Instant Classics

Mary and Charlotte explore the story of Perpetua, a young Christian woman tortured and murdered in the Roman arena in Carthage (modern day Tunisia) for her faith in the 3rd Century CE. Astonishingly, Perpetua kept a diary during her last days - right up until the point she was led into the arena - recording her life, dreams and fearless conviction that death was better than renouncing God. Even more astonishingly, this diary survives, incorporated into a longer account of her martyrdom narrated by another hand.. 

Perpetua describes the attempts by both her father and the presiding Roman official to convince her to just say the words that will save her life. She describes her inability to do this, even though it means depriving her baby of its mother. She also describes several of her dreams in the days before her death. The narrator takes over to recount what happened next. Perpetua was mauled by animals and finally despatched by a gladiator. 

Perpetua’s account is so remarkable, many have questioned its authenticity. The current scholarly verdict is that it is real, providing a rare insight not only into female experience in the Roman Empire - but a woman living through extreme circumstances. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

You can find an online translation of Perpetua’s diary here: https://www.ssfp.org/pdf/The_Martyrdom_of_Saints_Perpetua_and_Felicitas.pdf

Barbara Gold, Perpetua: Athlete of God (Oxford UP, pb, 2021) and Sarah Ruden, Perpetua: the woman, the martyr (Yale UP, 2025) are accessible introductions to Perpetua (both including translations of the whole or parts of the text)

More specialist studies include; 

Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano (eds), Perpetua’s Passions (Oxford UP, 2012)

Thomas J. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (Oxford UP, 2012)

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Antigone is one of the most regularly staged Greek tragedies with great actors lining up to play the part. Juliette Binoche, Juliet Stevenson and Gillian Anderson have all had a crack in recent years. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte look at why Antigone is such an enduringly interesting role. She is sometimes framed as a female Hamlet caught between family loyalties and the needs of the state. 

Antigone was written by Sophocles in the mid-5th Century BCE. It tells the story of King Creon’s attempts to restore order to the city of Thebes following a civil war. He orders that the body of the defeated rebel Polynices should lie unburied as punishment. Antigone, sister of Polynices, disobeys this order and gives her brother proper burial rites (as the gods demand). Creon sentences her to death for betrayal. 

Antigone is often portrayed as a proto-feminist icon - the brave woman standing up to the patriarchy. But is this really what Sophocles intended? King Creon has far more lines and is, like Antigone, caught in an impossible situation. There’s even one way of viewing the play as a parable on what happens when women meddle in the affairs of the state. 

It is, of course, precisely these ambiguities that make Antigone so popular. It raises questions that can never be answered and its relevance shifts from generation to generation. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

There is a big book by George Steiner on the history of Antigone: Antigones (Oxford UP, pb, 1986), including Hegel and much more.

More approachable are sections of Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: the subversive power of Greek myth (Wildfire, pb, 2021) and the video lecture by Simon Goldhill, https://www.cambridgegreekplay.com/talk-wheres-the-tragedy-in-antigone-by-prof-simon-goldhill

Nelson Mandela mentions the performance on Robben Island in his Long Walk to Freedom (Back Bay Books, pb, 1995).

Mary describes her own changing views of the play in Talking Classics (Profile books, 2026)

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Expressions of love, bawdy jokes, political satire or even just saying so-and-so was here - few things bring us as close to the Romans as their graffiti. In large part, thanks to Vesuvius preserving the streets of Pompeii and Herculaneum under rock and ash. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte look at what graffiti tells us about Roman society - both the relatable aspects and the unfathomable. 

Perhaps the biggest difference is the enhanced role graffiti played in a society which did not have forms of mass communication. Roman graffiti is like graffiti today, but also like social media. In both cases, nobody thought anyone would be looking at it 2000 years later. Roman graffiti goes beyond the official documents. It’s a rare glimpse of daily life and opinions that we today weren’t intended to see. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

A searchable database of graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum: https://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/

Charlotte’s article on the Spanish amphora scratched with a Virgil quote: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/24/ancient-roman-pot-virgil-poetry

Charlotte discusses the ‘conticuere omnes’ Virgil quote found in Silchester in her book Under Another Sky, Vintage, 2014

Kristina Milnor discusses Pompeian graffiti in detail in Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (Oxford UP, 2014); there’s a chapter devoted to Virgil.

For the brothel graffiti, see Sarah Levin-Richardson, The Brothel of Pompeii (Cambridge UP, 2019), chap 3.

The classic study of Greek and Roman literacy is W. V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Harvard UP, pb. 1991), developed in Alan Bowman and Greg Woolf, Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge UP, pb, 2008)

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In 430 BCE, Athens was hit by a terrible plague that ultimately claimed around a third of the population. All the social niceties we associate with Ancient Athens collapsed. Citizens turned on one another. The dead were left unburied. Mary and Charlotte both recount and question the ‘facts’ of the epidemic as told by historian, eyewitness and plague survivor Thucydides. 

