Prof Dame Mary Beard - Whiteness

I would like to welcome everyone to this Gifford conference. My name is Joe Shaw. I am a member of the Gifford Lecture Committee and am delighted to welcome our distinguished speaker, Professor Mary Beard, Professor at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College, as she continues her series on the topic of the ancient world and us, from fear and hate to enlightenment and ethics, tonight we will hear her in the second of her six lectures and it is titled Whiteness, the lecture and the questions tonight. They are being recorded and the video will be available online shortly.

I think yesterday's is already online just to give you an idea of ​​our efficiency on the university's Gifford conference web pages. I now have the great pleasure of handing it over to Professor Mary Beard. Come on, yes, of course, I want to start today's lecture with an animated cartoon that was produced by the BBC in 2014 for children in key stage two of the English curriculum, which is between 7 and 11 years old, now during the early three years of life of this cartoon. It went completely unnoticed, except no doubt by children and their teachers, but in 2017 it somehow caught the attention, God knows how, of a far-right journalist and conspiracy theorist, Paul Joseph Watson, who took a look at it and tweeted: I mean, who cares about historical accuracy? was objecting to the depiction of a high ranking Roman official in Britain as non-white, now the truth is that the cartoon was not perfect, all the animation was not perfect, those of you who were here yesterday may want to know that the depiction The gladiatorial combat was a bit cliché, to say the least, and the legend that was originally underneath this to say it was a typical family in Roman Britain was soon wisely removed.

We have no idea what a typical family was in Roman Britain, but I think it's extremely unlikely that mixed-race marriages were typical, and anyway, the story that this is based on suggests that this is the governor of Roman Britain and his family, so it's not typical at all, it's a BBC, it's not perfect, but that was said by several of us. responded to mr. Watson to say that this was a perfectly reasonable and unsurprising representation in the context of the diversity of Roman Britain and, in fact, this figure here seems to me as if it were based on the figure of Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who was a governor little known. of the province in the first half of the 2nd century AD.

C. now Urbicus is one of those rare people that we can trace throughout the Roman world; there is no surviving statue of him; He barely appears in Roman history writing a single sentence about his victories in Britain, but we have several written traces of him not far from here, one of them being the now very idyllic Roman fort of High Rochester, just south of the border. I suspect he was not even half as Dilek as these 2,000 years. ago and the trace is an inscription recording the construction of some type of building during his rule of Roman Britain.

Here you have a photograph, a drawing and a translation. I have blocked his name. It is not that unusual, but what is really striking is that two thousand five hundred kilometers away, in modern Algeria, we have another inscription that commemorates Quintus Lollius Urbicus in what was his small hometown of tiddis and explains that there was served not only in Britain but also in Germany, Judea and what we would now call Turkey and just near the town of tiddis is his clearly labeled family tomb which still lies in open countryside i.e. Urbicus came from Algeria and when he was serving in Britain he was very, very far from home, that now tells us nothing about the color of his skin he could have been of Italian origin from a Sackler family in Algeria.

He could well have been Berber and this tomb is a traditional Berber tomb design, but he could also have had some sub-Saharan ancestry. There were considerable contacts between North Africa. and sub-Saharan Africa partly due to the Roman slave trade, so we had no idea that his name does not give it away, but what we can say is that that is very possible as an image of Quintus, the humblest urbis, is not Surprisingly, perhaps none of that factual argument convinced those who were absolutely convinced that the BBC was here blackwashing history, as they put it, and they kept up a Twitter and video campaign against me and others for days, if Not weeks, one of the most prominent of these guys and, in fact, an American scholar more or less said that the arguments he was presenting about Lollius Urbicus and this picture of the Roman family were living proof that scholarship in the Kingdom United was totally correct and another guy who clearly had too much time on his hands took to what he thought were very funny images with a bit of photoshop yes, you had to admire the ingenuity.

I have to say it's wonderful. I could not find it. You know the life of Henry VIII and can imagine what color. Henry VIII was right and I hope you can also guess that there were much worse things than what I'm showing you now and I'll spare you that now. I really don't want to go back to this tonight and I don't want to make this conference some kind of revenge against these dumb idiots, but I hope you see mr. Johnson, but I'm starting from here to give a sense of how disturbing, how incendiary the topic I've chosen for today can be or, to put it more positively, how much it still matters to people and that topic as the title of the conference says "

whiteness

is better", perhaps the question in what color or colors we see the classical world in now.

Obviously it should touch on issues of race and ethnicity, but it's partly to avoid getting horribly bogged down in the enormously complicated stuff. debates around these terms and around the construction of racial difference in the 18th and 19th centuries around the controversial definition of ethnicity and around the controversial origins of classical culture that Martín Bernal's book, the Athena black, promoted 40 years ago now, although in my last conference I will return to that, it is to avoid all those complicated debates a little. I have taken a rather simpler approach in its simplest form. What I'm trying to say is basically let's close our eyes and try to conjure up a Greek or a Roman, what do we see?

Maybe you would like to imagine that you are closing your eyes and do it because I will tell you what I think you see in a minute. In part, I have also chosen

whiteness

to move the Debate beyond skin color. I want to think of old statues, white and colored. I wonder a bit about the architecture, including the togas, as well as the terms in which the Greeks and Romans themselves described the colors around them and why that makes a difference. how we understand the ancient world In the end I will return very briefly to modern ethnicity when I spend a few minutes wondering about the relative lack of diversity among those who now teach and study the classics.

