What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello everyone, it's Tom Holland here and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history. And today we're looking at Julius Caesar. Here's a short extract of that episode.
Hello everybody and welcome to the third of our special members bonus interviews with the great Mary Beard, national treasure, world's most famous classicist and presenter for her own podcast, Instant Classics. And Mary, today we move from Greece to Rome and we move to one particular figure. Clearly the most famous Roman of them all.
And it's actually, people will be watching this if they're getting it straight away in the middle of October. So hello, middle of October. But we're actually recording this on a day when, on The Rest is History, we have released an episode about the Eastern Front in the early months of 1914. And it's Russia led by a czar against Germany led by a Kaiser.
And it's amazing that just over a century ago, Europe was full of people who were named after Julius Caesar, who is the subject of today.
Absolutely. I mean, Caesar has kind of branded his name onto modern politics. And we still do that in the UK. We have a, you know, a drug czar. Yes. You know. Caesar would be a bit surprised, I think, to discover the kind of slight domestication of Tsar.
Well, it would be brilliant if, you know, there was the government held an inquiry into Latin in schools and they had a Caesar, a Caesar Tsar. Maybe one day it will happen.
I mean, Caesar is very different from what we looked at Alexander the Great last time. And Caesar and Alexander the Great have often been compared. By Plutarch, the great biographer. Plutarch, when he's doing his series of lives of people of the past, writing the second century CE. And I mean, we tend to read these lives as singletons. I'm going to go and read Plutarch's life of Caesar.
In fact, Plutarch... wrote them as pairs, so he was always pairing a Greek and a Roman, and then at the end comparing them. And those comparisons that he opts for are really interesting, but one of the most obvious ones is he's got Alexander the Great for his Greek half and Julius Caesar for his second half.
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