2022-03-15 LIVE from NYPL Mary Beard with Tim Gunn: Faces Of Power >> Aidan Flax-Clark: Hello. Oh boy, I walked right up here and kicked the mic stand, geez. How's everyone doing tonight? Better than me, I hope. Happy Ides of March. I'm not sure what you wish each other on this day. Let's say Happy Ides of March. I'm sure our guest tonight, Mary Beard can tell us what you're supposed to say. It's obviously the perfect day to have her here. And incidentally, it was her brilliant idea to do it. So thank you to Mary Beard for that thought. My name is Aidan Flax-Clark, and I'm part of the team that brings you LIVE from NYPL. And I want to say hello to everyone who's watching tonight, whether you're here in person in this room at the main branch of the New York Public Library, you're watching around the world online, or you're gathered at one of the many independent bookstores watching together. Hello to everybody. [ Applause ] I think conservatively we can estimate there's a -- I don't know, roughly 25 million people watching, I think. [ Laughter ] I couldn't be more excited to introduce tonight's speakers, two people whose work I'd so deeply admire and who we've come to learn, really admire each other. Mary Beard and Tim Gunn are here to speak about Mary's newest book, Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern. Twelve Caesars interrogates the projections of power in the statuary and portraits of ancient Roman emperors, and how they have impacted subsequent projections of power of the rich, famous and powerful across history and across the western world for two millennia. Fortunately, we live in a world where men in power aren't a problem anymore. So, you know, sorry to tell you that tonight's conversation has no relevance to anything that we're living through. Whether you know Mary's work from SPQR or Confronting the Classics or her many other books and television appearances, you know what makes her so singular is her ability to take this, you know, fairly remote and at certain ways, foreign period of history and make it not only approachable and lively, but also deeply human. And if you need another dose of that, you got to buy Twelve Caesars, of course, because it's just like all of her other amazing work. If you're here in this room, our library shop booksellers will be glad to sell you a copy, and Mary will be signing them afterward. If you're watching online, go to the event listing at nypl.org and you can find the link to purchase it from our shop there. All of your purchases go to benefit the New York Public Library. Also, if you would rather, you could check it out from us. And of course, everyone here has a library card. Yes? [ Cheering ] >> Aidan Flax-Clark: Okay, good. Because I shame people in public, if you don't have a library card. I just want to be clear. And if you're watching online, and you would like to check it out, go to your local library and check it out, please. For those of you in the room, I'd like to direct you to our printed programs that you hopefully picked up. There are some recommended reading in there as well as some other upcoming events. Tonight, Mary has given us one single suggestion for further reading, which makes sense because you can top it. It's The Other Twelve Caesars, written by the legendary biographer, Suetonius. It's about the first 12 Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Domitian. And man, if you have not read this book, it is so good. There's palace intrigue, murder most foul, like a million kinds of lasciviousness, and there's even the guy who gets attacked with a lobster. So if you've got a library card, you can find out how to check it out on our website on the event listing nypl.org/live, search it in the catalogue. And as for other upcoming events, you'll see some there, and there are more on our website at nypl.org/live. We've got events in-person, online, the metaverse, I don't know, who knows? One note, the April 6 event that you see in your program with poet Elizabeth Alexander has been moved to virtual only, but we'd love to see you online for that and everything else. So to register, go to nypl.org/live. Mary is going to be joined by Tim Gunn, who quite simply is one of my favorite people I get to work with at the library. He is an unbelievably stalwart and committed friend of the library. And it turns out is kind of a big classics nerd, which is why he's here with us tonight. Out in the world, obviously, Tim has been inspiring creativity and ingenuity among designers on television for years. Here at the library, Tim is the guest judge at our annual Halloween Literary Costume Contest, a tradition that was paused during the pandemic, but we hope to bring back as soon as we can. It's a lot of fun. And he also spoke at our very first virtual event in 2020, when the pandemic started. So it's entirely fitting that he's back with us for one of our first in-person events in 2022. And I'm going to bring both of them up in just one second. First, I want to tell you that