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
Nero didn't.
He had a fantastic, or it was claimed to be, fantastically lavish set of so-called youth games, juvenilia.
full-on public games in which lots of things happened that some people felt or reported to feel a bit uncomfortable about.
He apparently pretty much forced people to act and sing and do performances.
And there's the story of one 80-year-old lady, and as I approach my eighth or ninth decade, I feel more sympathetic to this, who was kind of made to do a dance.
and of course Nero also performed and you can see the biases creeping in here can't you it was said that he didn't really have a very strong voice it was all a bit weedy and
All the stories about how he forced people to do this.
That's what the old lady was made to dance.
It's one of the cases where I often think, well, maybe you could reverse this story.
You know, you could tell it in a way that was a lot more favourable.
And you could say, look, there was one 80-year-old lady.
She was so excited and so enjoying herself that she got up and she did a dance too.
Different impression.
You know, it all looks great for Nero, in a way, because he's the descendant of Augustus through his mum.
He's the adopted son of the reigning emperor.
Looks super.
The problem is...
that the reigning emperor has already got his own son.
And he's called Britannicus.
Called that to celebrate Claudius' conquest of Britain.
Showing 321–340 of 662 · page 17 of 34
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