Ancient Lives with Mary Beard

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, starring Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway is filling cinema seats around the world and is already a hot favourite for the Oscars. But what is it about this 3000 year old story that captures the imagination of writers, directors and audiences today?

Film director, Uberto Pasolini created his own intense take on the legend with his recent film, The Return starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as his abandoned wife, Penelope. In this bonus episode of Being Greek, Mary Beard talks to Uberto about the themes of the Odyssey that still grip us today. For Mary and Uberto it's not the man-eating giants and seductive sirens that draw them in but Homer's timeless insight into family life and the reintegration of a long absent husband and father.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Controlling the 2nd century city of Athens with their enormous wealth and intimate connections to the most powerful families in Rome were a local mobster, Herodes Atticus and his young Roman wife, Regilla. They spent their riches on lavish display, building theatres and athletic stadiums, sponsoring the Olympic Games and endowing temples where she was installed as the priestess of the gods. But this carefully curated world of influence came crashing down with accusations of corruption, deceit and murder.

It’s a story that’s fascinated the film director Martin Scorsese for many years and he joins Mary to analyse Herodes- a man caught between two worlds as a proud Greek profiting from his relationship with the empire that’s conquered his country.

He married when he was in his 40s, choosing a bride from a powerful Roman family who was only 14. Herodes had shown signs of a violent temper from an early age- even daring to get in a fist fight with a future Roman emperor. His reputation was sealed when Regilla, eight months pregnant, was killed by the blows of one of his lackeys.

A Greek man had apparently ordered the murder of a Roman woman from a family intimately connected to the imperial court. Surely nothing could save Herodes from his inevitable downfall?

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Anna Charalambou

Production Co-ordinator: Tanwen Hughes

Actors: Stavros Demetraki as Philostratus with other readings by Robert Wilfort

Expert Contributors: Rebecca Sweetman of the British School at Athens, Martin Scorsese, Helen Dorey of Sir John Soane's Museum and Carrie Vout of Cambridge University

Sound Design: Ilse Lademann

Commissioned for BBC Radio Four by Daniel Clarke

Special thanks to the British School at Athens, Sir John Soane's Museum, the Archaeological Museum of Marathon and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture

Meet Gerys, a Bulgarian slave who sells fruit and veg in the marketplace of Ancient Athens. He’s been bought and sold, he’s done his time rowing warships for the Athenian navy but now he’s at the centre of the Greek world. Passing his stall, squeezing his olives and buying his wares are poets and philosophers, judges and generals. He hears the debates over the future of Athenian democracy, senses its peril and witnesses its downfall as the city is conquered by Sparta and a military junta imposed on its defeated people.

When the moment comes to rebel he’s one of the first in line to join the rag-tag army of democracy, march to the top of a hill in the port of Piraeus and face down the terrifying ranks of the Spartans and their Athenian anti-democratic allies.

Victory is won against the odds but what reward do Gerys and his family win for his bravery? Mary Beard enters the world of the Greek slave and asks what it takes to become a true citizen of Athens.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Anna Charalambou

Actor: Stavros Demetraki

Expert Contributors: Rebecca Sweetman, Elizavet Sioumpara and Vincent Azoulay

Special thanks to the British School at Athens and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture

When the German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, pulled a shining mask from the bone-dry earth of Mycenae he is said to have telegraphed the King of Greece with the words, ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon’. The unearther of Troy was convinced that he had found more proof that the stories of Homer were based on historical fact. Here was the grave of one of the legendary commanders of the Greek forces in the Trojan War.

Later analysis rubbished Schliemann’s romantic notions, but the graves on this hillside high above the Aegean hold many more fascinating secrets and, in this episode, Mary asks what we can learn from the bones and elaborate grave goods of a Mycenaean woman that archaeologists have labelled, Gamma 58.

Homer’s stories of war, adventure, family and homecoming never lose their appeal. Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is released in cinemas this month and Ralph Fiennes played Odysseus in last year’s highly acclaimed The Return. That film's director, Uberto Pasolini joins Mary and the novelist and historian Emily Hauser in a search for the real people that lie between myth and history. Gamma 58 isn’t Helen of Troy or Odysseus’s Penelope but she has her own story to tell of male power and female agency.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Anna Charalambou

Expert Contributors: Emily Hauser of Exeter University, Pontus Skoglund and Eirini Skourtanioti of the Francis Crick Institute and Rachel Phillips of the British School at Athens

Special thanks to the British School at Athens, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and the Francis Crick Institute

It took quite an effort for a woman to capture attention in Ancient Greece. You could be a beautiful goddess or a savage monster but high profile career options for flesh and blood women were rather thin on the ground. So why has the name of Myrrhine survived for two and a half thousand years?

We can find her name inscribed on a gravestone in the dusty corridors of the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, painted alongside the gods on an enormous funeral vase in the National Archaeology Museum. And she appears as the most cunning of the Greek wives withholding sex from their desperate husbands in the Lysistrata- the best known and most performed of the Ancient Greek comedies.

So who was Myrrhine, how did she achieve her contemporary fame and why does she still speak to us from the stage today? Mary’s search takes her from the back streets of Athens to the peak of the Acropolis.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Anna Charalambou

Actors: Robert Wilfort as Cinesias and Laura Dos Santos as Myrrhine

Expert contributors: Nikolaos Papazarkades of the University of California, Berkeley, Nick Lowe from Royal Holloway University of London, Tulsi Parikh of the British School at Athens and Andronike Makres of the University of the Peloponnese

Special thanks to the British School at Athens, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, the Epigraphic Museum of Athens and the National Archaeological Museum, Athens

From Marvel movies to presidential elections their powerful influence endures on our stories, philosophies and politics, but what it was it like to be an Ancient Greek? Scattered clues need to be gathered until they form a living, breathing human, witness to the cultural powerhouse that was Ancient Greece.