LIVE from NYPL is made possible by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos. And of course, by all of you, our wonderful supporters and friends, near and far. Thank you for that support. Lastly, Mary would be delighted to take some of your questions tonight at the end of the conversation. If you're here with us in the room, you will have seen no cards and pencils left on your chairs. You can begin to write your questions now, people will come through the room periodically to collect them. And I'd love to remind you about questions, they're the sentences that begin with those words, you know, who, what, where, why, how. If you're watching online, you can put your question in the chat and we will get it. Or you can email publicprograms@nypl.org. Wherever you are, we'd love to hear from you. And we'll collect all of your questions and Mary will answer as many of them as she can at the end. Okay. Thank you again so much for being here. And now please join me in welcoming Tim Gunn and Mary Beard. [ Applause ] [ Cheering ] [ Applause ] [ Cheering ] >> Tim Gunn: Welcome everyone. [ Applause ] Mary Beard and Twelve Caesars. I just have to share with you, I'm a huge Mary Beard fan. And accordingly, I was a bit of a wreck about meeting Mary because you never know. And Mary is a rare gem and a doll, and I became a huge fan -- just to share maybe inappropriately, but I can't help myself. I became a huge fan when the last administration took over and I thought, "Is this the fall of the Roman Empire?" And I started doing a lot of research. And my first bit of research was Mary's book, SPQR, which is phenomenal. And I became a fan then and have been reading your books ever since. And when I first picked up Twelve Caesars, I thought, "Well, it's about the twelve Caesars." This book, if you don't know it, and please get it tonight, is an extraordinary tour of sorts of western art history from ancient times to the present. And it's simply phenomenal. So Mary, thank you for all of your incredible research. >> Mary Beard: Well, thank you, Tim. And I just feel out to say in case people don't realize that the feeling is mutual, but I'm going to be a bit better at being a fashionista in future [laughing] since I've met you. I mean, the shoes are all right, but I'm going to, you know, I'm going to try and improve my image. >> Tim Gunn: Mary is the semiotics of clothes, clothes we wear sent a message about how we're perceived. You are the superb academic and scholar. [ Laughter ] [ Applause ] >> Tim Gunn: It's true. >> Mary Beard: Coming from you, I take that as a compliment. I think from other people [laughs], it might not be. >> Tim Gunn: Aidan reminded us that it's the Ides of March. Can you talk about the significance of that? Because how great is it that we're here tonight on the Ides of March? >> Mary Beard: Yes, especially, especially planned. And I'm afraid I'm going to be a bit of a party pooper about the Ides of March because, look, it is the moment, the anniversary in which Caesar, the dictator was assassinated in 44 BC in the name of liberty, right? We might actually see a picture of that if we put on slide 4, we can see a very wonderful picture by Jean-Louis Gerome, who is capturing there in the Senate House, Cesar just having been murdered. And Caesar's body is under the little kind of clump of cloth. Why I think I want to be a party pooper, and there's been a lot of stuff on my Twitter feed today about, "Oh, it's great, isn't it, to think about the murderous dictators getting rid of them." Caesar was killed. An assassination is easy in some ways, relatively easy. The moral of Caesar's assassination was, the guys who killed him in the name of liberty, had no forward plan whatsoever. They didn't quite know what they done. They didn't really know what they were going to do next. What followed assassination was years, decades of civil war. And in the end, the assassination of Caesar in the name of liberty brought about one-man rule at Rome, autocracy, dictatorship forever. So what they thought they were attacking, when they were attacking, they managed in a sense to give that permanent form, and I think that, thanks partly to Julius Caesar, we do see these guys as freedom fighters and in a way they were, but they were not successful, you know. And I think the moral of assassination, not that I'm recommending assassination, anybody, of course, you understand, but the moral of assassination, suppose you were to think about it, is that you got to have a forward plan. And these lot didn't. >> Tim Gunn: You know it's tremendously ironic, isn't it? That their plan, in fact, completely backfired. >> Mary Beard: Yeah. >> Tim Gunn: And we had done a whole succession of autocrats. >> Mary Beard: Yeah. And this painting by Gerome, I think is one of the more interesting ones, because you can see on it the dead body of Caesar covered over by his toga, I suppose. And then in the middle of it, there's a kind of huddle of men all getting together. And I think what Gerome