Mary Beard has begun a new series of BBC radio programmes. In each episode of Being Greek, the Cambridge historian examines a character from ancient Athens or the city-state’s environs with the aim of glimpsing the lives of ordinary folk, not the elite. Beard is an excellent broadcaster, leading the listener along paths littered with revelations and uncertainties, deploying a style that is at once conversational and curious.
There is only one problem with the programmes, so far. You learn more about modern elite attitudes to the ancient world than you do about the lives of ordinary people in the ancient world itself.
Just why has been well articulated by another historian of ancient Greece, Greg Anderson. In his book, The Realness of Things Past, he asks why modern historians overlook and marginalise the central and most obvious feature of ancient Greek life – and almost any premodern way of life, in fact. That feature is the intimate, seamless way that people lived with God or the gods.
New essay at my Substack, A Golden String. Continue here…