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
The trouble is, as an old teacher of mine always used to say, it's very hard in the Roman world to tell a nasty case of poisoning from a nasty case of peritonitis.
Yeah.
People die of stuff, right?
People can die of ordinary things.
They could die of ordinary things, but everybody always wants them to die of poison.
An epileptic.
But people on that occasion had clear grounds for suspicion because it was said that after he'd keeled over at dinner, they had a quick burial, but the funeral pyre had already been prepared.
Well, one story is, and it's not without some evidence, that the power behind the throne was Agrippina.
Not so far.
What it shows is how easy it is to invent these stories.
All our three main historical sources are pretty clear that Nero tries to and eventually does murder.
kill her suetonius has the most possible attempts suetonius records that there were three attempts to poison her but like many romans she took a daily dose of antidote in order to kind of to protect her body against poison you know
a fish called Wanda he just keeps trying to kill her she's surviving it's like a farce isn't it yeah it is the next attempt is even more farcical the idea is that he arranged for tiles to crash from the roof where she was sleeping but this is like a roadrunner
She had been tipped off.
Now, what I think is very well puts us all in the spot here is that these are ludicrous stories and they are hammed up in the sources, you know, so that they're over the top and unbelievable.
There is a temptation to think that this is all very funny.
But this is a woman being killed by her son.
This is matricide, right?
And in the end, she is murdered.
And in the end, he sends a hit squad.
Showing 61–80 of 662 · page 4 of 34
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