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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with reflections on the misuse of history in today’s politics. He argues that fascism, once thought to have been buried by the Second World War, has reemerged in modern forms, thriving on the endless hunt for enemies, stoking culture wars, and exploiting new technologies. And he explains why the best antidotes remain liberty, equality, and sometimes humor.
Then David is joined by Mary Beard, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Rome and the author of the New York Times best seller Emperor of Rome, for a conversation about what the ancient world can teach us about current politics. They discuss how Roman emperors wielded power, why excess and corruption were baked into the system, and how fragile even the strongest-seeming regimes can be. Beard explains why myths about Roman grandeur persist, what daily life actually looked like under the empire, and what lessons modern democracies should (and should not) draw from Rome’s rise and fall.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Today’s show will be about history, its use, and its misuse. Now, that’s not so unusual. There’s a lot of discussion of history in the podcast world, but this show is unusual in that my guest is not some self-taught crackpot, not some professor of chemistry somewhere who has some thoughts about Jews. Today’s guest will be Dame Mary Beard, who is Great Britain’s leading classicist and expert on the history of Rome and the ancient world. So you’re going to be talking to somebody, or hearing from someone, who knows what she’s talking about, and that’s a little different from what often happens in discussions of history on the internet.
Walter Lippmann, a century ago, in his book Public Opinion, wrote, “The really important thing is to try and make opinion increasingly responsible to the facts. There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.” Now, we live in a very peculiar, perverse modern world where no one lacks information. Information has never been more abundant. You can have all the information you want. You can have good information if you want it. You can have the best information if you want it. You can have not only everything that’s available to you on the internet, but thanks to the internet and thanks to internet commerce, you can have books, the best books, delivered to you instantly, tomorrow. And not just today’s books, but the classics. Anything that’s out of print—somewhere on planet Earth, it exists somewhere, and it can be brought to your very door within 24, 48 hours, or a few more days than that. You have access to everything. The problem that we have is one unanticipated by Walter Lippmann, where there’s an abundance of information, but people consistently choose bad information so often, and that is especially true in the realm of the use and abuse of history.
Why is it that this is happening so fast? Why is it, in particular, that we are hearing so much defense of fascism and defense of [Adolf] Hitler, literally, as our introduction to historical study in so much of the online world. Well, part of it is that, look—just as the internet has made it possible to create ever more specialized forms of pornography for people with ever more specialized forms of kink, so rarer and rarer segments of opinion get more and more material delivered to them. And back in the old days when we had that legacy media monopoly—CBS, ABC, NBC, and the others would collectively agree, Look—even though we could make a little extra money by serving a Nazi market, we’re just not going to do it. We’re going to leave those dollars on the table and collect all the other dollars. But in the segmented market, there are people who say, I’m going for the Nazi dollars; I’m going for all the Nazi dollars because those are the only dollars that are available to me, are the Nazi dollars. So there’s something of that going on. But I think there is something deeper happening, something important.
Remember the character on Seinfeld, the Soup Nazi? He wasn’t a real Nazi; he just was bossy. For a long time we’ve used the terms Nazi and fascists as kind of epithets—jokey or not-so-jokey forms of insult. And because we use them as insults and because the people who receive them receive them as insults, it’s very hard for us to use them as analytic categories.
Compare the word fascist to the word socialist. Now, socialist can be used as an insult too. President [Donald] Trump and the people around him use socialist as an insult, even as they are nationalizing the means of production and taking over companies and making the state the arbiter of what is said on television and what forms of technology get made and whether or not U.S. Steel can have its headquarters in Pittsburgh or some other city. The government literally gets the right to decide that.
But we also recognize that even though socialism is used—or socialist—as an insult, it’s an analytic category that we can understand. There are socialist ideas. There are socialist persons. There are persons who are more socialist or less socialist. Ideas that are more socialist. There are socialist parties. There are socialist movements. And we can make nonpejorative, noninsulting descriptive statements about them. We can observe their ideas, observe their behavior. Sometimes they win political power.
Fascism before the Second World War was something similar. You could use it as an analytic category. Because of the complete and proper discrediting of fascism during the war—and because it was so badly defeated during the war—it has tended to drop out of use as an analytic category, even by the fascists themselves. Ernest Hemingway wrote, in one of his novels about the Spanish Civil War, “There are many fascists in my country; they just don’t know it yet. But they will when the time comes.” Well, the time has come, and we are seeing the rise of fascist movements all over the developed world. They often call themselves nationalists, but they’re not nationalists. They’re actually more international than any liberal movement. They have formed a kind of network, and the internet is their binding form.
