Mary Beard gets weird about the classics

In Talking Classics, Mary Beard, classicist and endearing enthusiast for all things Greek and Roman, asks a fundamental question: Why should we still study the Classics? What relevance do they have today?

A hundred years ago, a professor of Classics at Cambridge would have had no problem answering this. The Classics are the foundation of Western civilisation, they might have said, along with the Bible. The greatest minds of the ancient world, such as Plato and Aristotle, asked the kind of deep and searching questions we are still asking today. What is a life well-lived? The best system of government? What is true wisdom?

The Pantheon of Grecoroman Gods 

But things have changed. Western civilisation has lost confidence in itself to a catastrophic degree, and Mary Beard, a self-confessed leftie, is a perfect exemplar of this. And far from being a ringing defence of the Classics, her new book is a rather odd hybrid: part autobiography, part rather dispiriting attempt to say anything positive at all about the Classics, which she considers ‘an edifice of privilege’.

We may feel ‘revulsion’ at the Classics, she agrees, but should not feel either reverence or gratitude. This is on page 1. By page 3 she recalls that the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore found the Parthenon ugly, and insists we have no right to say ‘he was wrong’.

The magnificent statue of Augustus in the Vatican, known as the ‘Prima Porta Augustus’, she finds ‘faded’ as well as a ‘ludicrous stereotype of male power’. A certain tut-tutting disapproval of men in general pervades the book, in fact. At another point she worries the very word ‘Classicist’ might conjure the image of ‘an elderly white man in a suit’ (horrors!) rather than a ‘radical freedom fighter’ or a woman. Since Mary Beard herself is surely the best known classicist today, this is a pretty odd assertion.

She similarly derides the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, still a much-loved bestseller among self-help books 2,000 years on, as ‘useless’. And there is a desperate moment when, trying to be down with the kidz, she compares Virgil to ‘a modern rap artist’. It gets even more toe-curling when she claims to be a huge fan of the song Apesh*t by Beyonce and Jay-Z. This feels so like a ‘geography teacher trying to dance at the school disco’ moment it’s embarrassing.

Despite this apparent disapproval of what has been her own subject for 50 years now, she still gives us plenty of colourful nuggets about the ancient world. The Classics, she reminds us, include not only the lofty heights of Homer and Virgil, but also the joke book of the Emperor Augustus. And how interesting that those astute Athenians absolutely rejected elections in their democracy, in favour of choosing leaders ‘randomly by lot’. Elections, they thought, favoured the ‘educated or wealthy elite’ using money to acquire power. Imagine replacing our current Cabinet with some random team of maths teachers, nurses, scaffolders and farmers, say. Yes, please!

Talking Classics suggests dazzling and enticing stuff, artistic power and intellectual daring, not to mention the epic history of 1,000 years – yet Mary Beard’s arguments in favour of studying this fascinating alien world are garbled and dismal. Woolly political preferences keep interrupting, vague liberal guilt stains the pages like a spillage of slightly sour old wine, and you finally picture Prof Beard sitting up in a tree, holding the Iliad in one hand with purse-mouthed disapproval – all those men! All that fighting! – while with the other, busily sawing off the branch she’s sitting on.