Instant Classics

It’s not every year that a classicist wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (in fact, it hasn’t happened since 1959), so Mary and Charlotte interrupt the schedule to reflect on Anne Carson’s extraordinary career as both a classicist and a poet. Carson is most famous as a poet, but her work is rooted in her scholarly essays and translations of Ancient Greek. Mary and Charlotte talk about how her pion...

We think of cancel culture as a 21st-century phenomenon, but it’s been going on since the ancient Egyptians (if not earlier) and the Romans were enthusiastic adopters as a strategy for control. Mary and Charlotte discuss ‘damnatio memoriae’ (condemnation of memory) - the practice of erasing a person from public life and history, usually after their death. (Pedant alert: Romans didn’t use the term...

There are thousands of surviving busts and sculptures of Roman emperors, but… do we actually know what they looked like? The problem is that the function of these statues was less to do with realistically representing the supreme ruler (if at all), and more about asserting his power over the empire. Mary and Charlotte delve into the complexities of representation in ancient Rome.  People acro...

Mary and Charlotte delve into the stitching of the Bayeux Tapestry, a 224-foot long narrative embroidery charting William the Conqueror’s successful invasion of England in 1066. Little is certain about the creation of the textile, but it was likely commissioned by one of the Norman victors, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who was granted lands in Kent by his half brother William the Conqueror, shortly after...

Mary and Charlotte talk to Daniel Mendelsohn, one of America’s most revered classicists, whose new translation of the Odyssey was published last year.  Daniel’s decision to translate the Odyssey occurred rather unusually. In 2011, his 82-year-old father decided to attend his weekly Odyssey seminar at Bard College. In his memoir An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic (2017), Daniel recounts...

Last episode, Mary and Charlotte looked at how Homer’s Odyssey was reinterpreted in the Ancient World by writers like Euripides, Virgil and Ovid. In this episode, they show how it shaped English fiction - from Shakespeare through to Madeline Miller. They are joined by Jonty Claypole - Instant Classics producer and co-host of the Secret Life of Books podcast. One of the great turning points of Engl...

Ever since the Odyssey was composed, people have retold the story, played with it or used it as a departure point for similar or related stories. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte look at what happened next. How the Odyssey inspired other writers long before Christopher Nolan thought of adapting it for the big screen.  As now, the ancients were drawn to certain episodes more than others. On...

Few elements of ancient Rome have inspired quite such lurid speculation – by the Romans as well as ourselves – as the vestal virgins. Mary and Charlotte enter the (imaginary) temple of Vesta to separate fact from myth.  The Vestal Virgins were six (at any given time) priestesses who tended the eternal flame at the Temple of Vesta - goddess of hearth, home and family. As their name suggests, t...

Mary and Charlotte talk to best-selling author Robert Harris about his new novel ‘Agrippa’. Robert Harris has published 16 novels, of which nine have been made into films, including The Ghost Writer, Enigma and the Oscar-winning papal thriller Conclave. Five of Robert’s novels are set in Ancient Rome: the Cicero Trilogy, Pompeii and Agrippa.  Robert discovered Agrippa while researching the Ci...

Of all the Roman Emperors, Augustus has the reputation of being the most… well… august. That is to say, competent, level-headed and judicious. Not to mention one of the few who died of natural causes. But, according to Mary and Charlotte, the main reason Augustus got anything done is because he had a secret weapon in the form of Marcus Agrippa.  We don’t know much about Marcus Agrippa’s early...

A few months back we spoke to Emily Wilson on our subscriber series Exploring the Odyssey. Emily has been in the news recently, partly because her acclaimed 2017 translation of The Odyssey inspired Christopher Nolan, and partly because her criticisms of Nolan’s film have sparked debate. So we thought we would share the episode here on Instant Classics. In  the episode, Emily tells Mary and Ch...

Mary talks to Charlotte about her book Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War. For the last four years, Charlotte has returned repeatedly to Ukraine to report on the cultural life of the nation as it defends itself against Russia. Part of Putin’s attempts to legitimise the war lies in an age-old argument that Ukraine is simply an extension, or part of, Russia itself. Art and culture have always p...

