Past is prologue: For Mary Beard, history only remains relevant when shared

MUMBAI: It was a slice of cake that did it for Mary Beard. That is, it reeled her into the world of ancient culture. The way she recounts the incident is as evocative as the several historical best-selling books that she has written, on ancient Roman times. “This was back in 1960. I was five, and we lived in a very rural part of the UK. My mum, who is a teacher, said I should go and see London and the British Museum, and I was very keen on the Egyptians and the mummies. We went to the Egyptian everyday life gallery. And the British Museum then wasn’t child friendly as all the [show] cases were high. And at the back of one of the cases, my mum spotted a piece of 3000-year-old carbonised Egyptian cake.” So how did five-year-old Beard get to see the cake? It was thanks to a kindly curator passing by who brought out the ancient slice and held it in front of Beard’s nose and ignited a lifelong love for history in her.

The unlocking of that high glass showcase literally and metaphorically set Beard down on a curious path that has, for the most part, involved making history revelatory, interesting, fun, and most importantly, accessible. A historian, academician, prolific blogger, and editor, 69-year-old Beard is in Mumbai – that is, after attending the Galle Literary Festival, clocking in for the third time for the Jaipur Lit Fest, and now to give the keynote address for the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS)’s exhibition on ancient sculptures. The lecture, based on Beard’s recent best-selling book “Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World”, focused on the novelty and surprise of Greco-Roman classical art and how they represented what they held as divine.

Historical partnerships

The CSMVS show, “Ancient Sculptures: India Egypt Assyria Greece Rome,” breaks new ground as it has been planned in association with several partners – the Getty, The British Museum, the Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin, and Indian museums, and will be housed at the CSMVS until October this year.

For Beard, it’s this sharing of resources, historical artefacts, and knowledge that’s been a big draw. She’s written about the future of museums and how important it is to share resources. “I’m a trustee of the British Museum, and they were very keen to participate. It didn’t need me to make them do that. But I was very keen that they should. Because it really is a very important initiative,” she emphasises, while declaring, “These are world-class objects; we have to work out how to share them with the world. And that means not just sending them off for a couple of months, for a blockbuster show. But if we can show them medium-term, we [foster] ongoing connections.” The British Museum has initiated several domestic partnerships in the UK, collaborating with local galleries in Manchester, Newcastle, Cornwall, Newcastle for the long-term exhibitions much like they have done with the CSMVS one. “Why should all [these historical objects reside] in London, not in other places,” declares Beard. She refers to that all-important slice of cake, “While it was really great to see the cake, it was also a sign that [we could open] cases. I would really like more cases to be open. I think we’re a bit too concerned to preserve [objects].”

As a historian, Beard is a staunch believer in exciting her audience about the past and not locking it away. “That’s why I like Rome, because you go around the city, and you can sit and have a picnic on top of a bit of Roman wall. Whereas in most places in the world, you’d be told to not sit on the wall! When history is everywhere, you can make it part of everyday life. But [we need to] loosen up a bit. We need to make history something that we can engage with, not [an object] covered with a glass case. You can’t say this is world heritage, but it’s only going to ever be seen in London,” she declares.”

To the argument about who owns historical objects, Beard is emphatic that it’s about different ways of sharing. “Nobody owns the mausoleum,” she says, “We just need to share it more. There are different ways of sharing it in the modern world, online and digitally. I hope the world gets to know about [the CSMVS exhibition] because this seems to be a real message for the future.”

Women and power

Proclaimed a “national treasure and the world’s most famous classicist” by The Guardian, Beard’s book, “Women and Power” climbed the bestseller lists when it was published in 2018. A slim volume, it’s been unanimously hailed as a modern feminist classic and is a history of the silencing of female voices. The manifesto, the result of two lectures by her, is in keeping with Beard’s refusal to be silenced, in the real or the virtual world. “I wanted to write something about feminism that was accessible. A lot of modern feminist theory doesn’t seem accessible. It’s important. but you can’t pick it up as you did with Germaine Greer, for instance and thought, ‘Oh dang, it spoke to me.’ I was keen to write [a book] that showed that, actually, if you looked at history, you saw those [same] issues in the past. We were not the first generation to be exploited. If you go to an art gallery, you need to be able to think about why it is full of naked women?”

Beard shares an incident that reflects on the distance women have travelled and yet are considered “weak”. “I was caught out by this myself, about 15-20 years ago, when I was on a plane and the captain made an announcement. It was a woman’s voice and I thought, ‘That’s not the captain.’ Why is the cabin crew reading this?’ A split second later, I realised it was a woman captain,” she shared while acknowledging the complicated reality of women and power. “In my 20s, I thought that there were things that we needed to do to bring about female equality: equal pay, maternity leave, childcare arrangements etc. But the reality is much more complicated than that,” she says. Losing “weakness” is not just practical according to Beard, it’s also cultural. “It’s about ideas of authority, certainly in the West that go back thousands of years.”

Virtual reality

As the classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement, (she began writing for the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement in the late 1980s), Beard was also pushed into using social media forums like X, where she has remained a regular and steady presence despite the hate and vitriol that’s been directed towards her – for her views she has expressed. It’s a presence that has reassured many feminists both young and old. “Initially, I read what you were supposed to do [on the barrage of hate]. The advice was: block them, don’t reply. If you reply, you give them the purpose they need. And so, I did that, but it felt terribly frustrating because blocking them doesn’t stop them. It’s like saying, there are bullies in the playground. Let’s leave them to it.” Beard then followed her own instincts: which was to reply firmly and politely. “The rule I learned was never to be rude back. Because that only draws you in. So always be absolutely calm and polite. And never to do it when you’ve had more than two glasses of wine,” she laughs. It’s a tactic that has endeared her to the 321.9K followers she has on X. But for Beard, it remains important to speak up, “A lot of young women have told me it’s been helpful for them to see me calmly responding to someone who said, ‘You look like a witch’ and reply with, ‘You know, that’s an old joke.’”

The natural ease with which Beard responds on X is also characteristic of her nuanced academic work, which stands out in an increasingly polarised world.

Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling The Fires of Vesuvius and the National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated Confronting the Classics SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town and Women & Power. She delivered the keynote address of CSMVS’ Ancient Sculptures exhibition on Tuesday.