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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
She was murdered.
Maybe she wasn't innocent.
This is a dysfunctional family and nobody in it is innocent.
Gotta dance!
This is another place, I think, where modern readers and critics are a bit inconsistent, because on the one hand, we say, oh, Romans, they went and they massacred everybody, look at Julius Caesar, he's a genocidal maniac, and then we find a Roman emperor who actually likes culture, and we
start to laugh at them a bit yeah and to say well he was a bit weedy really and he was just a theatre kid you know so we can't have it both ways oh i think we can
There really are some funny things coming up here.
It's a great age of culture.
It is a huge literary renaissance.
Yeah.
Not quite clear what Nero's role in that is, but it certainly is.
And that he himself, as he tried at his beard games, he himself... You should have beard games.
Come on.
Boom, you own it.
So he himself performs, and it is said that it perhaps wasn't as brilliant as he liked to be told it was.
And there are amazing stories.
It's sort of...
It's sort of like hiring out the theatre and getting all your friends to come.
But Nero does go a stage further.
So he locks the theatre doors so that once you've got in, so it is said, and that in order to get out, people used to fake their deaths so they could be carried out.
Showing 441–460 of 662 · page 23 of 34
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