With the world gripped by Odyssey fever, Mary and Charlotte keep being asked the same question: which translation should I read? So here is a quick bonus episode to help you decide.  Mary and Charlotte cover the waterfront of the modern translations (Emily Wilson and Daniel Mendelsohn), but also celebrate some past classics, like E.V. Rieu’s. In the end, the simple answer is don’t worry - wor...

Summer is here (in the northern hemisphere at least) and with many listeners eyeing trips to the beach, Mary and Charlotte are here with some cracking beach read suggestions. Move over Carley Fortune, Ann Patchett, and Tana French and make way for Herodotus, Lucian and Longus. Charlotte does a hard sell for Herodotus’ Histories (all 700 pages) and Ovid’s (mercifully shorter) Heroides. Mary pushes...

In this Clacton byelection special, Count Binface takes a break from the campaign trail and zooms in from his spaceship to chat with Mary and Charlotte about his deep interest in Ancient Greece and Rome.  While denying all connection with an earthling called Jon Harvey who studied Classics at Oxford, Binface reveals the lessons he has learned by studying classical writers, like the Greek sati...

Last week, actor Tom Hiddleston launched his new series - not the further adventures of Loki (at least, not yet), but Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston. Mary and Charlotte talk to Tom who reveals his life-long fascination with the ancient world, including a degree in Classics at Cambridge where he attended the lectures of one Professor Mary Beard.  Tom talks about the impact Mary’s tea...

Last week, Mary and Charlotte gave their instant verdict on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey only hours after emerging from the premiere, dazzled somewhat by the proximity of so much A-list talent. A week later… they unleash their inner nerds to quibble with some of the decisions and omissions Nolan made in adapting Homer.  Their biggest gripe is the treatment of the female characters. Nausicaa an...

Mary and Charlotte emerge from the premiere of The Odyssey, pausing only for a night’s rest, before regathering in the morning with strong coffees to give their instant verdict on Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster.  Headlines Winners: Complicated, twisty-turny timelines; multiculturalism; Samantha Morton; Charlotte Higgins Losers: Feminism; humour; The Gods; Mary Beard To find out what a...

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey - the most eagerly anticipated event since Odysseus spied the shores of Ithaca - is almost with us at last. Mary and Charlotte have been exploring Homer’s epic over the last year in the Instant Classics Book Club, but if you’re time poor or just want a little refresher, then you’ll find the basics in this pre-screening primer.  In the first half, they...

Mary and Charlotte welcome Professor Maria Wyke back on the show to talk about two of the most famous words in cinema: “I’m Spartacus!” Hollywood has always had an obsession with Ancient Rome. So much so, the Roman Epic - or sword-and-sandal - is a cinematic genre in its own right. Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier and a host of other stars, is perhaps the toweri...

Shortly after its formation, the United States of America initiated a building program for both state and federal governments, turning to Ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. As Mary and Charlotte discover… In-between duties like writing the Declaration of Independence, acting as Minister to France and being President, Thomas Jefferson found time to make inspiration trips to study Roman archit...

Last year, Mary spent nine months in Washington D.C. During this time, she became interested in visual iconography and real objects of Ancient Greece and Rome on display in the city’s museums and streets. In this episode, she tells Charlotte about her fascination with a sarcophagus in the Smithsonian collection, which was believed once to have held the remains of Emperor Alexander Severus.  In the...

In case you haven’t noticed… the USA is celebrating a special anniversary. Mary and Charlotte talk to one of America’s leading scholars of ancient Rome and its modern reception, Joy Connolly, about why so much of the struggle for independence deployed the words, images and sometimes actual clothing of the Ancient Romans.  They discuss George Washington’s production of the tragedy of Cato in the re...

Nearly 2000 years before Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, a sage in Ephesus (now in Turkey) wrote a book whose title translates as… The Interpretation of Dreams. Armed with Artemidorus’ book, Mary and Charlotte dive into the surreal and revealing dreamscape of the Ancients.  If you’ve ever had a dream about flying or losing teeth or sex with a stranger, well… Artemidorus has a...

Mary and Charlotte talk to Professor Maria Wyke, classicist and film historian, about Cleopatra’s rebirth on the screen. By far the most famous Cleopatra film is the 1963 epic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton - at the time the most expensive film ever made and with a steamy on-set love affair between the two stars to match that of the characters they were playing. Almost as brilliant,...