In the wake of recent conflicts over free speech and acts of political violence, Mary and Charlotte discuss how - then as now - free speech dominated the political agenda in the ancient world, with wildly different interpretations about what it meant and who got to decide. 

They discuss two distinct, yet complimentary principles in Ancient Athenian democracy: Parrhesia (free or frank speech) and isegoria (the equal right to speak). In theory, parrhesia preserved the right to speak truth to power, including the scandalous sexual jokes about public figures which pepper the comedies of the Greek stage. Tolerance of these plays suggested the Athenians generally recognised the validity of frank speech - and one of the state warships was even named parrhesia. 

Isegoria embodied the principle that any free man had an equal right to participate in public discourse, although in practice this was rarely the case. Polished public speaking came with a good education and those who lacked it could be physically silenced. 

The principles of free speech and equality are deceptively simple, and - as with today - interpretation and implementation varied wildly, depending on who held power. The life and death of the philosopher Socrates provides an interesting case study. He is often celebrated as a martyr of free speech, dying in its name, but on closer examination this isn’t exactly what happened. 

They also look at free speech in Ancient Rome and the sobering story of Cicero’s final hours, in which his tongue - allegedly - was stitched into silence. 

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Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading

Plato’s version of Socrates’ response to the charges against him is found in his Apology of Socrates (this, like all ancient works we mention here, is widely available in translation in print and online). NB in Greek apologia means “defence” not “sorry”. 

An important debate in the Athenian assembly that we reference in our discussion (on how to punish the people on Mytilene) is described by Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War  Book 3, 36ff.

The story of Cremutius Cordus is told in Tacitus Annals Book 3, 34-5; that of the tongue of Cicero by Cassius Dio, History of Rome Book 47, 8.

Emily Wilson, The Death of Socrates (Profile/Harvard UP, 2008) is a good introduction to the issues of free speech in 399 BCE and their legacy.

Content warning: references to political violence both in the ancient world and in the past week, and mild sexual innuendo. 

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Tell me about a complicated man, muse…

In this episode of Instant Classics Book Club, Mary and Charlotte dwell on the first ten lines of The Odyssey (as translated by Emily Wilson) and show how it contains not only a summary of the story that follows, but introduces the themes, the subject, and the way the story will be told. Whoever Homer was, they were not a blind sage belting out rudimentary lyrics to listeners round a camp fire, but a sophisticated story-teller/s working and re-working their text to technical brilliance. 

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In particular, Mary and Charlotte introduce us to an ancient Greek word in the first line which is the key to everything that follows. Polytropos (πολῠ́τροπος) is almost untranslatable, but it is the secret to not only Odysseus’ character, but the story itself. Deciding how to interpret this word is amongst the biggest decisions a translator takes. 

Our aim in this episode is to get everyone thinking about polytropos - and how you might interpret it over the course of this story. Is it a good thing to be polytropos? Who in your life is polytropos? Try dropping the word into conversation with your boss. Or maybe don’t. 

Send your thoughts to [email protected] 

And don’t worry - the pace will pick up from here on! 

Mary and Charlotte’s recommended reads:

You can find Emily Wilson’s discussion of “polytropos” (and her own debates about how to translate it) here: https://emily613.substack.com/p/on-complicated 

Consistency alert: In the episode we sometimes refer to polytropos, sometimes to polytropon. That is because the main form of the word is polytropos, but it appears in these lines as polytropon (we’ll explain if you want!).

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In Ancient Greece, the Iliad was the poem above all other poems - an epic full of war and bloodshed that tells of the great heroes who fought and died for Troy. 

But not so long after the supposed composition of the Iliad, a woman on the Mediterranean island of Lesbos, close to the coast of modern-day Turkey, introduced a new and enduring note to poetry: desire. 

Her name was Sappho. She was revered through the Ancient World, but today only one work survives in its entirety: a poem usually known as the Hymn to Aphrodite. The rest is fragments - only about 600 lines of the 10,000 lines the Romans were still reading seven centuries after her death. 

Sappho lived in the 7th Century BCE, long before the rise of Athens as the dominant city-state in Ancient Greece. It was before democracy, before the Parthenon and, arguably, before the extreme subjugation of women common in the later “classical” period. Women weren’t exactly liberated in seventh century Lesbos, but it looks like they were a lot freer than in fifth-century Athens.  From her poetry, we can tell she was an aristocrat, a singer, a lover, and a mother. 

Sappho, famously, loved women. And in this episode, Charlotte and Mary explain why they also love Sappho. Not only is she the great poet of desire, but she also writes about nature, motherhood, middle-age, bad knees, and why war - despite what her brothers might say - is boring. 