is saying is that they're trying to wonder what the hell to do now, right? You know, they've killed the man they wanted to kill. But all they can do is think, "Oh, my God, what next?" >> Tim Gunn: Exactly. >> Mary Beard: And they go, and they make a complete mess of it. And it's ironic because, you know, Julius Caesar's assassination has become the kind of type assassination forever. And, you know, when the assassination, successful assassination plot on Abraham Lincoln, the assassins used the code name, The Ides of March, as the code name for the day when they were going to try, and successfully did, kill Abraham Lincoln. And it's sort of, you know, there isn't really an assassination in the world ever since of a political leader that hasn't, in some way, had the assassination of Caesar in the background. And everybody forgets what a complete bloody failure it was. >> Tim Gunn: Yes. >> Mary Beard: It's easy to kill a bugger. It's not easy, you know, well, relatively easy, it's not easy to pull off the political change that you want to pull off. >> Tim Gunn: No, indeed. And I'm just thinking that it's also morphed its way into fiction. And I'm thinking about Agatha Christie and Murder on the Orient Express, where it's very much like the assassination of Caesar, everybody has a stab. >> Mary Beard: Yes, everybody has a stab. >> Tim Gunn: Yeah. >> Mary Beard: But in the end, life goes on, and you made no difference. So if I was to reboot the message of the assassination of Caesar, I would say it's a terrible warning against assassination, because it doesn't get you what you think it does. You can see if you look at this picture, on the back right hand side, the benches in the center are empty. But there's one guy slightly portly gentleman, if you can just see him in a toga, sitting at the background, and he hasn't moved and he hasn't joined the others, you know. And he is the guy who's got it right. He's thinking, "This isn't going to end well." Right? >> Tim Gunn: And he was indeed right. Mary, tell us about the whole premise of your book and how these images are so seminal to it. >> Mary Beard: [Laughs] Yes. We might go back to image 1 now. And what you're going to see on image 1 is a composite of ancient and modern representations of Roman emperors in every kind of form. And I mean, I think there's one basic and then one slightly more intellectual premise of the book -- the basic premise of the book is that most people tend to think that images of Roman emperors are a very boring, right? >> Tim Gunn: I did. >> Mary Beard: You did? Yeah. >> Tim Gunn: Until reading your book. >> Mary Beard: That's right. Yeah. You know, I have watched people. I have sat for hours in art museums and museums watching people walk past lineups of marble busts of the twelve Caesars. And I know they walk past and they don't look. And let's be honest, I do too, right? One of the things the book wants to say is that, look, come on, images of the Caesars both in the ancient world and now, they're not like that. They're bright, they're gaudy. They're doing all kinds of different jobs. In the center of this picture, you can see my local microbrewery in Cambridge. Cambridge, UK, that is, you know, has a lovely little beer called Augustus, right? You know, the first main emperor of the Julius Caesar. Augustus is a fine, rotund, slightly ponderous beer, right? [ Laughter ] But there are others, like Caligula, who are naughty little beers, you know. Nero, you know, only the very strongest drink, the Nero beer. So you can see -- -- they come in paint, they come in color, they come in gaudy ceramics. It's not just marble busts. But attached to that, I mean, it isn't for big intellectual point of the book, is that they're still part of the way we talk about power. And even people who say, "Oh, I don't know anything about Roman emperors," actually, they do. And you see them in newspaper cartoons, you know, several times a year. And here I put just to remind us of that, I've got George W. Bush there, I think, in the bottom line, and he is being a Roman emperor, and he's strumming a lyre. Now cover The New Yorker, we don't need really to be told that that means George W. Bush is Nero. What does Nero do? He plays his lyre or his guitar as Rome burns to the ground. And those kind of images that we have, you know, we think of them as in some ways, cliched images, stereotypes, because they're that. But there's still ways that we think about power, autocracy, corruption. And as we've just seen with Caesar about political opposition, you know, they are part, they are hardwired into the western history as a way of contesting and displaying power and what we hate about it. >> Tim Gunn: And when you think that they have the staying power of 2,000 years -- >> Mary Beard: Yeah. >> Tim Gunn: -- what's more profound a statement than that? >> Mary Beard: They remained. And I think, still are. One of our go-to places for thinking about what power is. And, you know, when you say that to people, they