And one of the issues that they are on the internet to litigate is, who was right about the Second World War, and whether the United States and Great Britain and other Allies made the proper decision to resist fascism then, even at the devil’s Faustian price of making a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler. They want to re-litigate that as part of a larger project to rehabilitate the thing they don’t yet dare call fascism, but which is fascism.
I want to maybe pause here to think about what fascism as an analytic category should look like. Not as an epithet, not as an insult, and not as a joke, but as a way, really, to describe a growing group of people in many countries who are cooperating together in the pursuit of influence and power. Socialism as an analytic category exists, even though not everybody agrees on what the definition of socialism is, even though not everybody agrees on where the lines are, and even though not everybody agrees on who fits into which box within those lines. We can all agree the concept is there—although applying the concept can often, in practice, be a little complicated or uncertain.
Well, I think the same is true for fascism. It is a system of thought and belief. Now, because fascism did in the past and does today emphasize action and feeling over reason, because it’s not as doctrinaire as socialism, it’s a little harder to write down what its contents are. We can’t define it very well, but we can describe it. You see a yearning for authoritarian leadership—and not authoritarian leadership by some committee, but authoritarian leadership by the cult of the individual leader who is represented as more manly, more masculine, more physically fit, more virile than other men. That’s the basis of his leadership, is his claim to this kind of virility. Also, his claim to channel the unspoken feelings of the people. Fascism always rejects formal methods for ascertaining what the will of the people is, what public opinion is. It prefers an emotional and informal silent bond between this cult of the charismatic, virile national leader and his followers.
Fascism is backward-looking in its goals, but modern in its methods. There are many forms of authoritarianism that aren’t fascist, because they’re backward; they’re traditional. If you meet, in some remote part of the world, a tribal chief, and people obey him because they feel the gods wish them to, that can be pretty authoritarian, but it’s not fascist, because it’s backward-looking. Fascism in its methods is as modern as tomorrow. In the 1930s, it used the new technologies of the radio and the airplane. And in the 2020s, it uses the new technologies of today. Indeed, fascists are often better and faster at adapting these new technologies than their more tradition-minded adversaries.
Fascism offers statism, but without equality. It wants to control industry; it wants to control production—but it doesn’t do so with the idea of making everybody better off. It does so with an idea of aggrandizing the power of the group.
But the most important quality of fascism, I think the thing that is the test of whether it’s there or not, is what makes it go. Socialism is inspired by the ideal of equality. Liberalism is inspired by the ideal of liberty or freedom. Fascism is inspired by the search for enemies of the group. And whenever you see people with a strong “friend-versus-enemy” way of thinking—allies versus adversaries, insiders versus outsiders—what you’re seeing is the emotional juice on which fascism feeds.
That’s why I’m going to take seriously for a moment this recent absurd outburst—it’s recent on the day I recorded it; there may be a little lag before you see it—about the changing of the branding of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain. Now, Cracker Barrel, as those of you who have driven America’s highways know, is a popular restaurant in many of America’s rural places. Unfortunately for the shareholders and employees of Cracker Barrel, it’s decreasingly popular. It’s lost a lot of market share over the past decade. Cracker Barrel’s stock and trade is nostalgia. And the nostalgia that it has been offering is nostalgia that people don’t remember anymore. It’s not nostalgia for your childhood; it’s nostalgia for your grandfather’s childhood. And people who feel nostalgia want the product that reminds them of their own childhood. So Cracker Barrel has, in an effort to hold on to or reverse its declining market share, rebranded itself. Good decision, bad decision? I don’t know. Don’t have an opinion.
This has become a culture-war flashpoint of a kind that we’ve seen so often, and it seems of all the ones we have seen, maybe the most crazy, the most absurd. But it’s not absurd because what it is—it’s a part of the process of the endless hunt to identify enemies. And the issue over which you identify your enemies—it doesn’t have to be important because the test isn’t the issue. The test is the search for enemies and the in-gathering of allies to create a friend-foe distinction as Carl Schmitt, the German philosopher, wrote. You may not have heard of Carl Schmitt, I don’t recommend him to you, but he is the central text of many in the new modern fascist movement. He’s been read and admired by many who are very close to the Trump White House, and you can hear echoes of his language and above all his idea that the power to govern is the power to identify people as enemies of the state. Whether they’re foreigners or insiders, fellow citizens, the enemy can be identified by the state, and the tools of the state can be used against them. And that’s what’s going on with this Cracker Barrel story. It’s just a way to flush out who the enemies are and to identify who the friends are.
