I'd like to welcome you all to this
Gifford lecture my name is Joe Shaw I'm
a member of the Gifford lectureship
committee and I'm delighted to welcome
our distinguished speaker professor Mary
beard who is professor at the University
of Cambridge and a fellow of Newnham
College, as she continues her series on the
theme the ancient world and us from fear
and loathing to enlightenment and ethics
tonight we're going to hear her the
second of her six lectures and it's
entitled whiteness the lecture and
questions this evening are being
recorded and the video will shortly be
made available online I believe that
yesterday's is already online just to
give you a an idea of our efficiency on
the university's Gifford lectures web
pages
I now have great pleasure in handing
over to Professor Mary Beard
is that on, yes right let's I want to
start today's lecture from an animated
cartoon that was produced by the BBC in
2014 for children at Key Stage two of
the English curriculum that's from ages
7 to 11 now for the first three years of
its life this cartoon went entirely
unnoticed except no doubt by children
and their teachers but in 2017 it
somehow came to the attention heaven
knows how of a far-right journalist and
conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson
who took one look at it and tweeted I
mean who cares about historical accuracy
he was objecting to the portrayal of a
high-ranking Roman official in Britain
as not white, now the truth is the cartoon
wasn't perfect the whole animation was
not perfect those of you who were here
yesterday might like to know that the
depiction of gladiatorial combat was a
bit cliched to say the least and the
caption that was originally underneath
this to say that it was a typical family
in Roman Britain was soon wisely removed
we have no idea what a typical family in
Roman Britain was but I think it's
extremely unlikely that mixed-race
marriages were typical and anyway the
story that this is that it's built
around this suggests that this is the
governor of Roman Britain and his family
so not typical at all that's it a BBC
not perfect but that said a number of us
did reply to mr. Watson
to say that this was a perfectly
reasonable representation and not
surprising in the context of the
diversity of Roman Britain and in fact
this figure here looks to me as if he
was based on the figure of Quintus Lollius Urbicus who was a little-known
governor of the province in the first
half of the second century AD
now Urbicus is one of those rare
people that we can actually track across
the Roman world
there's no statue of him surviving he
barely makes it into any Roman history
writing the single one-liner about his
victories in Britain but we have several
written traces of him not so very far
from here one of those is the now very
idyllic Roman fort of High Rochester
just south of the border I suspect it
wasn't half as a Dilek as this 2,000
years ago and the trace is an
inscription recording the erection of
some kind of building during his
governorship of Roman Britain you've got
a photograph here a drawing and a
translation I've blocked out his name
that's not so very unusual but what's
really striking is that two and a half
thousand kilometers away
in modern Algeria we have another
inscription commemorating Quintus Lollius Urbicus at what was his tiny
hometown of tiddis and it explains that
he had served in not just Britain but
Germany Judea and what we would now call
Turkey and just near the town of tiddis
there is his clearly labeled family tomb
still standing in open country so that's
to say Urbicus came from Algeria and
when he was serving in Britain he was a
very very long way from home
now that tells us nothing about the color
of his skin he could have been Italian
by origin from a Sackler family in
Algeria he could well have been Berber
and this tomb is is a traditional Berber
design of tomb but he could also have
had some sub-saharan ancestry there was
considerable contacts between North
Africa and sub-saharan Africa partly
because of the Roman slave trade so we
hadn't no idea his name doesn't give it
away but what we can say is that that is
quite possible as an image of Quintus
lowliest urbis no unsurprisingly perhaps
none of that factual argument convinced
those who were absolutely convinced that
the BBC was here black washing history
as they put it
and they kept up a Twitter and video
campaign against me and others the days
if not weeks one of the more prominent
of these guys and actually a an American
academic said more or less that the
arguments I was making about Lollius Urbicus' and this image of the Roman
family were living proof that
scholarship in the United Kingdom was
dead right
and another guy who clearly had too much
time on his hands
devoted himself to what he thought was
very funny images on with a bit of kind
of photoshopping yeah you had to admire
the ingenuity I have to say it's a
wonderful one I couldn't find you know
the life of Henry the eighth's and you
can imagine what color Henry the
eighth's was right and I expect you can
also guess that there was quite a lot
worse than these than what I'm now
showing you and will spare you now I
don't really want to go back to this
tonight and I don't want to make this
lecture a kind of revenge grudge match
against these silly idiots but I hope
they watch mr. Johnson but I'm starting
from here in order to give a sense of
just how edgy just how incendiary the
theme that I've chosen for today can be
or to put it more positively just how
much it still matters to people and that
theme as the title of the lecture has it
is whiteness all better perhaps the
question what color or colors we see the
classical world in now I should
obviously be touching on themes of race
and ethnicity but it's partly in order
to avoid getting horribly stuck in the
enormously complicated debates around
those terms and around the construction
of racial difference in the 18th and
19th centuries around the contested
definition of ethnicity and around the
contested origins of classical culture
that Martin Bernal's book black Athena
prompted 40 years ago now though in my
last lecture
to come back to that it's in order
really to slightly sidestep all those
very complicated debates I've taken a
rather more plain speak approach at its
very simplest what I'm trying to say is
basically well we shut our eyes and try
to conjure up a Greek or a Roman what do
we see you might like just to imagine
you're shutting your eyes and just do it
because I will tell you what I think you
see in a minute it's partly I've chosen
whiteness also in order to kind of move
the debate beyond just the color of the
skin I want to think about ancient
statues white and colored I wonder thing
about architecture even togas as well as
also the terms in which the Greeks and
Romans themselves described the colors
around them and why that makes a
difference to how we understand the
ancient world I shall at the very end
come back very briefly to modern
ethnicity when I spend a few minutes
wondering about the relative non
diversity among those who now teach and
study classics what should we do I want
to ask about classics being as it is
such a predominantly white subject so