What should we do? I want to ask if the classics are As it's a predominantly white topic, I want to move away from a narrow focus on race and I have a lot going on and I've chosen a slightly idiosyncratic route around this topic so I hope it works out well. Like last night, I'm like you awkwardly, thinking about the shifting boundary between us and then between the ancient world and the modern world and I'm trying to look at both sides, but tonight it's going to be much more direct. issues of modern politics at stake issues that center on the question of who can see themselves reflected in the ancient world how and why the alt-right or the extreme right or whatever you want to call them how come they come to see the classical world as a mirror of themselves, of their own worldview and, very often, of their vaunted whiteness and what is at stake for the rest of us when they can include the classical world in their own political project and should I say I mean the right here.

I'm not talking about Jacob Riis MOG. I'm talking about something that's nothing more than writing about something that's not really conservative, but basically white supremacists also know that I don't want to smear too many people. I don't have any unfortunate metaphor, I don't have any doubt, but among those who opposed the BBC, and there were many, there were people who were genuinely shocked by this depiction of people in Roman Britain who were taken from God. I didn't really think or know about the diversity of Roman Britain and those who thought the terrible cliché that it was all PC gone, Matt.

I'm sure there were some of those and I think when the BBC still had the typical title, some of them were right to object, but there was within that a core of hardliners whose racist comments about that cartoon, I mean, remember which is a children's school cartoon made by Roman Britain, whose racist comments I could not, I believe, read aloud to them appropriately and possibly legally. How do we deal with this now? I have to say that I feel something of a moral dilemma here, and that is partly why I chose to speak on this topic and I hope it is evident that I deplore the use of the ancient world as a weapon in the course of the White War. supremacy, which is basically what some of this case and I feel as uncomfortable as I'm sure many people feel when I read the team yesterday when I read that Steve Bannon is opening what she calls a gladiator school on the outskirts of Rome to teach right. politicians how to fight for Judeo-Christian values, by which he means white Judeo-Christian values.

I mean, it comes straight from Seneca. You know the idea of ​​the gladiator as a symbol of the fight for right in every sense of the word. None of this makes me happy, but I think there is also a fun

dame

ntal principle that no one owns the classics and if

prof

essional classicists want, as I do, for the topic to remain part of the widespread public debate and public interest, that It cannot be in the condition that it can only be used for causes that we approve. You cannot say that you enjoy my topic, but only in the terms that I establish should it be honest.

I actually feel that there is too much doubt in the classical

prof

ession on the subject. The way these groups, these far-right groups, misuse, as the classics would say, and I think hand-wringing gets us nowhere and smacks of a kind of professional exclusivity. I think the only way to deal with these things is with the facts about which here and elsewhere, happily, the alt-right and their friends are largely wrong. I think you can beat them on facts, you don't have to beat them on certif, getting off the topic, no, I said it a few moments ago, but a question was and I.

I think it's a simple question, but it gets to the heart of the matter: what do we see when we close our eyes and think of an ancient Greek or Roman? How many of you have done that thought experiment? But I can be. I'm pretty sure that for most of us, certainly for me the answer is something like this right now. This couple, of course, is familiar to some. It's Mattila and Kike Elias, who are the stars of the first book of the excellent Cambridge Latin course that now guides most. students in the UK through their first steps in Latin are very loved are highly replicated even on tote bags Kye Kelley reviewed in Auto is guaranteed to be recognizable by anyone who wrote this book and are highly parodied and if you want I didn't put nothing of this.

You can find some pretty rude parodies if you put calculus into Google Images. Waikele partly evaluated Ilias' estimate. Hello, right, everyone who knows Latin laughs at that, yes, but for all this and for all the fun, the familiarity. all the time they are all white and if they are men, they all wear white togas, right, the so-called Latinas of Cambridge did not invent that vision, the classical world is obviously just resuming a long history from the Renaissance onwards of representing the inhabitants of the world ancient they thought of them as if they were like us, when we are white Western Europeans, whether it was Botticelli, his early Roman heroes, who were going to be watching on Thursday or Lord Layton's sexy Greek girls collecting stones on the beach.

You know, you can go through the entire history of Western art and you can find thousands of Greeks and Romans who look a lot like us in quotes, one of the consequences, I think, and I think there is a route to this, but one of the consequences of the western elite. For, say, half a millennium, culture has seen itself in the tradition of the classical Greeks and Romans, and it has also projected its own image of itself onto the Greeks and Romans, and, as the Cambridge Latin course shows, We are still learning to see. the Romans in that way, but more than that, as the fuss over the caricature shows that projection of our own image back into antiquity and then, through a sort of completely circular process, seems to give that particular image of Western whiteness a unbroken history dating back more than 2,000 years. years, but it is another way when theUnfamous poet Shelley said that we are all Greeks, the other side of that coin was that all Greeks are right and that now plays into the hands of the extreme right, but beyond Niraj, who are the Greeks, the Greeks are us , we Western white Europeans see ourselves like this, as the Romans and Greeks looked beyond that Niraj, the fact is that even in Roman Britain and I say even because Britain was the most backward and disconnected province from us , otherwise it surprisingly joined our Empire, you know Britain was a pit, let's face it, yeah hope won't be like that again, even in Britain, the people you would have seen around you didn't universally look like that , true, here there were almost every skin color on the stage, from black to brown to pink and white and Quinta slowly since urbis is not the only resident of very far away one of my favorite tombstones in the entire province is this one now in the Museum South Shields which is located nearby and was built by a Syrian man from Palmyra.