Now, Cracker Barrel also offers a glimpse of what our hope is. I mean, the way you beat fascism, in the long run—the strategy, the ideals—are upholding the ideas of liberty and equality and human dignity. And because liberty and equality go more naturally together than the fascist ideas, there is a reason why social democrats have often been a resource for liberals in the fight against fascism. Because liberals and socialists are not animated by the same thing, but they can recognize there is a kind of more cousinly kinship between the ideals of equality and liberty than there is between either of those and the endless hunt for internal and external enemies to persecute and punish. But we can stand for those ideals and we can uphold the institutions of law, the institutions of legality, the institutions of democracy.
But in the short run, the best tool against fascism is humor. You know, fascism always teeters on the edge of the ridiculous. One of the first people to understand this was one of the greatest of early comedians, Charlie Chaplin, who made a film about the Nazi movement called The Great Dictator, in which he relentlessly mocked the buffoonery and absurdity. He ended with an uplifting message of universal brotherhood. But all along the way through the movie The Great Dictator, he relies on humor.
And as you confront people trying to find group enemies and group allies by complaining about the rebranding of Cracker Barrel, you realize they’re teetering on the precipice of absurdity, and comedy is the push that can topple them over and discredit them, not with horror—although that is certainly deserved—but with laughter.
Everything comes back, it seems, even the discredited ideas of 90 years ago—and they’re back. And the fact that they’ve changed their form and their manner and their technology doesn’t mean they’ve changed their substance. We thought it was gone. It’s back. And studying both the past and the present is part of the intellectual armament to stand up against it, and that’s why I’m so grateful today, Mary Beard—we’re going to talk about very different things, of a very different historical era, but understanding the passage of time and the way we are connected to what came before and what we are connected to, what will come next, is our way to belong to a greater human community that insists on the universality of the best ideals and the antagonism of universal ideals to the brutal particularism that is what fascism is all about.
Before I go on to my dialogue with Mary Beard, however, I’m going to ask you a little favor. We at The Atlantic are hoping to learn more about the audience for this podcast. We’re hoping to learn more about you: our listeners and our viewers. And so we want to ask you a few questions. How did you discover this podcast? What do you think of the show? So we put together a short survey. It would be very helpful if you could take a few minutes to answer it. You can go to the TheAtlantic.com/Survey. We’ll have a link in the show notes as well. And as a thank-you, the first 100 respondents to the survey will get a $20 gift card. So please answer the survey. Please share and subscribe and get the word out about this podcast.
And now my dialogue with Mary Beard. But first, a quick break.
[Music]
Frum: Mary Beard is Great Britain’s leading scholar of the classical world. She took her first degree and her Ph.D. at Cambridge, where she teaches to this day. An ordinary introduction cannot do justice to the breadth and depth of Mary Beard’s published works. Her most recent is Emperor of Rome: Ruling the [Ancient] Roman World. SPQR: A History of [Ancient] Rome has become a massive and enduring best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. The book of hers that exerts special hold on me is The Roman Triumph, a disconcertingly original study of the Roman genius at inventing traditions and then insisting that those traditions had always been there all along. Mary Beard will shortly, at the end of August, launch a podcast of her own, Instant Classics, and that will be must-listening for everyone who cares about the Roman world. Mary Beard, welcome to The David Frum Show.
Mary Beard: Great to be with you, David.
Frum: So it’s the month of August as we record, a month that honors a Roman emperor dead more than 2,000 years. So this seems—not timely (that may not be the right word but apposite, appropriate. But what I want to talk to you about is this habit we have of making polemical comparisons to build our own contemporary purposes to and about the Roman world. I know this is something you have warned about. Can we start by talking about that?
Beard: I think the temptation is irresistible to make comparisons with the Roman world. I think that’s what Rome has done for the West ever since it ceased to be Rome, really. It was there as a kind of way of judging yourself, comparing yourself, finding lessons. And I think that that’s even more the case in the United States. I mean, I don’t see how anybody could live within United States politics and not constantly have half an eye on Rome. I mean, my issue is I want them to be better comparisons, better analogies, and I’m particularly allergic to the idea that somehow ancient Rome offers a kind of supermarket shelf from which we can pick whatever comparison is convenient to us at the time and somehow justify our own foolishness.
Frum: Well, you are right about the American propensity, and the comparisons we like to make are often very moralistic ones. So if you think that the world is too licentious, you say, Aha, and then you scrabble through for some real or invented classical quotation that shows that licentiousness was the problem. If you think immigrants are the problem, again, scrabble through the ancient world for some ancient real or invented quotation.
Beard: Yeah. And we shouldn’t be too self-flagellatory about this. I think, you know, we are not the first generation to have done this. You know, you go back to the 19th century, and you can find some of the vastest and most popular paintings in the whole of the Western world are both—well, they’re a funny mixture of decrying and secretly celebrating Roman licentiousness. So, you know, this has been on the agenda for centuries.
