SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Mary Beard was about 5 years old when her mother took her to the British Museum and they saw a 4,000-year-old piece of bread in a display case. The curator noticed that young Mary had to jump up to see it, so he opened the case, took out the bread, and held it out for her to see. And that set off a career studying ancient Greek and Rome for Mary Beard, professor at Cambridge and the Royal Academy, classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of many admired books on the ancient world. Her new book "Talking Classics: The Shock Of The Old" is bold enough to ask, why do we continue to have this fascination with the ancient world - Greeks, Romans, Caesars, Sophocles and worlds more? Mary Beard joins us now from Cambridge in the U.K. Thanks so very much for being with us.
MARY BEARD: It's great to be with you.
SIMON: What do you think got stirred up in you that day that you saw this bread excavated from the ancient kingdom of Thebes?
BEARD: Partly, it was that sheer amazement, that wonderment, that I could be allowed to get so close to something that was both so impossibly old and also amazingly ordinary. We'd been on the same trip to see the Egyptian mummies, which kind of every curious 5-year-old, I think, wants to see. But this ordinary piece of bread just hit the spot for me even more than the mummies.
SIMON: And yet, you say in this book, you don't love the Greeks and Romans any more than virologists love viruses.
BEARD: No. I don't love them. You know, I think, in all kinds of ways, they are vicious, brutal people I don't want to replicate. But they are unfailingly interesting. What they write is really interesting, even when I don't agree with it.
SIMON: I've got to say, one of my favorite sections is when you talk about a graffiti next to a lavatory...
BEARD: (Laughter).
SIMON: ...In the ruins of Herculaneum, destroyed by a volcano. Maybe I should ask you, the distinguished scholar, to repeat what it says.
BEARD: Well, it's in very simple Latin. This is some graffiti which must have been written just a few days before the eruption destroyed the town of Herculaneum, which was kind of Pompeii's twin sister town. And then it says what did he do? Hic cacavit bene. Now, I have to say I'm sorry. There is no other way of translating hic cacavit bene than had a good crap here. He's boasting, really, boasting about his bowel movements. Now, at that point, you think, I feel quite close to that world.
SIMON: There's also a baby's cradle nearby, isn't there?
BEARD: A wooden cradle. And in this cradle, there was the skeleton of a little baby, and the little baby was sleeping, resting. And a pretty cynical, hard-hearted person touching that cradle and knowing that it didn't survive. That's tear-jerking for me.
SIMON: You write, at one point, the Greeks and Romans have never stopped staring us in the face. How so?
BEARD: I'm sure that there is not a day since 19 BCE, when the poet Virgil died, when someone has not been reading his great epic poem, "The Aeneid," telling the story of the foundation of Rome. So I think, you know, you can't really go out in the world and avoid the Greeks and Romans. I mean, look, we're all expecting Christopher Nolan's movie soon. It's adapting a book that was composed almost 3,000 years ago. You can't ignore them. You know, they are there. You read James Joyce's "Ulysses" - he couldn't have done that without "The Odyssey." You look at the Coen Brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Right? You can't do that without "The Odyssey." We might not like the ancient world. I don't think I like it very much, but we can't just ignore it, or we have an impoverished view of our own culture if we try to ignore it.
SIMON: How do you make the argument which you hear nowadays that the classical world is nothing like the world right now, they were the embodiment of imperialism, privilege and exclusion, and they're nothing to learn from?
BEARD: They are that, but I think there are some aspects about the modern world which replicate that. I've never wanted to say that the classical world offers us ready-made lessons to solve our own problems. But whatever I morally think about some of the things that the ancient world, in general, stood for, I do know that the ancient writers faced the same kind of problems that we face.
SIMON: Given your status as a classicist, are you often asked to weigh in on current leadership all over the world?
BEARD: (Laughter) I am. The commonest question I get from journalists is, which Roman emperor is Donald Trump most like? And I don't think there's much point, actually, in comparing any modern political figure to any single Roman emperor. You know, Donald Trump is not like Nero. Sorry, everybody. He's not. You can see in the way that power operates in the modern world, the way populist power operates, the way autocrats or would-be autocrats operate, you can see some of the structures of that back in antiquity.
And I - you know, one thing would be leaders' heads on the coins goes back to Julius Caesar. Autocratic leaders want to see their heads on the currency. In Britain, we're very used to our monarchs being on the currency. But Julius Caesar was the first person to do this, and he didn't come to a happy end.
SIMON: Mary Beard, her new book "Talking Classics." Thank you so much for being with us.
BEARD: Scott, thank you. It's been a great pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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