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
He is reported even to have won when he kind of fell out of his chariot and didn't finish the course.
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.
Maybe he's trying to find another way of being an emperor, and we just have not got on his wavelength.
I think the jury's out, but we have to keep that as a possibility.
Yeah.
Nero's first wife is Claudius's natural, as it were, in 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.
He divorced her, sent her into exile and then had her killed.
And it is then said that her head was sent to Nero's new lover.
This is about as horrible... I mean, the story is horrible, whatever the truth.
I'm afraid what happens next to the new woman, a woman called Papaya, is not much better, honestly.
She's supposed to be a beauty, Nero nicked from her previous husband.
She does get pregnant, he's wanting an heir, and it's when she gets pregnant that he finally divorces Octavia.
Nero and Papaya have a daughter, but she soon dies.
She's made a god very quickly, but she dies.
Papaya gets pregnant again.
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