I'm wanting to move away from a narrow
focus on race and I've got rather a lot
to do and I've chosen a slightly
idiosyncratic route around this subject
so I hope it works well as last night
I'm kind of standing like you awkwardly
I think on the shifting boundary between
us and then between the ancient world
and the modern world and I'm trying to
look both ways but this evening there
are going to be much more direct issues
of modern politics in play
issues that center around the question
of who gets to see themselves reflected
in the ancient world how and why is it
that the alt right or the far right or
whatever you want to call them how is it
that they've come to see the classical
world as a mirror of themselves of their
own worldview and very often of they're
paraded whiteness and what is at stake
for the rest of us when they can script
the classical world into their own
political project and I should say I do
mean far right here I'm not talking
about Jacob Riis MOG I'm talking about
something not further to write at
something which is not not really
conservative but basically white
supremacists know also I don't want to
tar too many people with this brush I've
got no unfortunate metaphor right I've
got no doubt but among those who
objected to the BBC and they were very
many were people who were genuinely
surprised by that representation of
people in Roman Britain who were taken
off God hadn't really thought or known
about about the diversity of Roman
Britain and those who thought in the
terrible cliche it was all PC gone Matt
I'm sure there were some of those and I
think when the BBC still had the caption
typical on it some of them were right to
object but there was within that a
nucleus of real hard liners whose racist
comments about that cartoon I mean
remember it's a kids school cartoon by
Roman Britain who's racist comments I
could not I think appropriately and
possibly legally read out to you so how
do we face this now
I have to say I feel something of a
moral dilemma here which is partly why I
chose to talk about this subject and I
hope it goes without saying that I
deplore the weaponizing of the ancient
world in the course of white supremacy
which is basically what some of this
case and I feel as uncomfortable as I'm
sure very very many people do when I
read yesterday's team when I read that
Steve Bannon is opening what she calls a
gladiator school outside Rome
to teach right-wing politicians how to
fight for judeo-christian values by
which he means white judeo-christian
values
I mean it's straight out of Seneca you
know the idea of the gladiator as the
symbol of the fight for the right right
in every sense of the word you know none
of this makes me feel happy but I think
there's also a fundamental principle
that no one owns the classics and if
professional classicists want as I do
for the subject to continue to be part
of widespread public debate and public
interest that can't be on the condition
that it can only be used for causes of
which we approve you can't say enjoy my
subject but only on the terms I lay down
it should be honest I feel actually that
there's rather too much hand wringing in
the classical profession about the way
these groups these far-right groups
misuse as they would say the classics
and I think that hand wringing gets us
nowhere
and it reeks likely of kind of
professional exclusivity I think that
the only way to face this stuff is with
the facts on which here and elsewhere
happily the alt-right and their friends
are largely wrong
I think you can beat them on facts you
don't have to beat them on certif taking
the subject away from us no I said a few
moments ago but one question was and I
think it's it's a simple question but it
gets to the heart of it really it's what
do we see when we shut our eyes and we
think of an ancient Greek or Roman know
that how many of you've done that mental
experiment but I can be fairly sure that
for most of us certainly for me
the answer is something like this right
now this pair are of course familiar to
some they are Mattila and kike Elias who
are the stars of the first book of the
excellent Cambridge Latin course which
now guides most learners in the UK
through their beginning steps in Latin
they are much loved they're much
replicated even on tote bags Kye Kelley
assessed in Auto it is guaranteed to be
recognizable by anybody who's done this
book and they're much parodied and if
you want I didn't put any of this you
can find some rather rude parodies if
you put calculus into google images
Waikele assessed in part Ilias estimate
hello right everybody who knows Latin
laughs at that one yeah but for all this
and for all the fun the familiarity all
the time they're all white and if
they're male they're all white toga clad
right the Cambridge Latin calls did not
invent that vision the classical world
obviously it's only picking up on a long
history from the Renaissance on of
representing the inhabitants of the
ancient world of thinking about them as
if they were just like us when us is
Western
white Europeans whether that's
Botticelli his early Roman heroes who
were going to be looking at on Thursday
or Lord Layton's sultry Greek girls
picking up pebbles on the beach you know
you can go through the whole history of
Western art and you can find thousands
of Greeks and Romans looking much like
us in inverted commas one of the
consequences I think and I think there's
a route to this but one of the
consequences of elite Western culture
for let's say half a millennium seeing
itself in the tradition of the classical
Greeks and Romans has been that it is
also projected its own image of itself
back onto the Greeks and Romans and as
the Cambridge Latin course shows we're
still learning to see the Romans in that
way but more than that as the kerfuffle
over the cartoon shows that projection
of our own image back into antiquity
then by a kind of entirely circular
process appears to give that particular
image of western whiteness an unbroken
history going back more than 2,000 years
but it another way when the poet Shelley
fameless' famously said we are all
Greeks the other side of that coin was
all Greeks are us right and that now
plays very much into the hands of the
far right but beyond that Niraj that we
are the Greeks the Greeks are us we we
Western white Europeans look like this
like the Romans and Greeks looked beyond
that Niraj the fact is that even in
Roman Britain and I say
even because Britain was the most
backward and unjoined up province of us
otherwise strikingly joined our Empire
you know Britain was the pits let's face
it yes
hope is not going to go that way again
even in Britain the people you would
have seen around you didn't look
universally like this right there was
almost every stage skin colour here from
black and brown to pink and white and
Quinta slowly as urbis is not the only
resident from very far away one of my
favourite tombstones from the whole of
the province is this one now in the
South Shields Museum found nearby put up
by a Syrian man from Palmyra
his name was Bharat ease to his British
wife by the name of Regina which I
suppose we would say Queenie right this
is bharata's and Queenie and she as the
tombstone tells us was from the
Catalonian tribe which is around sand