Charlotte and Mary recreate what they can of Sappho’s life and art. And they ask the big question: why is it that so little of her work survives compared to many male writers of the ancient world? Are medieval monks to blame? Was she, as Otis Redding sang, just too hot to handle? 

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To join the Instant Classics Book Club and share our trip into Homer’s Odyssey, go to  https://instantclassics.supportingcast.fm/

New episodes will be published every other Tuesday, and available exclusively for members beginning 30th September. Sign up now with the promo code EARLYBIRD25 to receive a 25% discount on membership. 

Mary and Charlotte’s recommended reads:

There are hundreds of translations and adaptations of Sappho. Two of Mary and Charlotte’s recent favourites are: Anne Carson: If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and Stanley Lombardo: Sappho, Poems and Fragments

In her book, Eros, the Bittersweet, Carson also asks what makes Sappho the great poet of desire. 

The world behind the poetry is the subject of Rosalind Thomas’s “Sappho’s Lesbos”, in The Cambridge Companion to Sappho. This is a fairly specialist collection of essays, but takes the story of Sappho’s influence right up to the present, from the USA to India, China and Latin America.

For the controversies around the new discoveries of Sappho’s poetry made a decade ago, start with Roberta Mazza, Stolen Fragments (extraordinary detective work on the world of the illegal  trade in ancient papyri). Three articles by Charlotte also discuss that “new” Sappho and lift the lid on the problems:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/29/sappho-ancient-greek-poet-unknown-works-discovered 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/09/a-scandal-in-oxford-the-curious-case-of-the-stolen-gospel 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/25/doubts-cast-over-provenance-of-unearthed-sappho-poems

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Think ‘Roman sport’ and images of Kirk Douglas, Russell Crowe, Paul Mescal and other Hollywood gladiators may come to mind. But while the Romans were partial to blood-sports, chariot-racing was the really big thing. 

The archaeological remains of chariot-racing tracks have been found all over the Roman Empire, but none suggest a scale or grandeur close to the Circus Maximus in Rome. At full capacity, we think it could take a quarter of a million people - that’s twice the largest football stadium today. 

In this episode, Mary and Charlotte recreate what a day at the races was actually like for the Romans. They describe how chariot-racing worked as a sport, what the experience may have been like for the spectators (courtesy of the poet Ovid), although remain stumped by the not insignificant issue of how a quarter of a million people went to the loo when archeological labour has - so far - only discovered one, solitary toilet. 

They also describe how the chariot-racing industry worked, and the phenomenal wealth that prize charioteers acquired (Cristiano Ronaldo looks underpaid in comparison). 

Ultimately, it is impossible to draw comparisons with sporting events today because chariot-racing at the Circus Maximus was far more than entertainment. It played a hugely important role in the political life of the empire as one of the few places where the people in large numbers could encounter the emperor . As a consequence, it was not only a site for chariot-racing but for mass public protest. How the emperor behaved, before the gaze of the city, was critical to his popularity. While no emperor was ever unseated at the Circus Maximus, it gave his enemies a chance to see whether the people would mind if something unpleasant happened to him later. 

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To join the Instant Classics Book Club and share our trip into Homer’s Odyssey, go to  https://instantclassics.supportingcast.fm/

New episodes will be published every other Tuesday, and available exclusively for members beginning 30th September. Sign up now with the promo code EARLYBIRD25 to receive a 25% discount on membership. 

Mary and Charlotte’s recommended reads:

For good introductions to the “sport”, try:

F. Meijer, Chariot Racing in the Roman Empire (Johns Hopkins, 2010)

J. Toner, The Day Commodus Killed a Rhino: understanding the Roman Games (Johns Hopkins pb, 2015)

The career of the super successful Diocles is the theme of an online article by Peter Struck:

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/greatest-all-time

Mary discusses the problems that emperors had at the races  in her book Emperor of Rome (Profile pb, 2024)

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In this first episode of the Instant Classics Book Club, Mary and Charlotte explain why The Odyssey is such a pleasure, as well as historically significant, and provide the basic facts necessary to get going. 

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Pick a translation - any translation - and get reading with us.

The Odyssey, along with its sister text, The Iliad, is often considered the bedrock of western literature. In it are the seeds of the road movie, the family drama, fantasy fiction, the Western, and any number of genres. It’s also being adapted in a soon to be released film starring Matt Damon as the wily hero, Odysseus. So what better choice of text for the inaugural Instant Classics Book Club? 