Frum: Yes. Well, the decrying, that’s a favorite of tabloids and tabloid television on both sides of the Atlantic. Stay tuned for more shocking photographs of semi-clad women. We condemn these shocking, these semi-clad photographs, which we are about to show even more of after the break.
Beard: (Laughs.) That’s right. And I thought that when I watched Gladiator II, actually. I thought that we all sit there, tut-tut, and say how appalling it is that the Romans could have taken pleasure in the slaughtering of other human beings. And we get a certain sense of moral superiority. We then all show up at the movie theater and we watch people being decapitated. Now, you might say, But it’s not real. And there is a fair point there. But the boundary between seeing someone really decapitated and seeing someone decapitated so realistically that you don’t know it’s not real is a very odd one.
Frum: Would you take a minute here? Because I think some people get this mixed up, between the fall of the Roman Republic and the fall of the Roman empire. Could you just walk us through why those two things are different?
Beard: Yeah. They’re two very, very different moments, two very different narratives, hundreds of years apart. When we talk about the fall of the republic, what we are talking about is the end of the sort of democratic society—and sort of is very much underlined there—under which Rome had lived and been governed by from about 500 B.C.E. until, really, Julius Caesar in the middle of the first century B.C.E. And Caesar in taking over the state and essentially imposing—he was not actually emperor, but imposing some form, very briefly, of one-man rule is usually seen as the end of the republic when the institutions of popular power and control give way to what is never called a monarchy in Rome, but is essentially that.
The fall of the empire is harder to pin down because I can quite happily say, Well, look, middle of the first century B.C.E.: That’s when autocracy comes to rule in Rome rather than a power-sharing system you had before. The fall of the Roman empire is much more diffuse, much more hard to describe, much more hard to date, actually, and it is marked, in a sense, for many historians—but there are very many different ways of thinking about this—when the Roman empire, in terms of the territorial extent of the Roman empire, is no longer, in a sense, controlled centrally from Rome, but is split into different parts, is sometimes split into two with another capital at Constantinople in what is now Turkey.
But there are all sorts of mini-capitals around, which is somehow breaking down the unity of the Roman empire as a political structure. You no longer always have a single emperor. Many of the traditional imperial ways of governing the place have disappeared, honestly. You’ve got the rise of different forms of political and military power. There’s a lot of snobbishness in Roman writers about the nouveau riche who are now running the show. And there is military conflict. Rome’s boundaries, which had, for centuries, in a sense, been, not inviolable, but by and large with the most limited and very containable amounts of military struggle at the edges—they become more and more vulnerable. It becomes harder, honestly, to see where the Roman empire starts and where it stops.
But it is a huge issue, which is really, really hard to describe, even, let alone to explain, but has—since [the British historian Edward] Gibbon and before Gibbon, with The [History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—it has somehow been one of those historical big problems that we kind of want everybody to be able to say, Right. This is when the Roman Empire stopped being the Roman Empire, and this is why.
Frum: Yeah, Edward Gibbon, The [History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is sort of the central text for moralizing accounts of why Rome fell. The lack of virtue, by which he means not Christian behavior, because the Christians are the enemy in his book, but manly behavior, military behavior. And the Romans somehow become less military over time, and that’s why the empire falls.
Beard: And different people, not part of the traditional elite, tend to become the ones who are taking the lead militarily. But for Gibbon—and this has never been entirely overthrown as an idea, though it’s been hugely complexified—for Gibbon, the Roman empire cannot sustain the revolution into Christianity.
Frum: Yeah. I want to take you through some of our most contemporary uses of Rome because I think a lot of us have these habits and they’re unexamined, and they’ve actually become very intense in the United States in recent years.
Historically, I think it’s fair to say, traditionally, Roman comparisons are something that conservatives do because conservatives are worried about moral dissolution, and they appeal to Rome. And although I don’t know that emperors ever really did eat grapes reclining on couches, that we have the sense of. But in recent times—the past two or three years—this is an argument that is spread up on the left. And this is an implicit comparison of unpopular politicians, particularly Donald Trump, to Roman emperors or to the Roman strongmen of the late republic, and say, Aha! What happened to the end of the Roman Republic, that’s what’s happening to us with Donald Trump. So we don’t need to talk about Donald Trump, good or bad. We need to talk about Donald Trump: Roman; not Roman.