albans she's I would love to make her an
Essex girl but she's not quite an Essex
girl but very nearly so you've got Sir
Ian man with his British sort almost
Essex girl wife now we know no more
about this couple than what we see here
though there is a fragmentary tombstone
at Corbridge which may be bharata system
it's plausible enough that he was here
we don't know why but it's plausible
enough that he was here in some kind of
trading capacity though when people say
he was here in a trading capacity
usually means they've got no other
reason they got no other kind of
explanation of why's here and she does
seem to beam as the inscription says she
was originally his slave and then his
wife and the memorial itself is enough
to give us a glimpse
of at least cultural mix because it is
largely written in Latin but there's an
Aramaic inscription underneath let's see
here Latin and his put or he's had it
inscribed in Aramaic saying Queeny
farewell underneath was always puzzled
about who the hell they found in South
Shields who could inscribe Aramaic but
they did write sorry to anybody from
Sophia and there's plenty more evidence
from Roman Britain a pointing the same
direction I don't want to pile example
after example to kind of build up this
culturally diverse picture but I'm
thinking among other things of an
account in the biography of septimus
severus the emperor of an encounter with
an Ethiopian does a black soldier when
he was inspecting the Army on her dream
this wall and I'm thinking to of
increasing amounts a bio archaeological
data the point in the same direction I'm
going to tell you this but you get a
promise that you're not going to ask me
questions about it afterwards because
I'm telling you what you know I know and
I can give you a reading list but I'm
not an expert in bio archaeology but
it's one of the most productive new
scientific methods which I think it's
actually stunning really in its
simplicity even for us who are not
scientists is the analysis of oxygen
isotope traces in the tooth enamel of
human remains it is based on the
principle and it would be true of ours
as much as it is of these people 2,000
years ago it's based on the principle
the adult teeth still contain the traces
of the oxygen isotopes of the water that
you drank when your adult teeth were
forming in your jaw and that varies
dramatically with climate an environment
and what you get from that
relatively
conclusive and relatively simple test is
clear evidence of people here who grow
up a long way away there's a Roman
cemetery for example at Winchester were
40 skeletons the teeth of 40 skeletons
have been tested in that way
five of them had oxygen isotopes making
it hallee certain that they grew up in
North Africa and that's not untypical
the analysis also skull formation
confirms that picture although it's much
more rough-and-ready much more
impressionistic in its approach this
skull of a woman found near Eastbourne
strongly suggests from the shape of the
skull and the eyebrow ridges but she had
sub-saharan Africa African ancestry but
the tooth analysis makes it pretty clear
that she grew up in southern Britain so
you can see somebody who's got ancestors
from a long way away but almost
certainly grew up here no out of that
and you know we could spend half an hour
multiplying those examples there are all
kinds of loose ends the fact for example
that somebody grew up in North Africa
there's not a thing definite about the
color of his or her skin and the
evidence striking as it is from these
cemeteries is overwhelmingly urban or
military and because you don't get
cemeteries which reflect the you don't
get cemeteries for the poor old peasants
in the countryside who made up the
majority probably the British population
and in case you're wondering DNA
analysis doesn't help us that's to say
the DNA analysis is very hard to
sequence DNA from these ancient
skeletons
but the DNA analysis of the more
an indigenous British population shows
very little trace of anything that looks
African or of anything that looks
mediterranean or of anything that looks
Norman French or of anything that looks
Viking and there is some puzzles about
why that's the case but it doesn't help
for this problem but the overall
consensus now amongst Roman historians
and archaeologists that what you would
have seen if you looked round the
population of the urban or military
areas of Roman Britain would not just be
calculus on Mattila how many people were
talking about it's impossible to say but
the myth of a white Roman Britain is
exactly that it's a myth and if it's
true for Roman Britain it's even more
true for the rest of the Roman Empire a
vast area stretching from Syria to Spain
Scotland to this a horror without any
internal boundaries clearly documented
trading links army mobility roads and
sometimes the mass movement of
populations in the enslavement that
followed conquest it's also lots of
loose ends it's also very hard to tell
how this diversity was experienced and
in some ways that's a more interesting
question than whether it exists it or
not when I look at Barratt eases
memorial for Regina the thing that I
can't help wondering so this is going to
be Sun sound again is if I'm being rude
about South Shields
I can't help wondering what kind of
couple they made in Downton Roman South
Shields we have no idea of what the
colour of Bharat is his skin all we know
is that he says he came from Palmyra
which doesn't tell you very much we
don't know what clothes he adopted what
his hairstyle was but you can't help
wondering how noticeable this couple
were did they stick
Oh No did people remark on them you know
were there the kind of uh you know Roman
equivalents of you know no Syrians here
or were they just part of the
environment the mixed environment that
you sort of expect no you wonder that
when you look at this certainly could
find someone who could inscribe his
Aramaic so there may have been quite a
few more but we have no evidence we have
no evidence even to begin to answer that
question at least as far as South
Shields is concerned but if you look to
the evidence from nearer to the center
of the Empire there is more that you can
say Roman writers were often horribly
prejudiced against outsiders they
ridiculed that character but cowardice
the weirdness the inferiority of anybody
who wasn't like them and as you'd expect
Greek and Roman intellectuals speculated
on wide inhabitants of different parts
of the world looks different it's a
reasonable topic of speculation and they
often came up with all kinds of
different versions of environmental
determinism 3 explain why Greeks and
Romans always came out on top as against
those who lived where it was too hot too
wet too cold or whatever what they said
about the people of Roman Britain
doesn't bear repeating so they're not a
kind of nice easygoing liberal
multicultural lot to say the least
but so far as we can tell skin color was
not a major and certainly not the key
co-ordinate
of their prejudices this figure here's a
figure from a mosaic the entry to the
hot room in a set of private baths in
Pompeii and very likely he's a figure at
the very least of thought but it isn't
the racist image that we might read it
