Mary Beard: Hollywood Lied to You About Ancient Rome. Here's the Truth

You really didn't want to see Titus Pullo fighting the Picts??

The first season was awesome, but IMO second season was already pretty bad.

Unless they moved some things forward because they knew it was ending ending, I agree. As much as part of me wants to see where some of that goes, I know it wouldn’t have been good. Not like the rest of it was.

Separate topic: The way the show handled Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral got one of the biggest laughs out of me of any TV show ever.

Little Wars TV did a deep dive into the production of Rome and where the five season arc would have gone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cIVJD1cmbk

Also most people in the 16th century in Russia, Europe and even the Ottoman Empire would have considered themselves Roman of one variety or another.

So I think this backs my point - when she's referring to Opera, she's referring to a modern conception of opera, not an 18th century concept of opera. I agree that's more normal sounding.

Yes, Bernard Shaw used to complain in his reviews that no one listened to the music and constantly talked, as concerts were a social event, and you promenaded around.

SOme history here too https://ledbooks.org/proceedings2019/tag/silence/

Check out old Pride events (or any older Japanese MMA.) Everybody is quiet (with a few isolated shouts of encouragement) until someone does something heroic, and then there's a polite and energetic round of applause. The only reason that Zuffa UFC sounds like it does is because they intentionally tried to steal audiences from US professional wrestling. They also spent years standing people up almost immediately when they were jiu-jitsuing each other because the wrestling audience would just start booing aggressively after about a minute, the result being that the UFC were very kickboxer and greco-roman focused and some real killers had all their weapons taken away from them by UFC's application of their "Unified Rules."

Japanese MMA was founded and branded by people who were saying that Japanese professional wrestling was too theatrical, and Zuffa UFC was branded by people who were saying that professional wrestling wasn't violent enough (if anything, they were competing with "backyard" wrestling.) UFC has improved since, but imo that's because it became a monopoly and had to absorb all the other MMA audiences (and fighters), and the wrestling fans who didn't get bored with MMA eventually got less stupid.

> to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.

I also don't think there's any safe assumption of how Colosseum crowds behaved other than how contemporary narratives say they did. I agree that life and death brings an atmosphere of seriousness that wouldn't often exist at the Circus.

If the Romans regularly scribbled graffiti about gladiator fights and their outcomes, I would expect them to shout during them as well. It feels to me that such behavior naturally dovetails together: excited, rowdy, norm-breaking.

Hmm. Interesting; that surprises me. Enough that I did some googling: here's a quote from reddit that sounds more like what I'd expect:

  > Japan has by far the best combat sports audience in the world. Most of the time they are so quiet that you can literally hear the corners talking and even the ring shifting as the fighters move around. But then when something cool happens they go crazy.

That's how I'd imagine it at the edges of the "quiet crowd" phenomenon; even then it's cultural, that is, I wouldn't expect the same culture that did this to also have brisk 250k person events that are generally raucous.

> she keeps saying things like "this list of consuls since the kings can't possibly be right". Ancient people apparently could not maintain a straightforward list, despite the thousands of miles of roads and aqueducts

Did she,in the book, give a reason why the list can't possibly be right?

The same sense of muddled analysis (which I also found to be extremely off-putting) comes through in this interview:

> There's a lot of myths that you need to bust about the gladiatorial games, particularly in the center of Rome in the Colosseum. I think everyone's image of that is in some way based on modern movies on "Gladiator I," "Gladiator II." In some ways, I think those were rather impressive, but they got some things terribly wrong. And I think the thing that, for me, the biggest mistake they made is to imagine how the audience behaved. We do tend to think that somehow the audience must have gone wild, they were there because they wanted blood lust, they were erupting in passion, in anger, saying "Kill him," or "Save him," or whatever. Everything that we can tell about the audience from Roman sources themselves suggests that actually it was much more controlled than anything you see are in the movies. For start, it was completely sex-segregated, the women sat separately from the men. But more than that, everybody came dressed quite posh, you had to wear a toga to go. Now a toga is the official Roman dress for Roman men, but it's worn when you are doing something official, you don't wear it to the local bar in the evening. To go to the gladiatorial games, that was kind of official, and you had to wear your toga. Everybody sat not just segregated by sex, but they sat in rank order. Senators by law, the top rank of Roman society, on the front rows, and then the next rank down just above them, until you got to the very back where you found the slaves and the women. Now I think that we somehow have to just overturn our sense that it was kind of mad, "losing control" going on. I think it was probably more like an evening at the opera than an evening at a football match.

