Meet the Romans

Professor Mary Beard’s book, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, is one of the best books I’ve read in the last couple of years. It’s a tour de force of historical synthesis, covering 1,000 years of Roman history in a deeply engaging and informative fashion. I was very sorry to reach the end of the book, and after finishing it, I became fascinated with all things Beard. She is a highly distinguished classics professor at Cambridge University and has been a prominent public intellectual in Britain for years. In January the Guardian did a great profile of her titled, “The cult of Mary Beard: How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual.” As the Guardian article makes clear, Prof. Beard’s life story is quite interesting in its own right, especially for anyone who has spent their own career in academia.

For an introduction to Beard’s work, you can’t do better than her BBC series Meet the Romans, which is now available on YouTube. The first episode is available here. What makes the series so great is that Prof. Beard focuses on ordinary Romans, from slaves to breadmakers to soldiers. She tells the story of what it was like to live in the most powerful, diverse, and interesting empire of the ancient world. In the process, she truly brings Rome to life. If you watch the first episode, I predict you won’t be able to stop. And in that case, I've got good news: episode 2 is available here, and episode 3 is available here.  

Comments

[not really]

Taleb pwned her pretty badly.

[Anthony Gaughan]

"Not really," I assume you are referring to the debate over the extent of ethnic diversity in Roman Britain. For those who haven't followed the debate, Mary Beard argues that the archaeological record shows clear evidence of ethnic diversity in Roman Britain, whereas the statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb contends that modern DNA analysis shows very little ethnic diversity among Britons. For those interested, last August there was a good analysis of the debate in The Conversation, titled, "Mary Beard is Right, Roman Britain was multi-ethnic--so why does this upset people so much?" Here's a link to it:
https://theconversation.com/mary-beard-is-right-roman-britain-was-multi-ethnic-so-why-does-this-upset-people-so-much-82269
The Atlantic also had a good piece on the subject, called, "A Kerfuffle About Diversity in the Roman Empire." Here's the link: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/dna-romans/535701/.

[not really]

That's a misrepresentation of Taleb's point. His point is that the non-natives in Roman Briton that constituted its "diversity" were overwhelmingly Levantine/Mediterranean not sub-Saharan African and that Beard is erasing the former for weird ideological reasons.