as with the kind of connection I think
it suggests to us between race servitude
and sexuality this presumably he's meant
to be I think the slave attendant of the
bathing suite I wouldn't deny those
connections entirely but in Roman terms
the point is probably different the
black skin here may well be playing on
the idea of the heat of the room because
black skin was often explained you know
why do some people where it's hot have
black skin well it's because of the
burning effect of the Sun that's why
skin gets black and that in fact is what
ethiop's or Ethiopian means it means
back faced and here I suspect we've got
a little joke about you're just going to
go into a very hot place and say you've
got an Ethiopian and his rather large
penis is probably again in part at least
sort of hint about the sexually slightly
erratically charged atmosphere a bathing
rather than necessarily pointing in the
way that we might think at him and
certainly if you say what a Roman think
Roman think of a sway well there were
certainly African slaves and they were
elite Africans too but I think the
Romans thought of a slave probably he
thought of some shaggy ginger hair
German as much as anything else right
and so if you're wanting if you are
setting out to find legitimation in the
ancient world for racist ideology you've
chosen a rather bad place to do it but
as I said it isn't just a matter of the
skin colour of the human population the
beginning of the lecture the imagined
why
yes of the ancient world is a much wider
phenomenon and particularly prominent in
that whiteness all the hordes of
greco-roman marble statues that line
museum shelves and in many ways have
come to symbolize for us classical
culture and at one step remove I think
in symbolizing classical culture once
that removed to legitimate that why
image of the human beings that populated
the classical world everything in the
classical world looks white if you go to
museum or almost everything and you
might want to add our cinematic vision
to that every ancient Roman city scape
in all the great movies is also gleaming
white marble piled on gleaming white
marble though they've allowed a red
column and it's probably no surprise to
that this kind of whiteness with the
connotations of aesthetic and out one
remove racial purity has also come to
act as the poster boy of some far-right
organizations and one of the clearest
cases here is a neo-nazi party in the
United States which until a few weeks
ago was known as identity Europa or
identity ever OPA not quite clear which
but has partly in the face of happily
very much falling membership rebranded
itself as the American identity movement
I'm going to show you it's older posters
because they've got a whole series of PR
posters which a feature scrubbed white
classical or classicizing sculpture will
not protect your heritage or future
belong to us that's become great again
you can see the origins of these slogans
and the logic is pretty
obvious the white purity of the
classical tradition whether it's the
Apollo Belvedere II as you see here
Michelangelo's David on the right that
kind of underpins the logic of their
white political position is actually
logic taken up by their opponents who
ran parodic poster campaigns against
them which to start with I didn't
realize what parodies make angry old men
white men great again what's quite nice
one oh I get it now they're educated
bigots now in this case it seems even
easier to knock on the head the
misunderstanding of ancient culture
which underlies this because it is
established beyond reasonable doubt
beyond doubt really that much ancient
sculpture was not white at all that it
was brightly colored or polychromatic as
the academic jargon has it for a start
there were thousands upon thousands of
bronze statues which never looked white
most of these have disappeared because
they've been melted down into some
medieval set of munitions probably there
were also gold and silver statues melted
down for all the different purposes
there were marbles marble statues in all
kinds of different colors I always want
to throw this black Imperial lady who's
probably Nero's mother Agri Pina in the
face of white supremacists Agri Pina was
not so far as we know black but she is
here represented in black stone and in a
black stone that was infinitely more
costly and precious to work than
relatively soft why
marble so you've certainly got no fit
here between the blackness of the stone
and the blackness of her skin but the
point is and this has been made a lot of
recently the point is that even what now
looks like that kind of pure white
marble we have come to expect that
originally was brightly colored or much
of it was we know from the traces of
paint that you can still see on some
sculpture like here is the original red
and this is how she's been reconstructed
slightly more garishly sometimes you see
it very clearly actually still on the
stone but more often it is only visible
by microscopic analysis the color that
is still surviving you cannot see with
the naked eye but can be reconstructed
like this Archer and actually we know
they were painted because some ancient
writers tell us that sculpture was
painted and here's a rather nice vars
in the Metropolitan Museum in New York
and here's the painter he's actually at
work painting the statue now this is
both a simple and at the same time a
controversial story and it's so
controversial that one of my colleagues
in the state Sarah bond was threatened
with death on line after she'd explained
clearly and plainly and without any
unemotionally in a popular article that
the painting of white ancient sculpture
was normal but however we've ended up
with a lineup of one classical white
statue after another in our museums and
I'll be coming to that later
much of the blame is natural wear and
tear
the ideological consequences of this
whiteness that we are now confronted
with is pretty clear the classical and
the classicizing world now scenes a very
white space and that is unpacked 'add
fairly or not on the idea of the museum
and on the idea of the classical museum
as bolstering one particular version of
political and racial history and here
you can see it under attack and there
also obviously further implications in
this about what classics itself stands
for no that is all true but I'd like to
say at this point that the story is a
little bit more complicated than how
I've just described it and I think we
need to nuance the picture a bit and not
to throw the baby out with the bathwater
first as a matter of archeological fact
I do wonder quite how Universal the
painting of ancient marble sculpture was
I have no idea it was common but when
you see something like this and you can
just see that this marble is highly
polished and it's been highly polished
in antiquity this this is how it was dug
up it hasn't been given a nice polish
later it's a fourth century BC statue
from Olympia it's hard to imagine that
that statue was much painted if you're
going to polish it you don't paint it I
would say and the fact that Roman love
poets regularly hail marble as white and
then compare it to their girlfriends
skin I think also should give us a
little bit of a pause