Beard: Yeah. Well, I think you’re partly right, and I think that most people would follow you, David, in saying that if you think now about comparisons with Rome and the idea of Roman values, you’d think of it, by and large—not entirely, but by and large—as the rhetoric of conservative commentators. I think we’ve got to remember that, as you suggest, that’s not entirely the case now, but the history of Rome—not so much the Roman empire and the period of one-man rule—but the history of the Roman Republic was, from the 18th century and before, very often a slogan for radical revolutionary politics. I think it was Marx who said that the French Revolution took place in Roman dress.
So Rome is one of those shifting, reinventable, and fluid symbols that most bits of politics, most sides of politics, sometime work with. So I don’t think it’s ever restricted to a particular political point of view.
Frum: All right. So I want to walk through some of the ways that we’re different from the Romans and why the analogy doesn’t work. I think one of the things that is sort of startling to realize is the Romans—there’s a dispute whether the Romans even had maps, whether they knew what their empire physically looked like. And it’s not clear. But we know they didn’t have statistics. It’s not clear they had a budget. It’s not clear that the emperor knew how much revenue he had or how much he was spending.
Beard: No. Or even whether policy, in our terms, was possible. Even whether a kind of sense of, Where do I want this polity that I’m governing to be in 10 years’ time and how might I get there? That idea of prediction combined with action is something that we tend to retroject onto the Romans, and we imagine them in a hugely modernizing way. We imagine Nero sitting there and saying, Oh my goodness me. Is it a good idea to conquer the Parthians or not? But what you have is a vast knowledge deficit, a strategic-knowledge deficit, in Rome, which makes it completely different from us.
I mean, you mentioned maps. Now, there are very smart scientists in the ancient world who try to envisage what the globe looks like. There are all kinds of gazetteer route maps, which say to you, Look—if you want to go from Rome to Constantinople, how do you do it? And it’s town by town, milestone by milestone. But if you say to many people, I think, in any time of ancient Roman history, who are living in, let’s say, the Apennines, in the middle of Italy, Do you know you are living on a peninsula? And do you know how your landmass connects to the other landmasses, which you might be able to reach because you would follow the road, but how can you envisage what your geographical world is?
Frum: It’s like if you had Google Maps, the text function but not the visual function.
Beard: Well, absolutely.
Frum: Take I-81 to Exit 62. At Exit 62, you take Highway 9. But you don’t have the picture that goes with it.
Beard: You don’t have the picture. And so how you envisage the world in which you operate is very, very hazy.
Now, there are some maps—we do have one partly surviving city plan of the city of Rome. So it is not as if that sense of how you might envisage a geographical place in two dimensions—it’s not as if that’s completely unknown, but on the large scale, it is the “Google Maps without the picture” version that they’re dealing with.
And if you start to think about that and what difference it makes to your planning, even before you add in the problem about statistics, the problem about the economy—I mean, we are so used to ideas of the economy as an isolatable sphere of activity. Well, the Romans don’t even have a word for the economy.
Frum: Yeah. Well, one of the great conservative-proof texts has been this edict of the Emperor Diocletian, who ruled at the end of the 200s, freezing prices. Now, you will not find a more dogmatic opponent of price controls than me, but this is often cited, and there’s a famous conservative book The Way the World Works, written in the late 1970s. It cites this control, this edict of Diocletian, as an example of what happens when you impose prices and how it goes wrong. And you wonder, Did anyone in the Roman world even know that the Emperor Diocletian had done this? Did Diocletian know what anything cost anywhere in the Roman world?
Beard: A very few did know what Diocletian was doing. But like so many of the things that grab our attention about Rome, the price edict of Diocletian is so much more about a claim to power, to say, I can control this, rather than—he hasn’t got a backroom of boffins wondering what the effect would be of putting the price of shoes up in Lydia, right? So it’s many of these things—I mean, it’s a bit like roads, actually. I mean, in a very simple way, we kind of think about roads as being built by the Romans for communication. And that does turn out to be one of the uses. As you were saying, you know, on the Google Maps, you get from A to B; you follow the road.
Roads are also—well, they’re partly about getting the army around. They’re not about getting you and me on a convenient trip to Brindisi. They’re about military command. They’re also, particularly when you go empire-wide, they’re about saying, Look what I can do. I am putting a road across Germany. So a lot of it is performative, but we read it as strategic.
Frum: Let me ask you about barbarians. Were the barbarians barbaric? And were they immigrants in any way that we would recognize?
Beard: Not in a way that we would recognize. I mean, I think that, you know, the concept of barbarism is a deeply problematic one. I identify others as barbarians, and they probably identify me as the barbarian, or whatever their word for it is. It’s about perspectives and value judgements. And I think we all ought to be careful before, as quite a few people do, we somehow think there is a sort of natural divide between barbarians and the, quote, “civilized world.”