Mary visits the sites that help cast fresh light on past lives- the grave of a powerful woman in prehistoric Mycenae, an exquisite temple clutching the slopes of the Acropolis and the dusty plains of Marathon. Experts in Greece and the UK help Mary interpret the clues, along with film director Martin Scorsese who’s fascinated by the story of a gangster of the ancient world who pulled powerful strings to escape imperial justice.

In the first episode we meet Euphiletos, on trial for the murder of his wife's lover. Can he convince the jury that this is a crime of passion, not a calculated act of mob violence?

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Anna Charalambou

Expert Contributors: Rosanna Omitowoju, Cambridge University and Rebecca Sweetman, Director of the British School at Athens

Actors: Robert Wilfort as Euphiletos and Laura Dos Santos as the old woman

Translations by Mary Beard

Special thanks to Elizavet Sioumpara and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture

From Christopher Nolan blockbusters to presidential elections, their powerful influence endures on our stories, philosophies and politics, but what it was it like to be an Ancient Greek? Scattered clues need to be gathered until they form a living, breathing human, witness to the cultural powerhouse that was Ancient Greece.

In Being Greek- her sequel to Being Roman- Mary Beard, Britain’s best-selling historian of the ancient world, rebuilds the lives of six people, from a priestess to a murderer. Her investigations reveal the limits of female independence and take us deep into the marriage of an Athenian power couple. Themes of faith, politics and justice reveal the foundations of Greek society, but it’s the thoughts, feelings and lifestyles of individual Greeks she’s really interested in. Gods and legendary heroes are easy to come by, but Mary looks behind the temples and beyond the classic myths, filling in her stories with the relatable detail of Greek life, uncovering what they ate, how they decorated their homes and raised their children.

Mary visits the sites that help cast fresh light on past lives- the grave of a powerful woman in prehistoric Mycenae, an exquisite temple clutching the slopes of the Acropolis and the dusty plains of Marathon. Experts in Greece and the UK help Mary interpret the clues, along with film director Martin Scorsese who’s fascinated by the story of a gangster of the ancient world who called in favours from powerful friends to escape justice.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Anna Charalambou

Sound Design: Suzy Robins

Original Music: Mcasso

Commissioning Editor for BBC Radio Four: Daniel Clarke

Lucius Caecilius Iucundus kept the economic wheels of Pompeii well greased. He was a middle man doing very nicely - part money-lender, part auctioneer, part banker, all hustler.

Thanks to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the preservation of the ruins of Pompeii, we can still visit his house, look at his bronze portrait, and read his account books. 150 tablets of receipts, carbonised in the destruction of Pompeii, lead us through the deals that keep the city’s economy moving. If you want to buy a Ferrari-level horse but only have the cash for a Fiesta then Iucundus is your man. It might look like dry stuff, but it's as revealing of real life as snooping on someone’s Paypal account or leafing through their credit card receipts might be now. Never mind imperial plunder and luxury lifestyles, it’s a glimpse of how the economy works in a regular town.

Mary Beard visits Iucundus's home and talks to the novelist Robert Harris about his fascination with the Pompeii moneylender.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Expert Contributors: Sophie Hay, Parco Archeologico di Pompei; Matthew Nicholls, Oxford University

Special thanks to National Archaeological Museum, Naples and Parco Archeologico di Pompei

Allia Potestas is a woman remembered in one of the most intriguing and affecting funeral orations of the ancient world. Her lover remembers her diligent application to housework before praising to the skies her beauty and her erotic skills. But he didn’t have Allia to himself. She was shared in a ménage à trois with his male friend. It’s an unusual domestic arrangement and a surprising one to advertise on a tombstone. The lines themselves reveal an enormous amount about Roman morality and the sexual politics of the time, but the story between the lines is even more fascinating. Can we dig beneath the emotional turmoil of the man and guess what Allia herself thought about the arrangement? Mary Beard is joined in Rome by Allison Emmerson of Tulane University to examine this extraordinary funerary monument at the Baths of Diocletian.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Expert contributors: Allison Emmerson, Tulane University; Helen King, Open University; Mairead McAuley, University College London

Cast: Tyler Cameron as Allius

Special thanks to Museo Nazionale Romano

An obscure carved stone dug up from a vineyard in southern Italy tells the story of a pair of publicans- the delightfully named Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas- and their bawdy adventures in the pub trade. Fans of Frankie Howard, the Carry On films and the sitcom Plebs will instantly feel at home with the Roman sense of humour, but these two characters have so much more to offer than lame jokes and a glass of rough wine- they’re our window into the fascinating bar culture of the Romans.

Most urban Romans had neither the facilities nor the time to cook their own food so meals were eaten and drinks drunk from bars. New discoveries at Pompeii reveal the complex stratification of the culture, from the most basic takeaways to dining rooms that mimicked the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Cast: Robert Wilfort and Tyler Cameron

Expert contributors: Allison Emmerson, Tulane University, Claire Holleran, Exeter University and Sophie Hay, Archaeological Park of Pompeii

Special thanks to Antonio Valerio of Campi Valerio and Museo Archeologico di Santa Maria delle Monache, Isernia

Translations by Mary Beard