about quite how polychromatic marble
often was always was now my own sense
although it's a bit unfashionable to say
is that the painting of marble statues
was probably more common earlier in
antiquity than later but I think there's
quite a lot of ideologues in all sides
of this story and there are
polychromatic ideologues who want to
tell you that all ancient sculpture was
culled I don't think I believe that
secondly I think we have to accept an
uncomfortable truth but although we
don't find ourselves on the same
political side as the old right I think
that most of us are probably on the
aesthetic same side as the oldest right
right now I can accept that this is how
the famous primaporta Augustus once
looked but you're jolly well not going
to make me like it
right for better or worse my training in
Western culture has been too long and
too effective for me to think that that
looks nice
I'm sorry and I know that I'm not the
only one in his recent autobiographical
poem tyv James the television critic cut
rogue and poet stepped aside for a few
verses to as it were as he said thank
God that by and large the colour has
disappeared from a classical sculpture
and he praised the ghost white the white
ghost flesh that misses him that beats
the polychromatic crap out of the Disney
Land that antiquity once was and more
American archaeologists looked at this
particular reconstruction and he said it
may the Emperor Augustus look like a man
in a frock trying to hail a
right which I have to say I agree with
right now I also have a kind of sneaking
suspicion that those people those
scientists particularly those who are
looking through their microscopes they
they do make these reconstructions
partly to shock us they want us to say
oh my goodness me is that how it really
looks they say yes you know so they want
to make them as DS nation Clive's words
as broadly as they can and I think to
some extent the people who make these
you know paint the plaster
reconstructions like this are partly
saying - the whole tradition but we
think we've internalized about the
beauty of classical sculpture the
thought that that was that this statue
stood in the Emperor Augustus his widows
villa really beats me but it did right
but even more to the point is how we
think this image of white marble that
dominates our vision of classical
sculpture how did we get it how does it
originate it's clear enough to see the
political consequences the cultural
political consequences of seeing
antiquity is white and purely aesthetic
and white with a capital W and that's
clear but what was the origin of it now
there's a tendency I think now to see
politics at work at the origin of this
whiteness as well as in the consequence
and one of the main culprits is almost
always said to be JJ Benkelman who died
in 1760 1768
the year this portrait was painted
Winkelman was the so-called father of
art history the first man systematically
to analyze an attempt to date a wide
body of classical
culture but according to what is
becoming the standard story he is the
man more than anyone else who has
foisted the admiration of the pure white
marble onto his successors and why did
he do that essentially the argument goes
because he had a Eurocentric vision saw
color as a marker of the primitive and
identified the pinnacle of civilization
just like Europa people in such works of
art as the Apollo Belvedere II that you
see on the screen know there is a small
grain of truth in that
in Cummins eighteenth-century work is
very influential on how we see classical
sculpture and I would challenge anybody
to read vinkle man's eulogy of the
Apollo Belvedere II without feeling a
bit sick it's awful right but I think
the idea that somehow Benkelman was you
know the father really of the alt-right
in this respect really is a kind of
driven by a desire to make you know
conspiracy out of a cock-up initial
offers a historical chronology that
doesn't add up for a start ever since it
was rediscovered in the Renaissance this
sculpture came out of the ground
more or less white that is because in
the ground almost all traces of paint
had gone and such traces as there were
didn't withstand the usual techniques of
cleaning where I have to say admittedly
the boundary between being dirty and
being colored may have been a bit fussy
and it really is a part for a few
statues like one of the ones I just
showed you it's only in the last few
decades that scientific techniques have
enabled us to detect traces of pigment
that we can't see
with the naked eye but to dub vinkle
Minh a euro centrist in the modern sense
is just silly right he was an
eighteenth-century guy who'd never set
foot out of Austria Germany and Italy
what else could he be but you're
eccentric right and he certainly wasn't
the first to invest in the quality of
the whiteness of the tradition of
classical sculpture I mean you've only
got to look at the work of Renaissance
sculptures in the two centuries before
Winkleman who did exactly that they were
imitating the whiteness that they saw in
classical art Michelangelo's David as
you see here was never painted so it's
this is going back further than the 18th
century it's going back to probably to
the 15th century at least although it's
interesting that the implications of now
the whiteness of David were enough to
prompt a black David to be brought in to
Florence in that in 2016
actually in memory of the victims of the
nice bombings but you can see this this
is not just in classical sculpture
there's a bigger edginess here and
anyway I think vinkle Minh would feel
actually mildly pissed off to discover
that he'd become enemy number one in the
whiteness argument and actually he did
realize that some ancient sculpture had
been painted and indeed he devoted a
whole chapter of his book to a painted
ancient sculptor now he didn't
particularly like the idea that's for
sure and he too suspected it was
probably early and not belonging to his
high period of classical art and that
was certainly one way of putting it down
but he did not ignore the idea
sculptures were painted nor did people
in the 19th century like the painter
alma-tadema ignore it when he's got a
record here of what the path freeze must
have looked like so
actually although it's only in the last
few decades that clever boffins have got
their microscopes out and their lasers
to reveal what these colors were ever
since the 18th century people have known
that this was the case and I think in
some ways that no one actually comes out
very well out of the whiteness versus
colored sculpture debate or at least
they don't come out with much subtlety
leaving aside the driving ideology the
alt-right are quite simply
misrepresenting the tradition of ancient
sculpture in asserting is universal
whiteness they're not always wrong
they're not wrong about David but
basically they're wrong on the other
hand many of those see quite rightly I
think point to the apparent racial
exclusivity which the faux whiteness of
classical sculpture has recently
underpinned there are very least I think
guilty of oversimplifying the history of
the whole tradition of painted sculpture
in their search for goodies and baddies
it has become a kind of act of some
article of faith that is morally bad not