His name was Bharat. His British wife was called Regina. I guess we'd say Queenie. This one is from Bharata and Queenie. and she, as the tombstone tells us, was of the Catalan tribe around Sand Albans. I'd love to make her an Essex girl, but she's not quite an Essex girl, but almost, so you've got Sir Ian with the almost British type of her. Essex wife, we now know no more about this couple than what we see here, although there is a fragmentary headstone in Corbridge which may be the bharata system, it is quite plausible that he was here, we don't know why, but it is quite plausible that he was here. in some kind of business capacity, although when people say that he was here in a business capacity it usually means that they have no other reason, no other kind of explanation for why he is here and she seems to smile when the inscription says that he was originally hers. slave and then his wife and the monument itself is enough to give us an idea of ​​at least the cultural mix because it is largely written in Latin, but there is an Aramaic inscription underneath, let's see here Latin and his name, or did he have it inscribed in Aramaic saying Queeny.

Goodbye Below I was always baffled as to who the hell they found in South Shields who could write Aramaic, but they did write Sorry to anyone in Sofia and there is plenty more evidence from Roman Britain that points in the same direction. I don't want to accumulate example after example. to construct this culturally diverse image, but I'm thinking, among other things, of an account in the biography of Septimus Severus, the emperor, of an encounter with an Ethiopian, a black soldier when he was inspecting the army in his dream, this wall and I'm thinking of increasing amounts of bioarchaeological data that point in the same direction.

I'm going to tell you this, but promise not to ask me questions about it later because I'm telling you. what you know, I know and I can give you a reading list, but I'm not an expert in bioarchaeology, but it is one of the most productive new scientific methods and I think it's really amazing in its simplicity, even for us who are not scientists. is the analysis of trace oxygen isotopes in the tooth enamel of human remains is based on the principle and would be true for us as much as it is for these people 2,000 years ago is based on the principle that permanent teeth still contain the traces of oxygen isotopes in the water that you drank when the permanent teeth were forming in your jaw and that varies dramatically with climate and environment and what you get from that relatively conclusive and relatively simple test is clear evidence that here There are people who grow for a long time.

Very far away there is a Roman cemetery, for example in Winchester, where there were 40 skeletons. The teeth of 40 skeletons have been tested in this way. Five of them had oxygen isotopes, confirming that they grew in North Africa and that is not atypical in the analysis, also in the formation of the skull. confirms that image, although it is much cruder and much more impressionistic in its approach, this skull of a woman found near Eastbourne strongly suggests it by the shape of the skull and the ridges of the eyebrows, but she was of African ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa, but the tooth analysis makes it pretty clear that she grew up in the south of Britain, so you can see someone who has ancestors from very far away, but she almost certainly grew up here, not outside of that, and you know, we could spend half an hour multiplying those examples, there are all of them. types of loose ends the fact that, for example, someone grew up in North Africa there is nothing definitive about the color of their skin and the surprising evidence that emerges from these cemeteries is overwhelmingly urban or military and because it is not understood cemeteries that reflect the cemeteries that there are no for the poor old country peasants who probably made up the majority of the British population and in case you are wondering, DNA analysis does not help us, that is, DNA analysis is very difficult. sequence the DNA of these ancient skeletons, but DNA analysis of the more indigenous British population shows very few traces of anything that looks African or Mediterranean or anything that looks Norman French or anything that looks Viking and there are some We don't know why which is so, but it does not help to solve this problem, but the current general consensus among Roman historians and archaeologists that what would have been seen if one had looked at the population of the urban or military areas of Roman Britain would not be It is impossible to simply estimate how many people were talking about how many people were talking about, but the myth of a white Roman Britain is exactly a myth and if it is true for Roman Britain, it is even more so for the rest of the Roman Empire, a vast area that stretches from Syria to Spain to Scotland before this, a horror without internal borders, clearly documented trade links, paths of army mobility and, at times, the mass movement of populations into slavery that followed the conquest, there are also many capes loose, it is also very difficult to say how this diversity was experienced and In some ways, that is a more interesting question than whether it exists or not.

When I watch Barratt facilitate the memorial for Regina, what I can't help but wonder, so this is going to be Sun Sound again, is whether I'm being rude about it. South Shields I can't help but wonder what kind of couple they made in Downton Roman South Shields we have no idea what Bharat's skin color is, all we know is that she says she came from Palmyra, which doesn't tell you much. We very much don't know what clothes he adopted, what his hairstyle was, but you can't help but wonder how remarkable this couple was. They remained? Oh no, did people comment on them?

Know? Were there sort of Roman equivalents of yours? I don't know any Syrians here or they were just part of the environment, the mixed environment that one expects. No, you wonder if when you look at this, you could certainly find someone who could write your Aramaic, so there may have been quite a few more, but we have no evidence, we have no evidence to even begin to answer that question, at least in as far as South Shields is concerned, but if you look at the evidence closer to the center of the Empire, there is more you can say: Roman writers were often terribly prejudiced. against outsiders ridiculed that character, but the cowardice, the strangeness, the inferiority of anyone who was not like them and, as expected, Greek and Roman intellectuals speculated on broad inhabitants of different parts of the world look different, it is a subject of reasonable speculation and they often came up with all sorts of different versions of environmental determinism 3 to explain why the Greeks and Romans always emerged victorious over those who lived in places where it was too hot, too humid, too cold or whatever they said about the people of Roman Britain.

