more cheerful record, please, Bard?
Can we sing a cheerier song?
At this point, her son Telemachus, late teenager, comes up to his savvy mother, Telemachus, who's still growing up, and says, Mother, speech is man's business.
Go back to your room.
And she does.
Now, I read The Elder Sea for decades before I spotted that scene.
It is the original moment in the West where wet behind the ears teenager tells his savvy mum to shut up.
And it has been repeated millions of times since Homer composed it.
Well, I think teenage boys often start to learn about what power is by taking it out on their mums.
I think why it's a perennial bestseller, and why the Greeks are right in a way, I think, is that it's constantly preoccupying.
Showing 21–40 of 106 · page 2 of 6
← Previous
Next →