But I think that in Rome, it’s even more complicated and fluid and fuzzy than that. First of all, Rome’s unique selling point has always been—some people would say for better, some people would say for worse—an incorporative selling point. From going back to the republic, but particularly through the period we know as the empire under one-man rule, what is happening is that Rome is incorporating people further and further away from the metropolitan center into the polity, into the hierarchy. And some of those probably didn’t look—for people like me, this is a rather cheering thing, but others have a different view—they wouldn’t have come up with the same cultural baggage or looked like a Roman that was born and bred in Italy.
But the other thing is that Romans are always quite consciously using barbarians. There isn’t like what we see on our maps. We look at a map of the Roman empire at its greatest extent under Trajan, and there’s a very neat line all around it. Well, that is completely different from the reality of life on the ground. At the very most, what you find at the edge of the Roman empire, and even with Hadrian’s Wall, I’d venture to say, it’s almost universally kind of a set of border zones, where people kind of feel more or less included or more or less part of being Roman.
And Romans are repeatedly using in their armies people who are certainly not Roman citizens. And so what is at the margins, or what is outside Rome? By the time you get to the period when modern historians get very worried about the barbarians getting in, are a people who are kind of like Rome. The key example here is the Vandals in Vandal Africa—you know, poor things have given their name to a particular form of definitely barbaric behavior in the modern world—but if you go back to Vandal Africa in the 5th century C.E., what you discover: They’re all talking Latin, and they’re codifying Roman law and writing Latin poetry.
Frum: Well, I want to ask you about a particular Roman trope or myth that I think has a lot of impact to this day on decisions we make, which is: Roman writers were aware that many of their favorite luxury goods—silks, perfumes—were imported from outside the empire. And they didn’t always quite know what they were selling in return, but they did notice that the Roman empire had mines, and often, products from the mines flowed out to pay for the perfumes and the silks. And there’s a literature of Romans complaining about this, blaming the women for it, that influences economic policy to this day, that Well, we give away our hard-earned, our hard-toiled gold and silver—which are obviously really valuable—for these worthless fripperies of silk and perfume. And that’s why the empire is impoverishing itself and losing all of its economic strength. So tell me about the origins of that myth and why the Romans believed it.
Beard: They’re complicated origins, and the Romans were not entirely wrong to think that some wealth—some real, hard-earned wealth—was flowing outwards.
A numismatist, a coin expert, once said to me—and this does sound too good to be true, literally, but I suspect it’s not far from the case—that, leaving aside the museums in Italy itself, the museums in the world that are filled with most locally excavated Roman coins are museums in India. So there’s millions in the British Museum, but they’re acquired somewhere else. And there is a sense that there is real cash going out there. I think it goes back a very long way. And it’s, as usual with those stories and worries about luxury and so forth, it’s a kind of strange and sometimes unfathomable mixture of utter prejudice and an element of truth.
Romans from the 4th, 3rd century B.C.E. in the republic had been really concerned that what was going to drag Rome down—and this was largely, they saw it, morally, but not always—was luxury. And one of their versions of understanding the Greek world in the eastern Mediterranean was to see it as a place where people had already been enervated by luxury, and it’s also a very feminine luxury. And it’s the kind of joke that a Roman would have about, How do you spot a Greek in the street in the 2nd century B.C.E.? Well, he probably smells of perfume. That’s not what proper Romans do.
Frum: They stink.
Beard: Yes, proper Romans stink. And yes, both stink, but in different ways.
Frum: (Laughs.) They eat raw onions, and they don’t wash—well, they do wash; they wash a lot, but they don’t use soap, because soap is a barbarian invention. They scrape themselves off with—
Beard: (Laughs.)
Frum: I want to ask you about this. One of the things that I think is a mistake, that continues to have consequences towards our understanding of later periods in history, and what I always beseech people to understand is: Until the modern era, one of the great drivers of world economic activity was that China never produced enough silver to meet the demands of the Chinese economy. So China—and, to a lesser extent, India—they need silver, and they will give you anything.
So all you have to do is go into the ground and get a rock of a certain color, and the Chinese will give you silks. They’ll give you—the perfumes didn’t come from China, but the silks came from China—and all they’re asking in return are these rocks of which they don’t produce nearly enough. And if you can get a silk for a rock, you are not being abused. But the motive of this is: This is not Roman (or in the 1600s, European) self-indulgence. It is China’s desperate need for more silver to create a currency base. That’s the motive. That China is the center of the story, and we’re all living in their world and supplying their ultimate need for a cash economy.