sometimes think, "Well, I can't play that game," you know, you have to know awful lot about Roman history to, you know, understand this. And anyway, I wouldn't be able to tell Caligula from Titus or Domitian. You know, I don't really know the Roman emperors. And I think my answer to that is always look, the Romans didn't know that either, you know. Did most people in the Roman Empire know how to tell Titus from Domitian? No, they jolly well didn't. >> Tim Gunn: Well, that's a good point. I'm happy to hear you say that actually, is I've been feeling deficient and not being able to distinguish among them. >> Mary Beard: Well, don't worry, Tim. I mean, you're with the whole of the western world in that. And, you know, I hope what the book does is give you just enough, and you don't need very much to be able to play the game of the Roman emperors to be able to spot them and to wonder and kind of answer what they're doing in all the funny places that they get. You know, you can -- you know, like beer bottles [laughter], you know. You know, I want to bring back, you know, the Roman imperial iconography, not so much, I think to help us recover it because I think we've never lost it, but to help us recover a confidence with it, an inability to look it in the eye and to play with it. >> Tim Gunn: Would you say though, Mary, among the emperors, Caligula, Nero, Augustus, that Julius Caesar is the most iconic in terms of recognizability? >> Mary Beard: Let's put the next slide, number 2. Here, you've got three possibly ancient statues of Julius Caesar, and a coin of Julius Caesar in the bottom. And I think Julius Caesar is instantly recognizable, I think. Even now, you know, you can go to cartoon strips of Asterix the Gaul or whatever. And you've got a guy with a bald head and a long nose, dressed in a toga, and you think Julius Caesar. Now, he's also an extremely interesting case study in how we don't know what these guys look like really. And an awful lot of the images that we're told are of them, ancient images. Actually, we don't really know. The bottom of this slide, you can see a coin, and it's a coin minted just before Caesar's assassination in 44 BC. And it shows a picture of Julius Caesar in the middle, and Caesar's name around the edge. And basically, that is the only image of Caesar that we can definitely authenticate Caesar, and it's about half an inch tall. >> Tim Gunn: It's fascinating, though. >> Mary Beard: Oh, it is fascinating actually, partly because of some of its resonances with modern politicians, because if you look at this carefully, you can see that Julius Caesar is wearing around his head, a laurel wreath. And we're told by Suetonius that Julius Caesar was extremely pleased when he was given the right by the Senate in Rome to wear a laurel wreath on all state occasions. He was very pleased because he was balding [laughter]. And what he did is he put the laurel wreath on and that was partly a disguise. But he then did a clever comb-over [laughter]. And he tucked the hair into the laurel wreath so you didn't spot it. >> Tim Gunn: So even then, we had comb-overs [laughter]. >> Mary Beard: Have to say, I'm not sure if one of your recent presidents knew what -- >> Tim Gunn: Of course, he didn't. >> Mary Beard: -- what the ancient [laughter], you know, but I always feel extremely pleased that the idea of the comb over goes back 2,000 years [laughter]. >> Tim Gunn: And I'm so pleased that you mentioned Suetonius because I learned from your book and I had read parts of Suetonius decades ago, but I learned from your book and it's rekindled my interest that Suetonius wrote about Caesar, really a century and a half after Caesar died. >> Mary Beard: Yeah. Suetonius is the main biographer of these first twelve Caesars and it's from him that we get really the idea of the twelve Caesars, the first twelve Roman emperors, including Caesar. But he's -- Suetonius is a bit of an academic. He is a bit of a nerd. And he has a job in the Roman imperial library. He eventually falls out with the Roman imperial family in the second century AD, something to do with something he did with Hadrian's wife, but we're not quite clear what that might be [laughter], all right? But he's extremely important because he decided to write these biographies. And although we quite rightly, I think in some ways, think of him as a bit of a gossipy old thing and you know telling us what Tiberius did in the swimming pool and this kind of stuff. He had access to the Roman imperial filing cabinets. So he knew quite a lot. And he knew what life in the Roman palace was, but he is doing it in Caesar's case, you know, almost 200 years later. And he describes Caesar, God knows where he got his description from, and he does tell us about the comb-over and that matches. But apart from that, you know. >> Tim Gunn: So it's dubious. >> Mary Beard: It's dubious. You know, what you also see on this slide is three versions of images of Julius Caesar that people have taken to be ancient, bona fide images