Professor Mary Beard

speaker

662 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 1 May

Professor Mary Beard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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You're Dead to Me · Emperor Nero (Radio Edit) · 1 May 2026 podcast

OK, I've got two mini nuances.

And the first one picks up a theme that we've been playing with actually quite often in our discussion, tried to pull that together.

And it's what I suppose I call the T word.

And it's T for truth, right?

Are the kind of amazing, intriguing...

...memorable, brilliantly evocative stories that we read about Nero... ...are they actually true, with a capital T?

Now, we can't actually, literally, know that.

A long time ago, I used to really worry about that... ...but I've sort of become a post-truth person now... ...because what I think is really important about these stories... ...and they are important...

is that the fact that the Romans told them about their emperors.

And they sometimes told the same stories about different emperors.

And in a way, it was their way, I think, telling these stories, thinking them up, constructing them, was their way of getting their head around what the power of autocrats was, what you might fear about them, what they might do to you.

And so in a way, I think there are ways of getting inside the heads of the Romans to think about how the Romans thought about emperors.

My second nuance is that it's easier to complain about the gaps in our knowledge about emperors like this than to celebrate what we know about Nero.

And I'm guilty of that.

I'm complaining about what we don't know all the time.

But really, we should be turning this on its head, I think.

And we should say, what is amazing is that 2,000 years on, we know so much about Nero.

Not just in the amazing writing that we've been looking at, but we can still hold the coins of Nero.

We can still visit Nero's golden house, or at least part of it.

We can walk through Nero's corridors and we can see where he sat down or lay down to dinner.

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