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
And he is forced to suicide because that's a standard form of Roman execution.
No, this was a military... This was a military conspiracy.
It was a military revolt.
This is a coup, right?
It's a coup.
It's basically a coup.
And it's not trying to kind of... It's not a few of the kind of not terribly effective elite like Seneca and his friends...
doing it in Rome, it starts in the provinces, and Nero sees the game is up.
There's fighting, but in the end it's clear that people are turning away from Nero to the rebels.
And what he does is he goes out to a suburban villa and he realises he has to kill himself.
Everybody is doing... Everybody is deserting him.
And he goes out and there's a pathetic... There are very, really pathetic stories.
Again, believe it or not, I don't know, about how he was hopeless even when he came to try to die.
And he has some very odd last words.
Supposed last words were... He's got more than one lot, I'm afraid.
But the famous one is Qualis Artifex Pereo.
What an artist and artifacts.
What an artist is dying when I die.
He's 31.
And the first one picks up a theme that we've been playing with actually quite often in our discussion, tried to pull that together.
Showing 621–640 of 662 · page 32 of 34
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