of Caesar. And every single one of them has got big question mark over them. I mean, the one in the middle is the most famous and it is in the British Museum and it's a very austere picture of Julius Caesar. And it used to be on the cover of a every book about Julius Caesar. We now, for very good technical reasons, believe it was made about 1800 c., right? Not might be meant to be Caesar, but it wasn't taken from life, that's for sure. And on the left is the current favorite image of Caesar. This was dragged up from the River Arles -- from the River Rhone, sorry, in Arles about 15, 20 years ago to great fanfare. The person who found it actually sort of came out with it under his arm, you know, having done underwater exploration in the river. And he said and like, I will say this in French because it's very rude. He said, "[foreign language]." You know, "Oh, F me, it's Caesar," right? Now I have to say [brief laughter] that Caesar has -- there's a kind of strange tradition of images of Caesar being found in rivers. In the early 20th century, one was found in the Hudson River, not very far from here, actually [laughter]. It wasn't Caesar, how it got there, we don't know. But this guy is now extremely famous in France, at least. And he's had two tele programs about him, about this image. He's had an exhibition. He is also -- just think about this, he's been on the French postage stamp. >> Tim Gunn: No, I didn't know that. >> Mary Beard: Right. Amazing, isn't it? You know, you can tell the French are very good classicists because they put up a postulated image of Caesar on their stamps. Why do we think he is Caesar? Well, we think he is Caesar because that was a good way of getting him into the newspapers. >> Tim Gunn: And you're a dissenter, are you not? >> Mary Beard: I'm a slight dissenter on this. >> Tim Gunn: Okay, slight. >> Mary Beard: I'm a slight dissenter. The main reason that this Caesar is identified as Caesar is he's got a very liny neck, he's got a wrinkled neck. And the coin has a wrinkled neck. And see, this image has a wrinkled neck. I have to tell you, though, Tim, quite a lot of Romans had wrinkled necks [laughter], right? >> Tim Gunn: It was a Roman thing. >> Mary Beard: It was a Roman thing. I mean, it's a modern thing too, if you look carefully, I can tell you, not just the comb-over, but the wrinkled neck [laughter]. So whether any of these or that green job on the right, very strange, green, possibly Egyptian Caesar, which goes by the name of The Green Caesar, whether any of them are Caesar or not, bona fide authentically, we don't know. But I have to say before you get worried, because I think at this point, you might think, well, oh, blimey, you know, if you don't know what any of these look like really, and if none of these really are Caesar, you know, what on earth are we doing? I think nevertheless, we still, in our minds, have an image of Caesar, which works for us. So I think one of the things that the book shows is that, no, we can't tell that any of these were really meant to be Caesar. We can't tell any way whether Caesar looked like that, even if they were meant to be Caesar. But we nevertheless operate with a kind of picture in our head, which has worked for hundreds of years of what we think Caesar looked like. Why don't you put on the next slide, number 3? Because -- >> Tim Gunn: Though, Mary, you did say that we can rely fairly heavily on the fact that he did look like the figure on the coin. >> Mary Beard: Well, we know that the figure on the coin was meant to look like Caesar. >> Tim Gunn: I see what you're saying. Okay. >> Mary Beard: Whether he actually looked like that, I mean, you know, you're lucky because you guys live in a republic, and you don't have the figure of the monarch on your coinage. But I live in a country where we have the figure of the monarch. And I know that Queen Elizabeth II, both does and doesn't look like she's represented on the coins. Now there has been a kind of an attempt to make her a little bit older, you know, over the years, but she sure doesn't look 95. [ Laughter ] >> Tim Gunn: Also, I learned from your book that Julius Caesar had a whole really production line of people creating his image and sending it out, which I found fascinating. >> Mary Beard: Yeah, I mean, I think that if there is one cultural revolution that the Romans brought about, it is the massive dissemination of the image of the leader. Now Caesar wasn't around very long. And it's clear that he'd only just started the process of sending out his image and saying, "Look, I can't be everywhere. But an autocrat has to be seen by people." So he's the first to put himself on the coinage in a systematic way, as a living person. And he's the first to flood the world with his coin, with his image. Augustus, his successor, after this terrible period of civil war, Augustus has 40 years on the throne, and sort of manages to do what Caesar never did. >> Tim Gunn: And didn't you say Augustus sent out 80,000 images? >> Mary Beard: If you do a kind of back-of-the-envelope sort of calculation about how many images we think probably still survive, question mark, question mark, meant to be Augustus. And you kind of multiply them. It's not a bad guess to say that there's 50,000 to 80,000 -- >> Tim Gunn: That's just staggering. >> Mary Beard: Or it is modern dictatorship style. >> Tim Gunn: Yeah. >> Mary Beard: It is, you know, the image of the dictator absolutely everywhere. We see them in marble and bronze. But they're in paint and, you know, they're on the coinage. I mean, I think that, you know, as I say it's very odd being a Brit and kind of being used to seeing the image of the monarch on a coin. But that started the idea that you couldn't pay for a loaf of bread without seeing the emperor's head is something that was an absolute innovation of Rome in the end of the first century BCE. >> Tim Gunn: And it stayed with us. >> Mary Beard: And it stayed with us. >> Tim Gunn: Yes. >> Mary Beard: I mean, you've escaped it. >> Tim Gunn: Well, we do have presidents and others on our coins and paper money. Yeah. >> Mary Beard: But you don't -- you're not quite as overwhelmed by it as we are. >> Tim Gunn: You're quite right. And I don't know how much attention we pay to them, frankly. >> Mary Beard: No, no, no. And people have. I mean, here what you've got is some images of Julius Caesar in modern times. But just in a sense to make that point about the political resonance and the way modern dictators see themselves through the lens of particularly Julius Caesar, but all of them, I mean, what you've got there, it's a very old photograph, but it's actually Mussolini, who you can barely see. But he is busy dissolving parliament in front of an image of Julius Caesar, right? >> Tim Gunn: Yes, yes. Very powerful and very profound. >> Mary Beard: You know. And so Mussolini comes along and in the 1930s starts to flood Italy again with images, I'm sure, partly of Mussolini, but also images of Julius Caesar again. You know, doing Caesar -- Caesar would have been absolutely delighted. >> Tim Gunn: Yes, [laughs] Mary, can you bring us forward into western art history and talk about the ways in which Roman portraiture had a very direct influence on western art? >> Mary Beard: I think that it has, in some ways, it has kind of given us an image that the Roman portrait has given us an image of power. And there, you know, there are many western autocrats who have modeled themselves on Roman portraiture. I think we tend in a way, almost to take that for granted. And we kind of think that well, of course, you know, a Roman image of power is still our image of power. But what I think the book tries to do is to say, look, it's not just that. It's not just that, you know, every jumped-up dynast of the 17th century has himself done as Caesar. You find these extraordinary images of power insinuating themselves into all kinds of different places. >> Tim Gunn: And I think insinuation is a great word to use. You're quite right. >> Mary Beard: Yes. >> Tim Gunn: I mean, as I learned from you, I mean -- >> Mary Beard: Yeah. I mean, can you put on slide 5? This, I think, is, in some ways, my favorite version of an image of power. Because it's of an emperor that no one's heard of. And it's -- you know, everybody -- you know, yeah, Julius Caesar's got great name recognition. >> Tim Gunn: Indeed. >> Mary Beard: But I want now to show you a coin portrait, and an ancient portrait, believed to be of the emperor Vitellius. >> Tim Gunn: Very attractive [laughter]. >> Mary Beard: He's a real -- he's a good looker [laughter]. He's a good looker. Now, Vitellius is somebody who does not have name recognition. He ruled for about six months after the death of Nero. And on the left, you see a gold coin with his portrait on it. Every Roman emperor mints coins, however short they are on the throne, because they got to pay the army. And so Vitellius had to pay the army. There's one of his coins. In the 16th century, the sculpture on the right, bust was discovered in Rome, which looked like an absolute dead ringer for Vitellius. And it was believed to be Vitellius. It was found in excavations sponsored by Cardinal Grimani. And it's known as the Grimani Vitellius. And it was given by Grimani in his will to the city of Venice. Now that became the image of Vitellius fixed for centuries. I'm going to tell you now, and it won't surprise you, it certainly wasn't Vitellius. There are various technical details which suggest that it was carved 100 years after Vitellius. But nevertheless, it became Vitellius. Vitellius, I should say, is not just short-lived Roman emperor. He is a nasty, sadistic, overeating, corrupt autocrat, a sexual pervert as well. >> Tim Gunn: Familiar. >> Mary Beard: That's just what I want to say. I have a wager with people about this book, really, which is that I bet you that once you have got your eye in looking at this Vitellius, who was so popular as an image from the 16th century on, I guarantee that you will not go to