It's not worth repeating, so they're not a nice, liberal, multicultural sort of people, to say the least, but as far as we know, skin color wasn't a major factor and certainly wasn't the key coordinate of their prejudices. This figure here is a figure from a mosaic of the entrance to the hot room in a set of private baths in Pompeii and it is very likely that it is an at least intended figure, but it is not the racist image that we might read with the type of connection what i think suggests to us between racial bondage and sexuality, this presumably should be it.

I think the bathroom attendant slave. I wouldn't deny those connections completely, but in Roman terms the point is probably different: the black skin here may well be playing on the idea of ​​the heat of the room because black skin was often explained, do you know why some people where it does hot do they have black skin? Well, it is because of the burning effect of the sun, that is why the skin turns black and that is, in fact, what Ethiopian or Ethiopian means. means on your back and I suspect we have a little joke about you going to go somewhere very hot and say you have an Ethiopian and his rather large penis will probably be part of it again, at least to some extent. hint at the sexually charged atmosphere slightly erratically, a bath rather than necessarily pointing out the way we might think of it and certainly, if you say what a Roman thinks Romans think of an influence, certainly there were African slaves and also They were elite Africans, but I think the Romans thought of a slave, they probably thought of a shaggy, red-haired German as much as anything else, so if you want to find legitimation in the ancient world for racist ideology, you've chosen a Pretty bad place to do it, but like I said, it's not just a question of the skin color of the human population.

At the beginning of the lecture, I imagined why yes of the ancient world is a much broader phenomenon and particularly prominent in that whiteness of all. the hordes of Greco-Roman marble statues that line museum shelves and that in many ways have come to symbolize for us classical culture and, at one time, I believe they symbolize classical culture once they were removed to legitimize by that the image of the human beings who populated the In the classical world, everything in the classical world looks white if you go to a museum or almost everything, and maybe you want to add our cinematic vision to that, every landscape of the ancient Roman city in all the great films it is also gleaming white marble stacked on gleaming white marble, although I have allowed a red column and it is probably no surprise that this type of whiteness with connotations of aesthetics and racial purity has also come to act as the poster child for some extreme right organizations and one of the clearest cases here. is a neo-Nazi party in the United States that until a few weeks ago was known as Identity Europe or Identity Never OPA.

It is not very clear which one, but partly due to the happy decline in its membership it has been renamed the American Identity Movement I' Voy to show them their older posters because they have a whole series of PR posters that a clean white classical or classical sculpture will not protect their heritage or their future belongs to us and has become great again. You can see the origins of these slogans. and the logic is quite obvious, the white purity of the classical tradition, whether it be the Apollo Belvedere II, as seen here, Michelangelo's David on the right, which underpins the logic of its white political position, is actually a logic adopted by his opponents who presented parodies. poster campaigns against them, which I didn't realize to begin with what parodies make angry old men great again, white men, which is pretty cool, oh I get it, now they're educated bigots, now in this case seems even easier to hit on the head. the misunderstanding of ancient culture that underlies this because it is established beyond all reasonable doubt, beyond all doubt, in fact, that many ancient sculptures were not white at all, that they were brightly colored or polychromatic, as it says academic jargon, to begin with, there were thousands and thousands of bronze. statues that never looked white, most of them have disappeared because they were cast in some set of medieval munitions, there were probably also gold and silver statues cast for all different purposes, there were marbles, marble statues in all kinds of different colors.

I always want to throw this black imperial lady, who is probably Nero's mother, Agri Pina, in the face of white supremacists. As far as we know, Agri Pina was not black, but she is represented here in black stone and in a black stone that was infinitely more expensive and precious. to work that relatively soft why marble so there is certainly no adjustment here between the blackness of the stone and the blackness of your skin, but the point is, and this has been said a lot recently, the point is that even what now It looks like that kind of pure white marble that we expected to originally be brightly colored or much of it we know from the traces of paint that can still be seen on some sculptures, like here is the original red and this is how it has beenslightly rebuilt.

More strikingly, it is sometimes seen very clearly, actually still in the stone, but more often it is only visible by microscopic analysis. The color that still survives cannot be seen with the naked eye, but it can be reconstructed like this. Archer and, in fact, we know that they were painted. because some ancient writers tell us that the sculpture was painted and here is a quite nice vars in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and here is the painter, he is actually working painting the statue now, this is a simple story and at the same time controversial and it is so controversial that one of my colleagues in the state, Sarah Bond, was threatened with death online after she explained clearly and clearly and without any emotion in a popular article that painting ancient sculptures white was normal, but whatever We end up with a lineup of one classic white statue after another in our museums, and I'll get to that later, much of the blame lies with natural wear and tear.