to recognize the ancient sculpture was
colored and in a sense both the white
Brigade and the colored Brigade here
I think fighting it rather silly
argument as a brief coda to this section
before I finish I can't resist saying
that if I wanted to unseat identity
Europa's confidence in the history of
whiteness I wouldn't argue about
sculpture I'd point them to the history
Greek ceramics which I'm sure they also
admire
and particularly to the so-called black
thicker style of Athenian vases in the
6th century such as you see here and I
would ask them one simple question
all the pots of the 6th century whose
skin is white and the answer to that is
always and only woman's skin and I
suspect that would shut the alt-right up
because they not just whiteness
they also ape a kind of white male
warrior mentality and you will see on
these voices men are always represented
as black and women are always
represented as white I think one needs
to oh you're not that kind of territory
needless to say this is not because
women in ancient Athens were white and
men were black but because the
representation the relationship between
representation and reality is much more
complicated than just thinking of a
direct analog between the color of the
representation and the color of the real
skin just as it was with Agri Pina so I
want to bring this lecture to an end
though by coming back briefly to another
controversy that a BBC production
prompted last year might start with it's
the same sort of controversy but it
raised different issues the production I
have in mind I don't know if anybody saw
it was the series Troy fall of a city I
thought was pretty ghastly actually
loosely based on very loosely based on
the Homeric epics what particularly
caused outrage and you couldn't see
where it kind of starts from the same
position what particularly caused
outrage surprisingly widely actually was
a choice of a black actor David gassy to
play Achilles the Greek hero of the
Trojan War there was plenty more in
response to this of the political
correctness gone mad kind of argument
plenty of why are they taking away my
literature and the cause of their
multicultural project
and some of those who actually knew
their Homeric poems joined in quoting
the apparent fact that Homer had set
Achilles was blond now at this point I
thought once bitten twice shy I thought
I would keep out of this argument so I
tweeted only very briefly to say this
was all a bit misplaced doesn't it this
argument as achilles it actually never
existed right boreal Paddington Bear
right you know anyway this was acting
right and if he's gonna be acting right
you wouldn't be English very odd for
Greek to then I wisely we drew from the
fray one of my colleagues Tim Whitmarsh
delved in a bit more deeply and decided
to take on the Achilles was blond
brigade the Greek word they were
referring to in Houma is examples as
Whitmarsh pointed out blonde is a
possible translation of xanthus but so
also is brown grizzled gray or golden
and to take another example he said
odysseus who was played by a white actor
is actually at one point in Homer
described as melon craze which can be
translated as black skinned that could
also mean tanned or in the kind of
coding of the VARs I just showed you
kind of ruggedly bloke ish I think might
be another way of seeing it now partly
in this there's a problem of pinning
down the color in the sense of what hue
is being referred to just as we might
have problems in everyday conversation
it deciding what the boundary was
between blue and green but it's a bigger
issue here which is really important for
the more you look at the way Homer and
other great writers describe color the
more you find
and that they don't actually fit our
definition of color what we think color
is in any straightforward way xanthus
that blonde word also clearly has an
element of motion it's kind of waving us
speed and the milanka is the black
skinned also connotes tricks in us and
while eNOS just like the latin adjective
mama reyes or marble-like can mean white
but can also mean sparkling or shiny the
C gets described as mama Reyes and the C
is not white in our terms now how the
Greeks and Romans actually saw things is
one of the biggest gaps we have between
us and then what did the world actually
look like to them but what these
definitional puzzles mean is it's not
just the problem is not just that you
can't kind of map one color term
directly onto another and that's a
problem in most European languages - you
can't even map the idea of color itself
between ancient and modern cultures and
that means that whatever we see in what
survives there's inevitably and
necessarily an underlying category
mistake in looking for  whiteness in the
ancient well we've got no idea what the
ancients would have thought whiteness
was and it's at that bottom line but the
alt-right and others are wrong now have
that point in your head because it
actually informs a bigger modern point
which is where I'm going to finish it's
a slightly surprising link but it works
I hope because it's often said and
rightly that classics as an academic
discipline is far too white it attracts
too few people of color it props itself
up on an old exclusive white prestige
model
what is not only unfair but also means
that the discipline itself misses out on
the advantages and insights that come
from diversity question is how to solve
them now don't worry I'm not going to
give you an hour long explanation how to
solve it I'm going to point you in one
direction I'm going to suggest that what
we've seen this evening in this color
issue is relevant to that big modern
social and pedagogical problem I think
for example the divide was rewrite in
the Cambridge Latin course I might go to
some effort to ensure that the
characters in the first book didn't all
look like this right I don't I'd rather
not give the impression that learning
Latin was a whites-only area and I think
there's a case to be made for extending
the boundaries of what is studied in the
ancient world beyond northern european
northern Europe and the Mediterranean
shores on the grounds that if you make
the subject of study look less white
European you might make it more
attractive to those who are not
themselves of white European inheritance
that said I worry that in doing that we
might fall into the trap that has been
set by the half bate ill-informed
tirades of the ultra who claim to see
their whiteness reflected in the
greco-roman world you don't escape that
trap simply by holding up a mirror to
someone else and it is absolutely a
false promise to suggest that anybody
can find themselves in the ancient world
that's the main reason or it might terms
the main reason why the alt-right are
wrong the only honest way to diversify
the subject of classics is not to buy
into this kind of identity politics good
or bad it's to insist that the ancient
world is more different from any of us
than we can possibly imagine nobody owns
classics how
ever its defined and nobody's identity
and nobody's color is reflected they're
classics and the classical world is a
mirror to nobody but that more
positively those details about whiteness
color and language in Greek and Roman
culture show one of the greatest and