If you're going to make an assertion that seems absurd on its face ("The large crowds of wine-drunk plebs were subdued and mild mannered whilst observing blood sport!"), you should offer up evidence that actually supports your assertion. Her reasoning appears to have been: Men and women sat separately. The rich got preferred seating. You had to dress up (in a toga). QED, the atmosphere was like an evening at the opera. Huh?

I mean.. we suspect there's a level of fabrication by early Roman historians. In your specific quote - it's more that record keeping (to that detail) happened after-the-fact and based on oral traditions. Just take a look at Suetonius and how he describes his sources of information, things along the lines of "well, this is hearsay but I heard it from my relative who knew XYZ and therefor I think it's credible".

Framing the uncertainty around early record keeping is a good. Similarly, the second Servile war in historic documents matches the first Servile war almost like Star Wars ep7 matches ep4. That _hints_ at fabrication. So if they fabricate data in one place.. :)

I'm not acquainted with her work, but after reading the transcript your comment seems... highly moralistic and highly judgmental?

The whole interview reads as very sober, she mentions elements that are at odds with the pop culture understanding. She very explicitly takes head on this type of criticisms.

>I think the question of how you judge these people is very tricky. People often write in to me and say, "I don't like the way that you do sometimes make judgments about X as a mass murderer, when they're 2000 years in the past. Surely, it's often said, "You should be judging them on their own terms, not on your terms."

> I've got two responses to that. One is, quite often, these people were hostilely judged in antiquity itself, but we rather brush that under the carpet. Julius Caesar, for example, it's reckoned now that he may well have killed about a million Gauls in his campaign against Gaul, and there were people in Rome who said he was committing crimes against humanity. This is not a new invention that Caesar was a war criminal, there were people in Rome who said that. So I think we have to be very careful always to listen out for the discordant voices in antiquity itself. But I think perhaps more important is that the job of the historian, and this kind of explains I think why we sometimes find there's a flip flop here between one sort of judgment of Alexander the Great and another, you know, favorable or not favorable, same with Caesar, whatever, is that the job of the historian I think is to have stereoscopic vision. I think it is important to understand these characters in their own context, and in their own terms, and how people, by the standards of their time, yes, I think you should do that. But I think that the modern historian can't just leave their own moral values, you know, at the library door. I do at a certain point have to say I find the conquests of Alexander the Great, very, very uncomfortable, and I think what I particularly dislike in terms of our modern appropriation of them is the way we somehow seem to go along with approving of what they did. I might not want to disapprove of it, I might want to say, in part, that by the standards of their own time was okay, but I do have to say it's not the standards of ours, and we have to realize that there are moral issues and questions about what happened in antiquity that we shouldn't be afraid of bringing to the surface. I'm very happy to do that. I mean, I think it's quite interesting, I've chosen a group of men for my most influential Rome, I think I had no choice but to do that. I can also say, but I think there is something about the misogyny of the Roman Empire that I deplore. And you have to be able to hold those two views at the same time, I think.

That's not sneering, it's just not falling in to the trap that whitewashes the brutality of the past. Should future historians only consider our proclaimed ideals? Our notions virtue? Will the War on Terror be seen just as a "cool" period, morally-neutral?

In other words, she doesn't like them--and apparently she is self-righteous about it, too.

> violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.

Which is a very anachronistic way of looking at things and very unscholarly, too bad, I really wanted to get into her books. I guess the Protestant moralism and virtue-signalling got to her (there are exceptions to this, especially in the German world, but it is my impression that the Anglos never really fully adopted the Romans and the Roman worldview, and I'm including Gibbon in here).

I just don't think someone that sees them as patriarchal and violent will ever see their achievements as amazing. They will most likely have the belief that their achievements were due to stealing it from another culture or on the backs of slaves (and the slaves were actually responsible for the amazing achievements).

It's putting a leftists lens on a historical culture. I get bored with these takes pretty quickly because of the obvious bias which leads to complete inaccuracy.

I think it depends why you're interested in the Romans. As a layman, I like the military history, the politics, etc. I'm less interested in the sociology - especially when retro-fitting a 2025 world view on it.

And you can despise the Romans for the way they went about things, but it's not like the other societies they went to war with were any better, and in a lot of cases were worse (EG Carthaginian baby sacrifice).

I keep reading this online and I find it to be nonsense. Over a thousand years earlier the Romans developed all the conquered lands. They built massive infrastructure projects: roads, ports, aqueducts, buildings. And brought sanitation and education. Ghengis Khan only brought peace and trade networks, something Rome also brought with them.

Next up, how Carthaginians were actually the good guys and child sacrifice was not that bad.

> another emperor would usually reunite the empire

Well he did, in the 530-550s to a significant extent. That of course didn’t work out because of the plague and other factors.