Thucydides’ account is remarkable in that it aligns with the emerging science of medicine in ancient Athens by focusing on the symptoms and natural causes rather than framing it as  divine retribution from the gods. Yet, for all this, the truth is hard to pin down. We still don’t know what exactly the plague was. And Thucydides’ claims to be an objective historian are undermined by the way he presents the plague as a possible response to Athenian arrogance and hubris. 

Yet for all the gaps, we see many of the social characteristics of epidemics that have recurred throughout history. Social collapse, finger pointing, moralising, and arguments about which ‘truth’ to believe. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

Thucydides describes the plague in his History 2, 47 - 55  Plutarch describes Pericles’ death from the plague in his Life of Pericles 38.

There are plenty of translations of Thucydides available online. But NB one of the most often used (a nineteenth-century version by Richard Crawley) is also one of the least reliable. 

Thucydides, Apollo, the Plague and the War, Lisa Kallet, The American Journal of Philology, Fall 2013, Vol. 134, No. 3, pp. 355-382 (an interesting article in which Kallet casts doubt on the purely objective, scientific account Thucydides purports to give of the plague)

A Plague Like no Other: Beyond the Buboes in Thucydides' account of the Plague of Athens, by Pere Domingo, Paula Prieto, Lluis Pons, Clinical Microbiology and Infection, May 2025 (a useful round-up of the latest medical thinking on the Athenian plague)

J Longrigg, ‘Death and Epidemic Disease in Classical Athens’ in V Hope and E Marshall, Death and Disease in the ancient city (Routledge, 2000)

Emily Greenwood: https://yalereview.org/article/thucydides-times-trouble (a classicist reflects on the Athenian plague and Covid)

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Think Roman food and we imagine extravagant banquets involving rare delicacies. There’s some truth in this, but only for the few. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte ask: what did your average Roman eat? 

Cooking at home was only for the very rich - you had to have not only a kitchen, but the staff to manage it. For this reason, most Romans ate on the hoof or at fast food outlets. In Pompeii, for instance, there is surviving evidence of many such establishments: places where citizens could access a pre-cooked meal straight away. 

While we know that most Romans ate out, and the sorts of places where they ate, until recently there was very little evidence showing what such establishments served. Modern archaeological techniques are starting to provide answers through the analysis of excrement in Roman lavatories. Comparing the evidence from lavatories in Herculaneum and modern day Scotland, a faeces - sorry, thesis - emerges of people surviving on whatever the local countryside could provide - varying dramatically from region to region - with a few luxury imports for special occasions. 

Forget dormice and think cabbage. Lots of it. In myriad ways. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

There is a good overview of the Herculaneum cesspit here: https://www.cambridgeamarantus.com/topics/topic-vi/63/63-evidence

And detailed scientific analysis here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11457-018-9218-y 

For a brief account of the menu at an ordinary Pompeian bar, see: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/fast-food-joint-pompeii-served-snails-fish-and-wine-new-finds-suggest-180976651/ 

Cato’s On Agriculture – complete with its praise of cabbage – can be found in English translation here.

And some information on the Bearsden latrine analysis

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When we think about Roman food, most of us imagine wealthy citizens stuffing their faces with rare delicacies while reclining on their sides and taking occasional breaks to use the vomitorium (urban myth alert). In this two-part special, Mary and Charlotte cut through the fermented fish sauce to look at what the Romans really ate. And no, the vomitorium was not a place where they made themselves vomit. 

In this first episode, Mary and Charlotte look at posh food, beginning right at the top - in the imperial palace. Happily, there are some stories of jaw-dropping extravagance, including Elagabalus (a fave of the show) hiding pearls in the rice as a surprise for his guests. And the favourite dish of the Emperor Vitellius involved pike liver, peacock brain, flamingo tongue and lamprey sperm - all mixed together. But just as many emperors favoured a martial diet and household economy. Augustus - a snack guy - boasted about his ascetic preference for with cheese, figs and bread. Tiberius was criticised by the elite for serving leftovers. 

You can never trust anecdotes about the emperors, but most of the stories have a plausibility when you read them alongside a surviving cookbook - Apicius’ De re culinaria. Here we find out about garum - or fermented fish sauce (which Mary thinks is less disgusting than it sounds), animal wombs, dormice as well as a lot of vegetarian dishes (more to Charlotte’s taste). 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

Emperors’ reported eating habits are discussed in Mary’s Emperor of Rome (Profile pb, 2024) 

You can find a complete (rather lumpy) translation of Apicius online here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm

Several modern writers collect some of Apicius’ recipes and adapt them for “the modern kitchen”: eg John Edwards (Rider pb, 2009),  Sally Grainger (Prospect pb, 2015) and Andrew Dalby (British Museum pb, 2012)

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Mary and Charlotte talk to Tom Holland, co-host of the Rest is History. As well as being a podcasting megastar, Tom is a brilliant historian of Ancient Rome. His books include Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic,  Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age and his recent translation of Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars. 