mind-changing intellectual rewards of
study in the classical world is the poet Louis MacNiece put it because it is so
unimaginably different
that's to say classics it's about all of
us and it's about not a single one of us
and that is why classics has diverse
appeal and why we can learn from it and
I hope that it will become more diverse
and this old white lady I hope she'll
live to see the diversity thank you
well thank you very much that was a
tremendous lecture lots of lots of food
for thought which doubtless you will be
able to sort of come back it's professor
Beard in a moment because we have a
time for question and answers I just
want to thank you at this stage and
we'll come back to thank you more
formally later on by giving you another
round of applause just to let you know
that Professor Mary beard will continue
her series on Thursday evening at the
same time of 5:30 p.m. and we look
forward to the next lecture which will
be entitled Lucretia and the politics of
sexual violence so it's not going to get
any less any less controversial it may
get more controversial I just want to
make a couple of announcements as many
of you will know but I'll just repeat
the points we're holding an online
discussion throughout the fortnight
there are the two weeks of the series
it's not a fortnight because it's a week
now and it's a week somewhat later on in
the month on our Gifford lectures blog
led by Andrew Johnson of new college to
following to contribute to the
discussion which we warmly welcome you
to do please visit the address the URL
at the back of the leaflet and on our
Gifford lectures web pages
you're also warmly invited to attend the
Gifford seminar which is hosted by the
Royal Society of Edinburgh along
with the University of Edinburgh it will
be held on Wednesday the 29th of May
from 2:30 to 4:30
sorry 2:30 to 3:45 in the Geo 3 lecture
theatre in 50 George Square and
professor beard will be joined by a
number of other people from the
University of Edinburgh including
Professor Douglas Cairns and Dr. Lucy
Grig and they'll be discussing
questions from the audience arising from
this this Gifford lecture series you can
get tickets for this there are still
some available although they're limited
for our University Gifford lectures web
pages so just I'm about to invite you to
to ask questions please
remember wait until the the
cordless mic has reached you but I do
want to give people, if there's still
people who need to leave at this stage
will want to leave at this stage just
there's a few more moments for you to go
if there is anybody we can we can just
wait but meanwhile please can we have
the mics coming out and the first
questions will be very welcome
it's not easy to see where are the mics
today somebody's got to have a question
or a comment
I can't this bill did you have your hand
up bill yeah
Mark, Bill Zacks thank you very much for
this equal no less illuminating thank
you gladiatorial lecture what if
anything do we know about the views of
the classical world from the so-called
Dark Ages
the middle, the Middle Ages the period
between ours and its I want to say
nothing now that's not fair because I
think the experience of the the medieval
experience of the classical world was so
hugely different that and I think it's
it's often kind of painted as if it was
ignorant and I think it is not ignorant
the middle Egger artists and writers of
the Middle Ages in a sense made a
connection between their selves and the
ancient world in a very different way
from the Renaissance I mean to put that
crudely in in simple terms you know by
the time you get to the 15th century if
you want to do a statue of Julius Caesar
or a painting of Julius
you make him look like a Roman you know
it's got a toga on he's got a laurel
wreath if you're doing an illustration
of Julius Caesar in the 12th century he
looks like somebody from the 12th
century now we have been brought up to
think that that you know there is you
know an increase in expertise and
knowledge of the ancient world now
actually anybody drawing Caesar in the
12th century damn well knew that season
didn't look like him they just chose to
do it differently just like when they
dressed up 17th century guys in togas
they knew they didn't wear them now but
what that means is that kind of totally
different engagement with how you might
represent the ancient world but the that
you can't do this color stuff on the
same continuum and so everything the
ancient world as its perceived in what
we have in the Middle Ages a fuzzy
boundary between 14th to 16th century
just it each has it is sidestepping
that idea of color and whiteness so you
can't really tell what they thought I
don't think they're stupid
I mean people tend to think oh they
didn't realize that the Romans were
different yes they jolly well did they just chose
not to show them it's different okay
at the back there yeah thank you thank
you very much for a really really
interesting lecture and you finished on
I think a very compelling point a point
which is about getting people excited
about learning classics so how'd you go
about actually sharing that vision and
getting people interested and excited
well you do your best
having I think it's you know in in many
ways I think that what I'm saying is
something which the classes team would
be able to back up that the that
professional classicists are very
committed to something like the model
that I
suggested but I think that I mean I
think it is hugely important and I will
talk about this in the last lecture it's
hugely important to celebrate the
difference of the ancient world and make
that difference seem exciting rather
than the kind of you know which you know
which Roman Emperor was Donald Trump
like kind of version which is making
which is kind of domesticating I mean I
said I think part of the problem about
getting people interested in the ancient
world is that it is account of you want
to get them excited by the the tightrope
that you walk when you're looking at it
I mean you know it's a said well it's in
a book you know it's looking at the
Roman world or any bit of the classical
it's just like being on a tightrope you
look down one side and they're all being
just like us you know they're yeah
they've got the same bodily functions
they go into the loo they're falling in
love you look down the other side and
they're completely mad you know they're
doing weird things you could never
imagine doing and it since it always
seems to me that that is the kind of
that is the really heady excitement of
looking at the ancient world and all you
can do is talk it and hope that you
reach people and you know I think there
is a supplement I don't mean to knock
the Cambridge Latin course but a
Cambridge Latin cause is like I can't of
the sort of beginners French book that I
had or you know the ladybird book with
mum dad and two kids no it's not only
that they're white the old damn family
is you know a nuclear family with
there's Matteler and Calculus I can't
remember the name of the kids but it's
two of them and there's Grumio the cook
you know it's and there's an awful lot
is being thrown away in the extend of
what you might think was exciting in
that kind of domestication and you see
