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
jointly Nero and his two daughters, thinking that that would somehow kind of sew up the safety of his kingdom.
What actually happens is that the Romans in the province come in, they ransack the place, they trash it and they rape the daughters.
At that point, Boudicca says, according to the story, no thanks.
And she leads a rebellion.
And she's successful for a bit.
She destroys London.
She destroys St Albans.
Colchester, yeah.
But the governor of the province, a guy called Suetonius Paulinus, who's no relation of the historian...
He brutally squashes this.
I mean, in the end, most rebellions are put down because the rebels just can't withstand the Roman legions.
And he completely trashes them.
He takes the most violent reprisals against the rebels.
And the upshot is strange and slightly more optimistic because it shows you that not all Romans are as nasty as others.
There's a whistleblower on the governor's staff and the whistleblower writes to Nero and says, these replies have got to stop.
And Nero very soon replaces the governor, replaces Suetonius Paulinus, with a guy who has a wonderful name called Petronius Turpilianus, which means lazy sod, basically.
It means what?
Lazy so-and-so.
Lazy so-and-so.
Turpilianus, it means kind of slow, lazy.
Showing 541–560 of 662 · page 28 of 34
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