The ideological consequences of this whiteness that we now face are quite clear: the classical and the The classicist world now presents a very white and decompressing space 'adds fairly or not the idea of ​​the museum and the idea of ​​the classical museum as reinforcement of a particular version of political and racial history and here you can see it under attack and Obviously there are also more implications in this about what the classics themselves represent, no, that's all true, but I would like to say at this point that history It's a little more complicated than what I just described and I think we need to nuance the picture a little and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

First, as an archaeological fact, I wonder how universal the painting of the ancient sculpture of marble. I have no idea it was common, but when you see something like this and you can see this marble is highly polished and has been highly polished. In ancient times, this is how it was unearthed. It has not been given a good polishing. Afterwards, it is a statue of Olympia from the 4th century BC. it's hard to imagine that statue was heavily painted if you're going to polish it don't have it painted, I would say, and the fact that Roman love poets regularly hail marble as white and then compare it to their girlfriends' skin, I think which should also give us a little pause about how polychrome marble always was, it was now my own sense. although it is a little old fashioned to say that painting marble statues was probably more common earlier than later in ancient times, but I think there are many ideologues on all sides of this story and there are polychromatic ideologues who want to tell you that all sculpture old was deleted I don't think so, I believe that, secondly, I think we have to accept an uncomfortable truth, but although we are not on the same political side as the old right, I think most of us are probably on the aesthetic side. same side as the eldest at this moment I can accept that this is what the famous primaporta Augustus once looked like but you are very good, you are not going to make me like it either for better or for worse my training in Western culture has been too long and too effective for me to think that that looks good I'm sorry and I know I'm not the only one in his recent autobiographical poem tyv James the television critic cut roguish and the poet stepped aside for a few verses to, as it were, He said thank God that color has generally disappeared from a classical sculpture and praised the white ghost, the white flesh of the ghost that misses him, which surpasses the polychromatic crap of the Disney Land that once was antiquity and more American archaeologists They looked at this particular reconstruction and said that perhaps Emperor Augustus looks like a man in a dress trying to claim a right which I have to say I agree with at this point.

I also have a kind of sneaking suspicion that those people, those scientists, particularly those who are looking through their microscopes they make these reconstructions partly to surprise us they want us to say oh my God, this is what it looks like they really say yes, you know, so they want to do them as a nation DS Clive's words as widely as they can and I think to some extent the people who do these, you know, paint the plaster reconstructions this way, they partly say: all the tradition, but we believe that we have internalized about the beauty of classical sculpture the idea that this statue was on the Emperor Augustus. his widow's villa really hits me, but he did it well, but even more important is how we think about this image of white marble that dominates our view of classical sculpture, how we obtained it, how it originates, is it clear enough to see the political consequences.

The cultural political consequences of viewing antiquity are white and purely aesthetic and white with a capital W and that is clear, but what was the origin? Now I think there is a tendency to see politics at work in the origin of this whiteness as well as the consequence and it is almost always said that one of the main culprits is JJ Benkelman who died in 1760 1768 the year this was painted portrait Winkelman was the so-called father of art history, the first man to systematically analyze an attempt to date a wide body of works. classical culture, but according to what is becoming the standard story, he is the man who more than anyone has imposed the admiration of pure white marble on his successors and why he did it essentially the argument is because he had a Eurocentric view of the color vision. as a marker of the primitive and identified the pinnacle of civilization just like Europe, people in works of art like the Apollo Belvedere II that you see on the screen know that there is a small grain of truth in that in Cummins' work of the 18th century is very influential on how we view classical sculpture and I would challenge anyone to read Vinkle Man's eulogy of the Apollo Belvedere II without feeling a little sick, it is very true, but I think the idea that Benkelman was somehow, already You know, the real father of the extreme right in this respect is really a kind of impulse from the desire to let you know that a conspiracy from an initial error offers a historical chronology that does not add up to begin with since it was rediscovered in the Renaissance this sculpture emerged from the more or less white ground, this is because on the ground almost all traces of paint had disappeared and the traces that there were did not resist the usual cleaning techniques where, I must say, it is true that the limit between being dirty and being colored may have been a little tricky and it's actually part of some statues like one of the ones I just showed you.

Only in recent decades have scientific techniques allowed us to detect traces of pigment that we cannot see with the naked eye. but calling Vinkle Minh a Eurocentrist in the modern sense is just nonsense, right, he was an 18th century guy who had never set foot outside of Austria, Germany and Italy, what else could he be? But you're eccentric, right? right?, and it certainly was. I am not the first to invest in the quality of the whiteness of the classical sculpture tradition. I mean, you just have to look at the work of Renaissance sculptures in the two centuries before Winkleman, who did exactly that: they imitated the whiteness that they had.

Seen in classical art, Michelangelo's David as seen here was never painted, so this dates back further than the 18th century, probably dating back to the 15th century at least, although it is interesting that the implications of now whiteness of the David were enough to cause a black David to be brought to Florence in 2016 actually in memory of the victims of the pretty bombings, but you can see that this is not just in classical sculpture, there is a greater nervousness here and anyway I think that Vinkle Minh would actually feel. He was a little angry to discover that he had become enemy number one in the whiteness argument and, in fact, he noticed that some ancient sculpture had been painted over and, in fact, dedicated an entire chapter of his book to an ancient sculptor painted, now he did not particularly.

He liked the idea, that's for sure, and he also suspected that it was probably early and not from his high period of classical art, and that was certainly a way of taking it for granted, but he didn't ignore the idea of ​​sculptures being painted, nor did he. the people of the 19th century. century, like the painter alma-tadema, ignore it when you have a record here of what the freezing of the road must have been like, although in reality it is only in the last few decades that the clever boffins have taken out their microscopes and their lasers to reveal what these colors are like.