it too when you know you go to
archaeological sites
very occasionally they manage to
undomesticated particularly when they've
got multi seater lavatory because they
have to under medicate back say do you
really think they all went to the loo
together you know my goodness me but
otherwise it's all kind of it's all
standardized it's all just like what we
might you know it's a the nuclear family
is back projected and you know I think
that that's you know it's like tight
units it's like space exploration in
some ways thinking about the ancient
world but you know all you can do is
just go on talking the talk I'm sure we
could crowdsource some more information
from the cambridge latin courses it was
certainly what I learned my very little
Latin in any way over people and people
do remember it though (speaks latin)
great so thank yo u very much and it's
great to see Mattel and calculus again
my question is really about the law and
whether the Romans or the Roman system
ever had a category a legal category of
race in the way that we might have now
or that part eight South Africa had or
somewhere else they didn't I mean they
have legal categories where we don't
expect them I mean such as free and
slave and a whole lot of other
categories of limited freedom in between
I think what's very interesting is that
where you it is and I'm going to be
talking about slavery in the second week
but and this in some ways goes back to
Bill's point to if you get well when you
start to get the representation in late
medieval art and on but particularly
from the 15th century I'll show you a
Botticelli next time actually about 14
about 1500 where the ancients mentioned
slaves the modern the Renaissance
artists will represent that slave as
black so you start to get a you start to
get the
the racial imposition on to something
which in the ancient world was not
racial at all as I say you've told a
Roman to think about a slave they're
much more likely to thought about a
shaggy northern barbarian than about a
black guy so I'm going to go over here
because I'm trying to keep a balance in
questions if I can so they're just in
front hi and you spilled towards the end
about how you have an issue with people
who are basically projecting on the
Romans they see a mirror image and so
I'm a biologist by background and we get
the issue with things like stitch people
get very upset about transgender fish or
homosexual penguins and all sorts of
things and if people are projecting onto
something like I mean at least rulings
are human how do you challenge that and
how do you try and stop that probably
quite natural impulse that people do try
and see themselves history I mean I
think it's um it's hard because you know
come from all my sense of celebrating
the weirdness all the difference that is
actually impart the idea that you can
have some commonality with these people
that also brings people in
you know if the Romans were just
incomprehensible to us they'd be much
less interesting but I think you know
you could only do I think I think
there's no magic bullet I think you do
it on a case-by-case basis and the
example that I've just used but I'll be
very briefly will have on the screen on
Thursday the great Botticelli painting
in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
in Boston of a famous Roman rape the
rape of Lucretia and a slave has a major
as a as a by part a big part in this
story and Botticelli has done the slave
as a black slave now I was at a workshop
about this painting with a load of
people who taught it I don't teach
Potter Jenny
but they were saying that that was one
the places where their students
University students you could really
bring them into those debates because
you could say how do we think of a slave
and to see Botticelli doing that and
then to think about difference and
similarities they said their students
really got into interested in that kind
of diversity but I think it's you are
combating well you're combating by and
large the whole tradition of Western art
history you know which you want to say
how did the Romans look it is it's awful
downer to say well they don't look like
anything you've ever seen and so I think
you're you're wanting to or I'm
constantly wanting to kind of get people
to enjoy the difference while also have
a feeling for some sort of similarity
but it I think it's very very hard I
really do
at least it's not fish the last question
here hello thank you very much for your
talk I I really enjoy it in and agree
with most of what you see which is not
usual know one thing they start weighing
and I wonder if any one ever pointed
that the identity of people that one
of their poster boys a representation of
an uncircumcised Jewish boy and how they
square that they look if they are deeply
deeply illogical right and in some ways
I mean although I think it's quite
interesting to see how the old right are
kind of using these characters there's
two things which kind of make one feel
that one shouldn't really overestimate
their likelihood of taking out of world
takeover I mean but what is there's not
very many of them
you know even the guy who ran this
identity Europa said his membership was
in dozens rather than in hundredths
probably like 20 right just for the meet
line in posters but they're also
terribly illogical and it terribly
ignorant and no I think all the time you
just need to call them out for not
knowing stuff and I mean I think there
is a there is a debate and I think it's
it I suppose I've given the impression
that they that that these far-right
groups just using classics I mean
they're not they're you know people who
work on Viking history say they're using
Viking history people who work on
Christianity say that they're using
Christianity now actually most of them
are just as illogical they're because
most of them deny they're Christians but
they they're using Christianity because
they suddenly come and I think are right
the Crusades that's us for actually
they they get themselves into a complete
hopeless total so every logical ities
that's why I mean I'm you know I'm calm
I am fairly confident that we don't have
we ought to try to show them the
error of their ways but where they're
not going to win because they're not
smart enough to win and they make the
you know they make me stupid errors so
I'm quite I did a seminar with students
who are worried about social media abuse
and one of them got up at the end and
said what we were in the English faculty
in Cambridge and they said what would we
do if somebody from the old right came
into one of our seminars
looking terrified I said they wouldn't dare
thank you very
much thank you to the audience for your
questions great selection questions
there and thank you again to Professor
Mary Beard both for her lecture and for
her responses for questions I think I
think we expected very much that
Professor Beard would provide a set of
Gifford lectures that what that you know
challenged preconceptions myths because
that's very much what she's been doing I
think for a very long time in in the way
that she's conducting herself within
academia and as a public intellectual as
Jay Brown said yesterday so can we just
thank her once again in the usual way