Beard: And, I mean, if you think about that importance of metal in Rome, one of the things I think it’s very easy to forget is quite how important Spain was in the whole economy and geopolitics of the Roman empire because Spain was the absolute center of the mining industry. And it’s where—from the 2nd century B.C.E. and a little bit earlier—Rome is getting its ore, its metal ore. And I think it’s somehow, when we think of the Roman empire, we think of Rome itself. and I think bits of Hadrian’s Wall, and then we’re going out east. But in some ways, we ought to be thinking: Spain.
And one of the most extraordinary, environmental scientific analyses done recently has been in the Arctic ice cap and taking long, deep bores into the Arctic ice cap. And what they claim—I have to believe what I’m told here—what it is claimed you can detect is the industrial pollution in the Arctic ice cap traceable to the mines in Spain. I mean, pollution is being created there as well as wealth on a massive level.
Frum: On a planetary scale.
Beard: Yeah, not seen again for centuries.
Frum: Can I ask you about diseases and climate changes? So there’s an important book by a historian named Kyle Harper, whom I’ll be talking to next month on a slightly different subject, who makes a very modern argument that Rome suffers two terrible rounds of plagues—one in the 200s and then again the 500s, the one in the 500s amplified by a sudden cooling of the Earth’s climate. And that if you want to understand—I mean, the Romans are just living, like all premodern peoples, on their fingertips, on an often-unfriendly planet. They get a great burst of good weather from about the time of the Parthenon to about the time of the 200s. The weather begins to get bumpier after the 200s. It gets really nasty in the 500s. And that’s our story.
Beard: That’s one story. (Laughs.) And I think that people like Kyle Harper have, I think, very usefully put that back on the map so that now, when people think about the decline and fall of the Roman empire—although this had never been entirely out of the picture before, the idea that that there was, for start, devastating plague—most historians now, I think, even if they don’t say, Oh, well, that’s the answer, they think there’s something much more significant about pandemic.
And I’m afraid this got a huge boost over COVID, where people started really seriously to live through what it was like to live through plague. And so I have no doubt that there’s important factors there. I mean, I think the problem is that we are still a bit kind of in hock to Gibbon’s desires of saying, So what is the one thing that can help us see, explain, and pin on the history of the Roman empire too? And I’m afraid it’s more complicated than either lead in the water pipes—which is what we used to be told—immigration, Christianity, or climate change.
Frum: Let me round up by asking you about one more book, which I’m sure you’ve read. In the Gibbon tradition, in all the other traditions, it’s always understood the fall of the Roman empire was a bad thing. And for sure, I think it was very violent. We can see: The population collapses; people in Britain lose the ability to make, even, pottery; there’s this great step backward—we’re not supposed to call it “toward a more primitive culture.” We’re supposed to call it a “more simple culture.” But I’m sorry—if you had a pot before, and you don’t have a pot now, that’s a real loss.
Beard: I think running water. (Laughs.)
Frum: But once you’re through this traumatic event, there are historians who argue, a lot of what happens later in Europe is the good things happen. Unlike what happens in China, unlike what happens in India, when the empire is cracked, it never gets put back together again. And so you get a world of competing power centers. That has one consequence: It makes these competing power centers very good at war, compared to—these small European countries are able to beat the mighty Chinese empire when they encounter each other, because they’ve been fighting battles against each other for 500 years, and they’ve acquired a huge edge in being good at that. The Chinese don’t have to be so good at it. But it also means a great gift for freedom, because if you’re publishing something that your local king or ruler doesn’t like, you can just go 20 miles across a border, and there’s a king who doesn’t care and maybe even welcomes you insulting the king 20 miles away.
Beard: Yeah, I mean, I think we are very still under the thrall of the Roman empire. And even if we’ve been brought up as kind of left wing, anti-imperialist, there’s still something about the Roman empire which we still half-think was a good thing. I mean, more people joined together in a single polity than ever before or since in Western Europe. And I think where you spot that, and I spot that even with very radical students, is in the adjectives we use about them. And I’m always struck by how people say things like Julius Caesar was the greatest Roman conqueror. And I say, Well, do you think conquerors are great then? And suddenly, the very feisty, lefty students, they’ve convicted themselves from their own mouth.
