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
What?
The Julius Caesar thing.
Claudius has a big triumph for conquering Britain.
Triumphs and great procession through Rome, parading your captives and everything.
That goes with massacres.
That's Roman Maticus.
Now what Nero does is come home and he has a slightly different sort of tribe, entering up at the temple of the god of music, Apollo, celebrating his sporting and cultural victories.
I tend to think that I'm on Nero's side here, possibly.
Maybe if the Romans had spent more time having triumphal processions and celebrating people who were good at arts and culture...
The world might possibly have been a nicer place.
You could take it that far.
maybe he's trying to find another way of being an emperor, and we just have not got on his wavelength.
Yes, possibly.
I mean, I think the jury's out, but we have to keep that as a possibility.
Yeah.
I mean, Nero's first wife is Claudius's natural, as it were, inverted commas, daughter, Britannicus's sister, a woman called Octavia.
And it was a kind of a brilliant move, in a way, for sewing up Nero's perfect right to rule.
And the picture we're given of her is that she was very virtuous and that what then happens, according to the standard story, is that Nero...
falls madly in love with somebody else, then in order to get rid of Octavia, accuses her of sterility because there was no children.
Roman men didn't usually think that no children was their problem, it was the wife's problem.
Showing 481–500 of 662 · page 25 of 34
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