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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's the biggest city in the West until Victorian London.
So early 19th century London.
But there are some bits that we might expect to see that we don't see.
The Colosseum is one obvious case.
You go to Rome now and, you know, OK, it's in the middle of a roundabout, but it's really, really impressive.
Now, the Colosseum was built after Nero's reign by the next dynasty.
But interestingly...
Its name preserves a little memory of Nero because it was erected very close to the site of a colossus, a colossal statue of Nero, 30-something metres tall, it is said.
And that's what gave this amphitheatre its name.
It was near Nero's Colossus.
What we tend to forget, I mean, you were partly right, Patton, you know, that this is actually bright and there's graffiti everywhere and it probably stinks, absolutely stinks, right?
But it is not always great monuments, no matter what colour they were.
So it's a mixture of vast display buildings put up, often bankrolled by emperors, and terrible slums.
Yeah.
What's interesting is I think in modern cities, certainly in British modern cities, we're used to a kind of zoning in city architecture.
We think there's the rich part, you know, and there's the poor part.
And, you know, there's almost unseen boundaries between these two different things.
Levels of the city.
What's really striking in Rome is there's a bit of that, but the slums are right there next to the grand staff.
You can walk past the great Capitoline Hill and at the bottom there's a slum tenement.
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