a major art museum without finding him somewhere. If you do and can prove it, I will refund the price of the book. Now, just let's go on to slide 6, where you just see how this character crops up. Now on the right, you've got a rather nasty walnut version, probably 18th century of Vitellius. I found him actually in an antique shop in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. >> Tim Gunn: It happens. >> Mary Beard: Yeah. I looked at it very, very hard and the very nice man in the shop thought I must be interested in buying him. >> Tim Gunn: May I ask how the hell large is it? >> Mary Beard: It is about three quarters for a meter tall. >> Tim Gunn: It's big. >> Mary Beard: It's big, it's big. So he came over, and was very, you know, officious in helping me with my inquiries. He told me it used to be owned by Andy Warhol. >> Tim Gunn: Oh, good heavens. >> Mary Beard: Well, I never. [ Laughter ] Next to the walnut Vitellius, we have a brass, a kind of gilded brass blob [laughing] which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is trying to capture the fleshy disintegration of Vitellius, but instantly recognizable. You then move on to a rather posh drawing in the National Gallery of Art. But on the left-hand side of this is a painting in Minneapolis, which I think starts to show you how edgy this is actually. Because here, what you see on this painting by Michael Sweerts is a very pretty young boy doing his art lesson, and he's drawing a sculpture. And if you look carefully, what he is drawing is presumably a pulp plaster cast of the Vitellius, the Grimani Vitellius we've just seen. And this is usually taken to be, you know, a fairly standard routinized image of art instruction. Here is the boy learning, as people did, to copy the plaster cast to get his drawing technique right. And that in part is what it is and what's going on. I think people don't stop to say, isn't there a kind of subversive reading here? You know, here you've got a sweet-looking boy, and the thing that he's been set to practice his drawing on, is a plaster cast of the most perverted, sexually perverted, not to say, pedophile Roman emperor in the book. Now isn't that painting? Not just a painting of devoted art history and art practice, isn't it saying there's something creepy about what we ask kids to draw? And I think it's saying there's something creepy. You know, anybody who sits down and is made to draw Vitellius is being given a lesson, which is more than just a drawing lesson. >> Tim Gunn: May we have a nod of forgiveness of the artist and say that he was just ignorant and didn't know? >> Mary Beard: Well, you could, you know. I think that would be a slight under interpretation [laughter]. I mean, he might have been, he might have been on -- >> Tim Gunn: But perhaps not, as you're saying, there is a subliminal message here. >> Mary Beard: Yeah, I mean, some of these images do in a sense become so familiar that you might -- you might take that line, you might say, "This is just a famous, famous classical image." >> Tim Gunn: Exactly. Oh, it's a Roman emperor. How fantastic. >> Mary Beard: It's a Roman emperor. >> Tim Gunn: Yeah. >> Mary Beard: You go back a few 100 years, Vitellius doesn't mean anything to us. You know, I bet, you know, if we went out into the street in New York and said, "Can you tell me anything about Vitellius?" to a passerby, you wouldn't get much for an answer. >> Tim Gunn: They'd think it was a pasta dish. >> Mary Beard: No, they'd think -- [ Laughter ] -- at best, at best. >> Tim Gunn: That you'd be saying Caligula and people would say -- >> Mary Beard: They might. >> Tim Gunn: -- "No, no, no, no." >> Mary Beard: Yes, they might. In the late 19th up till really the early 20th century, if you go back and you look at 19th century, early 20th century novels, Vitellius is still a household word. He is used as an adjective. If you want to say, "I'm having a really good dinner," you might say, "I'm having a Vitellian banquet." >> Tim Gunn: Oh, good heavens. >> Mary Beard: Right? And people knew they have Suetonius. And in some cases, his characteristics might not have been known. But they were much more than now. And I think it's always worth saying, when you see one of these Vitelliuses, what happens if we write his character back into this? >> Tim Gunn: And it's important that we do that, I believe. >> Mary Beard: Yeah. And it's -- I think it's, it adds, it really adds to it. I mean, there's -- if you put on slide 7, I think you can see that it adds to it here really, really strongly. Because what we're about to see is a reproduction of Paolo Veronese's painting so called the Feast in the House of Levi. It's a very controversial 16th century painting because the artist did it as a Last Supper. And then the Inquisition came along and said, "That's a rather unorthodox Last Supper." You know, what are Germans doing in this Last Supper? What are the dogs doing? And Veronese, he was a clever old soul, said, "Okay, I'll just rename it then. We'll