We use great all the time, as in Alexander the Great or Pompey the Great, whatever. So I think you’ve always got to be on the lookout for the way you have been brought up, sort of deep down, to think about that. But I think that in some ways, I’m a very bad person to ask this to, because when I was a student, when I was first really studying the, quote, “decline and fall of the Roman empire,” now, I was coming in at the first generation where what we were being told was, in a sense, what you’ve just said. Look—you know, it’s decline in some people’s book. But what happens to the way you understand that process if you say it was transformation or a revolutionary reimagining of the world, an atomization, a devolution of power? I mean, I don’t think one can ever—you’re never going to get a right answer here. But the idea that somehow there was—sure there was change, sure some of it was bloody and nasty, but it wasn’t a zero-sum game. And I often think when I look at some of the, in some ways, very fashionable works of art produced in what we used to call the Dark Ages, there was a sense always that people were saying, Look—these people can’t do the Roman stuff anymore. They can’t sculpt a lifelike human being in the way that the Romans could. And you almost want to say, That might be true, but what if they were just absolutely refusing to do it that way? What if this was a willed desire to see the human body differently, to represent the world differently? What if it’s a kind of a cultural refusal rather than a cultural failure?
Frum: Well, there’s a passage in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Helena where the Emperor Constantine calls his artists together to ask them to build a triumphal arc just the way they did it in the olden days, 200 years before. And the architects explain, Your majesty. That’s just not how we do things anymore. It’s not the style. It’s old-fashioned. You want to look like your great grandfather? Be our guest, but our modern vision—and Constantine says to them, Okay, I hear everything you say, but if you had to do it, could you do it? They all stare at their shoes and mumble No.
Beard: Yeah. And that’s the double bind in which we are caught. And it was hugely influential on me, although I now find it very reparative—I remember watching when I was a teenager Kenneth Clark’s famous series Civilization, which was probably more popular in the U.S. than it was in the U.K. And I remember watching the first episode of it, which had been kind of about the Dark Ages, and I still can see Clark standing there saying, Civilization survived only by the skin of its teeth. And you suddenly thought, Phew. And we’re all waiting for the Renaissance to come along. And it is—happily, we now see it’s a bit more complicated.
Frum: I had many professors in college, and after, who made a big impression on me, but there’s one line from one professor—someone you may have known, Roberto Lopez, who was a great medievalist.
Beard: I didn’t know him, but I know who you mean.
Frum: And I caught him at the very, very, very end of his career, probably the last seminar he ever taught. But he had a saying, which was, History never repeats itself; it only appears to do so to those who don’t pay attention to the details. And it was one of those things, you know, because I had a glib enough understanding of history at that phase in my academic career to be making comparisons all the time. And it was like a bucket of water in the face: Just stop doing this.
Beard: I would like to come back with my favorite quote, which I heard much more recently, and it appeared to be entirely extemporary. I was doing a discussion with the Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina, and we were both on stage in Spain. And somebody in the audience at the Q&A said, What can we learn from history? And I took the question first, and I was an absolute classic academic, saying some of the things that I’m sure I’ve said on this podcast: Well, it’s very complicated. We can think about things differently, but we have to be careful about drawing too many kinds of direct comparisons. And Antonio, when it came to him, he said what was totally obviously true. He said, We’ve got to be able to learn from history because we haven’t got anything else to learn from.
Frum: (Laughs.) That’s quite fantastic.
Beard: I thought, That put me in my place.
Frum: And as this month of August reminds us, the Romans are news that stays news.
Beard: Exactly. I always wonder how many people are out there who date their whatevers—either July or August—without thinking, Ah, that’s off to Julius Caesar and Augustus. We are still living under the star sign of Julius Caesar and Augustus.
Frum: And January and March.
Beard: Well, the other months: good old Roman months. Yeah. But I like to think of those emperors up there, you know? It’s like this is Augustus’s month, so we need to know a bit about him.
Frum: Yes, we do. And we need to know that as we cope with our modern problems, it’s good to know about the past. As you say, it’s all we’ve got. But our problems are also new. Our world is very different. And when you’re thinking about Donald Trump, you need to think about him in the American context. And while ancient comparisons can give you a literary motive, a literary inspiration, they don’t really solve the problems, because the worlds are so very different.
Beard: The question I’m most asked by anybody is which Roman emperor is Donald Trump most like. And to explain that can be fun as a parlor game, but actually, it’s not going to get you anywhere, asking that question.
Frum: Right. He’s our problem. He needs our solutions.
Beard: Yes.
Frum: Mary Beard, thank you so much for joining the program today, and good luck with your future endeavors in this realm and others. Thank you.
Beard: Thank you. Thank you, David. Nice to be with you.
Frum: Bye-bye.
[Music]
Frum: Thank you so much today, Mary Beard, for joining me today on The David Frum Show. Let me remind you of the little favor we’re asking: Would you please go to TheAtlantic.com/Survey and tell us a little bit about you, how you’ve discovered the show, what you think of it? The first 100 respondents to the survey will get a $20 gift card from The Atlantic.
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[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
The post Why America Isn’t Rome (And Why That Matters) appeared first on The Atlantic.