Since the 18th century people have known that this was the case and I think that somehow no one comes out very well in the debate about whiteness versus colored sculpture or at least they don't come out very subtly leaving aside the driving ideology of the extreme right. you are simply misrepresenting the tradition of ancient sculpture by claiming it is universal whiteness, they are not always wrong, they are not wrong about David, but they are basically wrong, on the other hand, many of them see very well I think I am pointing out the apparent exclusivity race that the false whiteness of classical sculpture has recently supported.

I think they are at least guilty of oversimplifying the history of the entire tradition of painted sculpture in their search for good and bad, it has become something of an act. of some article of faith that it is morally wrong not to recognize that ancient sculpture was colored and, in a sense, both the White Brigade and the Color Brigade here, I think I can fight this rather silly argument as a brief coda to this section before determine. I can't resist saying that if I wanted to tear down the identity of Europe, the trust in the history of whiteness, I wouldn't discuss sculpture.

I would point them to the history of Greek pottery, which I am sure they also admire and, in particular, the so-called black pottery. thicker style of 6th century Athenian vases, such as those seen here, and I would ask a simple question of all the 6th century vessels whose skin is white and the answer is always and only women's skin and I suspect that would close the question. alt-right because not only are they white, they also emulate a kind of white male warrior mentality and you will see in these voices that men are always represented as black and women are always represented as white.

I think it's necessary, oh, you're not. Needless to say, that kind of territory is not because women in ancient Athens were white and men were black, but because the relationship between representation and reality is much more complicated than simply thinking of a direct analogue between the color of the representation and the color of the representation. real skin color as it was with Agri Pina, so I want to end this lecture by briefly returning to another controversy that a BBC production caused last year could start with the same type of controversy but raised different issues from the production that I have in mind I don't know if anyone saw it was the series The Fall of Troy of a city that I thought was quite gruesome actually loosely based on the Homeric epics that caused particularly outrage and you couldn't see where it sort of starts from the same position , what caused particularly surprisingly widespread outrage was actually the casting of a black actor, David Gassy, ​​to play Achilles, the Greek hero of the Trojan War, there were many more responses to this, from political correctness gone mad. many arguments as to why they are taking away my literature and the cause of their multicultural project and some of those who actually knew his Homeric poems joined in citing the apparent fact that Homer had established that Achilles was blonde now at this point I thought that a once he had been bitten twice Shy, I thought I would stay out of this discussion so I tweeted only very briefly to say that this was all a bit off topic, isn't this argument like Achilles?

In reality, it never existed. he's going to be acting fine, you wouldn't be English, very strange for Greek, so we wisely pulled out of the fray, one of my colleagues, Tim Whitmarsh, dug a little deeper and decided to take on the blonde Achilles brigade, the word Greek that they we refer to in Houma are examples, since Whitmarsh pointed out that blond is a possible translation of by a white actor, is actually described in a moment from Homer. like melon madness, which can be translated as black skin, which could also mean tanned or in the type of VAR coding that I just showed you, tough guy type.

I think it might be another way of looking at it now, in part, there is a problem with specifying color in the sense of what shade is being referred to, in the same way that we might have problems in everyday conversation deciding what the limit was. between blue and green, but here is a bigger problem that is really important the more you look at the The way Homer and other great writers describe color the more you encounter and they don't really fit our definition of color, what we think is the color in a simple way, xanthus, that word blonde also hasclearly an element of movement, it is a kind of signal that tells us speed. and the milanka is black-skinned also connotes tricks in us and while eNOS, like the Latin adjective mama reyes or marble, can mean white but can also mean bright or shiny, the C is described as mama Reyes and the C does not. is white in Our terms now, how the Greeks and Romans really saw things is one of the biggest gaps we have between us and what the world was really like for them, but what these definition riddles mean is that it's not just the problem, it's not just that you can It's not like mapping one color term directly onto another and that's a problem in most European languages;

You can't even map the idea of ​​color itself between ancient and modern cultures and that means that whatever we see in what survives there is inevitably and necessarily an underlying category error in looking for whiteness in the ancient well, we don't have idea of ​​what the ancients would have thought whiteness was and it's at that endpoint, but the alt-right and others are wrong now they have that point in their head because it actually informs a broader modern point which is where I'm going to end up is a slightly surprising link but it works, I hope, because it is often and rightly said that classics as an academic discipline is too white and attracts too few people of colour.

It is based on an old exclusive model of white prestige, which is not only unfair but also means that the discipline itself loses the advantages and knowledge that come from diversity. The question is how to solve them now, don't worry, I'm not going to give you an hour-long explanation on how to solve it. I'm going to show you an address. I am going to suggest that what we have seen this afternoon in this edition about color is relevant to that great modern social and pedagogical problem, I think for For example, the division was rewritten in the Cambridge Latin course.

I could make some effort to make sure the characters in the first book didn't look like that, right? No, I prefer not to give the impression that learning Latin was a difficult task. whites-only zone and I think there are arguments in favor of expanding the boundaries of what is studied in the ancient world beyond northern Europe, northern Europe and the shores of the Mediterranean, arguing that if you make the subject of study seem less white European, it could make it more attractive to those who are not themselves of white European heritage who said: I worry that in doing so we may fall into the trap that has been set by the half-informed and misinformed diatribes of the ultras who claim see their whiteness reflected in the Greco-Roman world.