The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus, King of Ithaca, and his (literally) epic journey home after the Greek war againstTroy. He encounters the man-eating cyclops, the dangerously alluring sirens (the original femmes fatales) – and he stops in the land of the lotus eaters, the land of blissful forgetfulness. But there is so much more to the story than a series of adventures. It’s also a story of what’s going on at home while he is away: his wife Penelope is trying to avoid being married off to one of a horde of ghastly “suitors” and his young son Telemachus learns how to be a man. The end is both happy and a grisly bloodbath. 

Over the coming months, Mary and Charlotte are taking a deep dive into this greatest of all stories - and inviting you to read along with them. They’ll be sharing their lifetime’s enjoyment of it, putting it in context, and unpicking some occasionally tricky bits! 

And send your thoughts to [email protected] 

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(We hope you enjoy this introduction to The Odyssey. To continue the journey, please join the Instant Classics Book Club at https://instantclassics.supportingcast.fm/

New episodes will be published every other Tuesday, and available exclusively for members beginning 30th September. Sign up now with the promo code EARLYBIRD25 to receive a 25% discount on membership).

Mary and Charlotte’s recommended reads:

The translation we will be quoting from is that of Emily Wilson. But really any will do (there is another even more recent version by Daniel Mendelsohn, which we will be keeping an eye on too). There are also plenty available free online. Most of those are rather old (and sometimes sound a bit stilted), but you can find a more up to date version here: https://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/homer/odysseytofc.html

Both Wilson and Mendelsohn start with very useful introductions to the poem. But try also:

Barbara Graziosi, Homer: a very short introduction (OUP paperback, 2016)

Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses (IB Tauris paperback, 2012)  (you can download the whole book here: https://edithhall.co.uk/product/the-return-of-ulysses-a-cultural-history-of-homers-odyssey/)

The Open University has a useful website (“free course”) on the Odyssey, with links all kinds of articles (including one by Charlotte on the theme of “warrior home-comings”): https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/exploring-homers-odyssey/content-section-3 

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For a long time being a classicist didn’t exactly make you a hit at a party. Then along came Donald Trump and suddenly everybody wants to know: Which Roman emperor is he most like? 

In this inaugural episode of Instant Classics, Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins confront the question they are asked the most. And, as ever when Mary Beard is involved, the answer isn’t always as simple as you might think. 

Mary and Charlotte explain how most of what we know about the emperors is unreliable. We do get some extraordinary glimpses behind the palace walls (Suetonius, the biographer of the first “12 Caesars” was a real insider – having worked as palace archivist and librarian). But almost all our accounts of them come from after their reign and are part of “posthumous reputation making”. Often, the way to keep bloke in power pleased was to trash his predecessors. Did Caligula really have all his soldiers pick up every shell on a beach or plan to make his favourite horse a consul? 

These stories may be fanciful, but they are hugely important nevertheless and were repeated for generations. They are some of the best evidence for Romans thought of their emperors, about their fears of imperial power and how it falls. 

So one to one, real life comparisons are always misleading (insists Mary!). But the wider patterns of political power can be similar then and now. Donald Trump plays many of the tunes that you find in the emperors’ playbook: capriciousness as a political tactic (they’re always changing their mind); Julius Caesar was one who made a point of speaking directly to the people to bypass political institutions (Trump does it through social media); wanton cruelty mixed with sudden acts of generosity. 

Charlotte doesn’t let Mary off the hook. Yes, it’s hard to draw direct comparisons, but - come on Mary! - which emperor is Trump most like? 

Answers are given! 

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Mary and Charlotte’s recommended reads:

Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars. Written in the second century CE. There’s a new translation by Tom Holland, but plenty of others are available. It was written to be read from start to finish, but new readers might choose to start with the lives of Caligula, Nero or Domitian.

The Lives of the Later Caesars (available in Penguin translation: its Latin title is the rather more opaque Historia Augusta). Much less well known, this is a series of ancient biographies of emperors after Hadrian that make Suetonius look very “proper”, with lurid anecdotes that no one has ever thought were true. If you want a good start, go to the life of Elagabalus (also called Heliogabalus).

For those wanting to explore Elagabalus, there’s an awful lot of modern gossip-mongering masquerading as history. For a more reliable start, try Martijn Icks, The Crimes of Elagabalus (this is great on how he was represented in later art and culture), or Harry Sidebottom, The Mad Emperor.

Advert alert: Mary discusses the stories told about Roman emperors, and how we can understand them in her book, Emperor of Rome. 

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A new podcast hosted by Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins.

Episode 1 Available on Thursday, August 28th, 2025.

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