In the first half of this episode, Tom talks about why Suetonius, with his interest in court gossip and trivia, is the historian for the current age. In the second half, he talks about his lifelong fascination with the Romans - from discovering the Asterix books as a boy, the poetry of Catullus as a teenager, and how writing a series of novels about vampires led him to write Rubicon. 

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If you were to go back in time to 15 February in Ancient Rome, you might see marauding packs of naked men surging through the streets. If you were particularly unlucky one of them might whip you with a piece of goat skin. This was the Roman festival of Lupercalia. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte ask: what on earth was all this about? What did Lupercalia mean to the Romans? And what was the real purpose of any festival to the Romans? 

Despite its mind-boggling oddness, Lupercalia is better documented than many other Roman festivals. This is partly because the Romans themselves didn’t know really what it was about. Lupercalia was something that seemed to have always been celebrated, but opinions varied - then as now - as to what it meant. The wolfiness of lupercalia, and the suggestion the ritual began in the cave where Romulus and Remus were believed to have been suckled, implies it may have been a way for the Romans to connect with their murky origins - an example of the city performing its own past. But even this is contested. 

One thing is clear: despite the date, Lupercalia had nothing to do with modern Valentine’s Day - unless, of course, your idea of romance is running naked through the streets flailing a piece of animal skin…

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Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

The Lupercalia is one of Roman religious festivals discussed in Mary’s book, with John North and Simon Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge UP pb, 1998) volume 2 (with translation of the main ancient texts, including a section of Pope Gelasius’ pamphlet).

Mary also discusses how to understand Roman festivals more widely in her chapter in C. Ando (ed.), Roman Religion, Edinburgh Readings in the Ancient World  (Edinburgh UP, pb, 2003).

Shakespeare’s Lupercalia is in his Julius Caesar Act 1, scene 2

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Greece gave way to Rome and the Roman Empire too declined, but Helen of Troy survived. Forever young and relevant, she has been reimagined by generation after generation. In the last episode of this mini-series, Mary and Charlotte look at Helen’s enduring appeal in the modern age. 

They show how she appeared in the poetry of medieval bards, inspired playwright Christopher Marlowe to create one of the most famous lines in English literature (the face that launched a thousand ships) - and how Shakespeare, not wanting to be outdone by Marlowe, said her face launched ‘over’ a thousand ships. 

Mary describes some of her favourite 19th century paintings of Helen - and discusses the problem of how you paint a face that, by definition, is more beautiful than the face of any artist model. Charlotte talks about how that problem continues in cinema (with a side anecdote about asking Brad Pitt the wrong question at the launch of the film Troy). 

Finally, Charlotte and Mary compare some of their favourite Helens in modern literature, including Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005), Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and Natalia Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019)

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Paintings referred to: 

G Moreau, Helen at the Scaean Gates

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Helene_a_la_porte_scee_-_gustave_moreau_-_2.jpg

F. A Sandys, Helen of Troy

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/artifact/helen-of-troy

(The original magazine illustration from which the painting is excerpted:

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O783702/illustration-to-helen-and-cassandra-print-sandys-frederick/ )

E de Morgan, Helen of Troy:

https://www.demorgan.org.uk/collection/helen-of-troy/

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What happened to Helen after the Trojan War? Mary and Charlotte pick up the trail of mythology’s most famous femme fatale as she makes the long journey home from Troy. The big question at the end of the previous episode was whether her husband Menelaus would kill her as revenge for betraying him with Paris. 

Needless to say, her charms win out and, after a long stop in Egypt, where she acquires some amazing accessories, they return home to Sparta. Just in time for Telemachus, son of Odysseus, to arrive and ask them if he knows where his father is?

The Helen of The Odyssey Book 4 takes us by surprise. She and Menelaus have settled into a rather humdrum domestic companionship. And it raises the question: was all that fighting and bloodshed worth it? For this? 

Just as fascinating as Homer’s surprise depiction is a theory embedded in Greek texts that Helen never actually went to Troy, but sat out the whole affair in relative safety in Egypt. The Helen people saw on the ramparts of Troy was simply an eidolon - an image. 

Mary and Charlotte show how the true nature of Helen - villain, victim or double agent? - provided an endless source of debate, and opportunities for creative flights of fancy, in the ancient world. Finally, they look at a few of the different accounts of her final years. 

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Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

In addition to the reading recommended for the earlier episodes:

The whole tradition of the phantom of Helen is discussed in detail by Norman Austin in Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom (Cornell UP, 2018)

Helen and Menelaus in Sparta feature in Book 4 of the Odyssey (with a detailed recent discussion by J Burgess in The Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s Odyssey, ed Christensen (Oxford UP, pb, 2025))

Herodotus’ account is at his Histories 2, 112 ff

Euripides’ play Helen is available online here https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0100 though it is a rather old-fashioned translation (be warned!)  and there is a full performance (by students) on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MVyAZbRaK0

Emily Wilson translated Euripides’ Helen as part of a recommended (if you want to go for it) fat selection of Greek plays in recent translation: The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Modern Library Classics, pbck, 2017) edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm

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Producer: Jonty Claypole 

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