Don't escape that trap by simply showing a mirror to someone else, and it is absolutely a false promise to suggest that anyone can find themselves in the ancient world; That's the main reason or you could call it the main reason why the alt-right is wrong, the only honest way to diversify the subject of the classics is not to accept this kind of identity politics, good or bad, but to insist that the ancient world is more different from any of us than we can imagine. No one owns classics, regardless of how they are defined. and no one's identity and no one's color are reflected, they are classical and the classical world is not a mirror for anyone, but more positively, those details about whiteness, color and language in Greek and Roman culture show one of the greatest and most transformative intellectual rewards of study. in the classical world the poet Louis MacNiece said it because it is so unimaginably different, that is, the classics are about all of us and it is about none of us and that is why the classics have a diverse appeal and why we can learn from them. and I hope it becomes more diverse and this old white lady I hope she lives to see the diversity thank you, thank you very much, it was a tremendous conference, a lot of information to reflect on that you will certainly be able to I'll be back in a moment, I'm Professor Beard because we have time for questions And answers.

I just want to thank you right now and we'll thank you more formally again later by giving you another round of applause just to let you know that Professor Mary Beard will continue her series on Thursday night at the same time of 5:30 p.m. and we look forward to the next conference which will be titled Lucretia and the Politics of Sexual Violence, so it won't be less controversial, it may become more controversial. I just want to make a couple of announcements, as many of you know. but I'll just repeat the points: we're having an online discussion for a fortnight, there are two weeks of the series, it's not a fortnight because it's a week now and it's a week a little later in the month on our Gifford conference blog . led by Andrew Johnson of the new university to continue contributing to the discussion, which we warmly welcome you to do.

Visit the URL located on the back of the brochure and on our Gifford conference web pages. You are also cordially invited to attend Gifford. The seminar organized by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in conjunction with the University of Edinburgh will take place on Wednesday 29 May from 2.30 to 4.30, sorry, 2.30 to 3.45 in the Geo conference room 3 in 50. George Square and Professor Beard will be joined by others from the University of Edinburgh, including Professor Douglas Cairns and Dr Lucy Grig, and will discuss audience questions arising from this series of Gifford lectures to which you can get tickets. There are still some available, although they are limited to our Gifford University conference web pages, so I'm about to invite you to ask questions.

Remember to wait until the wireless microphone arrives, but I want to give people, If there are still people who need to leave at this stage they will want to leave at this stage there are only a few more moments for them to leave if there is someone we can wait with but In the meantime, can we take out the microphones and First questions are welcome. It's not easy to see where the microphones are today. Someone has to have a question or comment. I can't handle this Bill. Did you have your hand raised? Bill, yes, Mark, Bill Zacks, thank you very much for this. no less illuminating thanks gladiatorial conference What do we know, if anything, about classical worldviews from the so-called Middle Ages, the Middle Ages, the period between ours and theirs?

I don't want to say anything now that isn't fair because I think the experience of the medieval experience of the classical world was so enormously different that, and I think it's often painted as being ignorant and I think it's not ignorant, artists and writers of Egger of the Middle Ages in a sense made a connection between themselves and the ancient world in a very different way than the Renaissance. I want to put it crudely in simple terms, you know when you get to the 15th century if you want to make a statue of Julius Caesar. or a painting of Julius, you make him look like a Roman, you know, he's got a toga, he's got a laurel wreath, if you're doing an illustration of Julius Caesar in the 12th century, he looks like someone from the 12th century, now that we've been.

He was raised to think that you know there is an increase in experience and knowledge of the ancient world. Now, actually, anyone who drew Caesar in the 12th century knew full well that that season didn't look like him, they just chose to do it differently. like when they dressed 17th century men in togas, they knew they didn't wear them now, but what that means is that totally different kind of commitment to the way that you can represent the ancient world, but you can't wear these things. of colors. the same continuum and, therefore, everything that the ancient world perceives in what we have in the Middle Ages, a diffuse boundary between the 14th and 16th centuries, simply what each one has is eluding that idea of ​​color and whiteness, so you can't really tell what they are.

I thought, I don't think they're stupid, I mean, people tend to think, oh, they didn't realize that the Romans were different, yeah, fine, they just chose not to show them that it's different, okay, back, yeah, thanks thanks. Thank you very much for a really interesting lecture and you're done. I think that's a very compelling point, a point that's about getting people excited about learning the classics, so how would you go about sharing that vision and getting people interested and excited? Well, you do. I think the best thing about you is that you know it in many ways.

I think what I'm saying is something that the class team could support that professional classicists are very committed to something like the model I suggested, but I think I mean, I think it's very important and I'll talk about this in the last lecture. . It's so important to celebrate the difference of the ancient world and make that difference seem exciting rather than in a you-know-who-knows-which Roman emperor kind of way. It was Donald Trump kind of the version that he's doing that's kind of domestication. I mean, I said I think part of the problem with getting people interested in the ancient world is that it's because you want them to get excited about the tightrope you walk when you look at it, I mean, you know it's a saying, Well, it's in a book, you know, it's looking at the Roman world or any part of the classical, it's like being on a tightrope, you look to one side and they.

They're all like us, you know, yeah, they have the same bodily functions, they go to the bathroom, they're falling in love, you look the other way and they're completely mad, you know, they're doing it weird. things that you could never imagine doing and since I always find that that's the kind of really intoxicating thrill of looking at the ancient world and all you can do is talk about it and hope to reach people and you know. I think there is a supplement. I don't mean to dismiss the Cambridge Latin course, but a Cambridge Latin course is like I couldn't, the kind of beginner's French book I had or, you know, the ladybug book with mom, dad and two children, no.

It's not just that they're white, the damn old family is, you know, a nuclear family with Matteler and Calculus. I don't remember the name of the children, but there are two of them and there is Grumio, the cook, you know what he is and there is a horrible lot of things being wasted to the extent of what you might think was exciting in that type of domestication and you see it too When you know that you go to archaeological sites, very occasionally they manage not to domesticate them, especially when they have bathrooms with several seats because I have to medicate again, I mean, do you really think they all went to the bathroom together?

You know, my goodness, but otherwise, everything is standardized, it's like what we might know, it's a nuclear family that projects backwards and you know, I think that's what you know, they're like compact units, it's like the space exploration in some way, thinking about the ancient world, but you know all you can do is keep talking. I'm sure we could get more information from Cambridge. Latin courses, it was certainly what I learned, my very little Latin in some ways, but people do remember it (speak Latin), great, so thank you very much and it's great to see Mattel and calculus again.

My question is really about the law. and if the Romans or the Roman system ever had a legal category of race like we might have now or like the eighth had South Africa or somewhere else, they didn't, I mean, they have legal categories where we don't expect them, I mean, like free and slave and many other categories of limited freedom in between. I think what's really interesting is where it is and I'm going to talk about slavery in the second week, but and this in It kind of goes back to Bill's point about whether you recover when you start to have representation in late medieval art. and onwards, but particularly from the 15th century.

Next time I'll show you a Botticelli, actually around 14 around 1500, where the ancients mentioned slaves. modern Renaissance artists will depict that slave as black, so you start to have a racial imposition on something that in the ancient world was not racial at all, like I say, you've told a Roman to think about it. a slave, you're much more likely to think of a hairy northern barbarian than a black man, so I'm going to go here because I'm trying to keep a balance in the questions, if I can, so that they're right up front. Hi, and towards the end you said that you have a problem with people who basically project themselves onto the Romans, they see a mirror image, that's why I'm a biologist and we have problems with things like sewing, which is why people get very angry.

Transgender fish or gay penguins and all kinds of things, and if people project themselves into something like, I mean, at least the rules are human, how do you challenge that and how do you try to stop that probably quite natural impulse that people Do they try to see themselves in history? I mean, I think it's hard because, you know, it comes from my whole sense of celebrating weirdness, all the difference that actually imparts the idea that you can have something in common with these people that also attracts people, you know. , if the Romans were simply incomprehensible to us they would be much lessinteresting, but I think you know you can only do it.

I think there is no magic formula. I think you do it on a case by case basis and the example I just used, but I will be very briefly on display on Thursday Botticelli's large painting at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston of a famous Roman rape: the rape of Lucretia and a slave plays an important role in part. this story and Botticelli has made the slave like a black slave now he was in a workshop about this painting with a lot of people who taught it. He didn't teach Potter Jenny but they said that was one of the places where the college students of him. students, you could really bring them into those discussions because you could say how we think of a slave and see Botticelli doing that and then think about the differences and similarities, they said their students were really interested in that kind of diversity, but I think it's that you're fighting well, you're fighting in general the whole tradition of Western art history, you know what you mean, what were the Romans like?

It's terribly depressing to say, well, they don't look like anything you've ever known. seen and then I think you are wishing or I constantly want people to enjoy the difference and at the same time feel some kind of similarity, but I think it is very, very difficult, I really do it in at least it is not fish the last question here hello Thank you very much for your talk. I really enjoy it and agree with most of what you see, which is unusual. I know one thing, they start pondering and I wonder if anyone ever pointed out that identity. of people that one of their posters is a depiction of an uncircumcised Jewish boy and what they look like if they are deeply illogical, true and in some ways I mean, although I think it's quite interesting to see how the old right is a bit When using these characters , there are two things that make you feel like you shouldn't overestimate your probability of getting out of taking over the world, I mean, but there aren't many of them, you know, even the guy who ran this identity, Europe, said his membership it was in dozens instead of hundredths, probably like 20, right for the meeting line on the signs, but they're also terribly illogical and terribly ignorant and no, I think all the time you just need to call them out for not knowing things and I.

I mean, I think there's a debate and I think that's the way it is. I guess I've given you the impression that these far-right groups only use classics. I mean, no, you know people who work on Viking history say they're using Viking history. People who work in Christianity say that they are now using Christianity. In reality, most of them are just as illogical because most of them deny that they are Christians, but they are using Christianity because suddenly they come and I think they are right the Crusades, it is us, they actually get into a total desperate situation, because what every logic, that's why I mean, you know, I'm calm, I'm pretty sure we don't have, we should try to show them the error of their ways, but where they're not going to win because they're not smart enough to win. and they make stupid mistakes, so I'm pretty.

I did a seminar with students who are concerned about the abuse of social media and one of them stood up at the end and said what we were in the English teachers at Cambridge and they said: what would we do if someone from the old right came into one from our seminars looking terrified? I said they wouldn't dare. Thank you very much to the audience for your questions. Excellent selection of questions and thank you. Again to Professor Mary Beard for her lecture and her responses to the questions. I think we were really hoping that Professor Beard would deliver a series of Gifford Lectures that challenge preconceived myths because that's largely what she's been doing.

I think for a long time, the way she's conducting herself within academia and as a public intellectual, as Jay Brown said yesterday, can we just thank her one more time in the usual way?