call it the Feast in the House of Levi." But it was drawn as a last supper. It's now in the Accademia in Venice and is absolutely vast. It covers -- you know, it once covered the whole wall of a refectory of a religious order. But the guy I'm interested in is the guy in the main picture. You can only just see he's sort of leaning against the column on the right. And I've blown him up on the right-hand side there. And you look at him, and he is the Grimani Vitellius. >> Tim Gunn: Absolutely. >> Mary Beard: The face of this guy is the Grimani Vitellius. You could say, all right, Veronese's painting in Venice, this statue of Vitellius then believed to be Vitellius, no, was very familiar. He's just taken the physiognomy of it. Here he is -- the character is what would Veronese called a scalco, a carver, a headwaiter really. But here is a case, I think that you can see that the identification of the face with a character really means something, because this character is looking across directly at the figure of Jesus in the center of the table. And it's what looks like a conversion narrative. This, you know, this carver on the edge is looking at Jesus and is recognizing godhead is what is happening. You say, okay, fine, just an ordinary, an ordinary guy. No, what Veronese is saying is, "I have taken the image of one of the most corrupt Roman emperors, the pervert, the autocrat, the sadist. And I am showing you that the power of Jesus is so great that he even converts Vitellius." Now you have to recognize that figure as Vitellius, you have to kind of, as it were, decode the painting, but if you do, you add a whole [inaudible] to what Veronese is trying to do. >> Tim Gunn: And I knew this painting when I studied art history. And it wasn't until reading your book that I understood this depth of meaning. It's very profound. >> Mary Beard: Yeah. You know, these guys know their classics. >> Tim Gunn: Yeah. >> Mary Beard: You know, they might not be able to tell their Caligula from their Titus in old ways, but they know the stories, they're part of the rhetoric. And so it's not just that these emperors are being used to represent power. They're being incorporated into paintings, where they're doing complicated jobs in representing power. You know, you're being asked to think -- >> Tim Gunn: Yes. >> Mary Beard: Now, you know, happily, as I say, you know, you might at this point think they, oh, blimey, I'm never going to be able to know all I need to. Well, actually, there's rather few figures here that are making a difference. And you know, one of the things I want to do in the book is sort of give you the tools to unlock that. >> Tim Gunn: And indeed you do. Certainly helped me. >> Mary Beard: Yeah. And I tell you, now you've seen him, you'll see Vitellius everywhere [laughter]. I promise you. >> Tim Gunn: [Laughs] I'm frightened [laughter]. >> Mary Beard: And you'll think, oh, dear, you know. Oh. This ought to have a trigger warning on it. Vitellius, oh, God, you know [laughter]. >> Tim Gunn: Mary, before we get to audience questions, is there anything else you'd like to add? I mean, we could talk for hours, about Twelve Caesars. >> Mary Beard: I think we better see a woman, right? >> Tim Gunn: Oh, excellent. Yes, let's do that [laughter]. >> Mary Beard: Can we have slide 12? Because you know, one of the things that I became aware of really, but after I was about five years into working on this, you know, here was Beard, the feminist. And she was busy writing a book about blokes with sculptures and painting done by blokes. And I thought, where are the women, you know. And you know, are there any people in this book who are not white, you know? Well, actually, as always, as almost always, if you start saying, I want to find a different version, I want to find stuff done often in or by women, and not just, you know, old white men, you do find them. You know, you just -- you need the will to look not -- >> Tim Gunn: Yes. >> Mary Beard: -- they're there. You know, if you've got the will to look. And I suppose I just thought we ought to finish really with this extraordinary sculpture by Edmonia Lewis in the late 19th century, which is a sculpture of the Death of Cleopatra. Now Cleopatra isn't a Roman empress, but she had an affair with Julius Caesar. >> Tim Gunn: She had association. >> Mary Beard: Yeah, that will do for me, all right? Had an affair with Julius Caesar. And you know, Mark Antony might almost become a Roman emperor, and she had an affair with him too. Now, Edmonia Lewis, extremely interesting artist, she's really effectively the first African American female professional sculptor. She has a pretty rough time in the United States. And she sets up a studio in Rome, where she has extraordinary success. This, in a sense, is her masterpiece. But it has an extraordinarily convoluted history because she does it for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 shipped over from a studio in Rome to the States. It's bloody big, and it doesn't go back. It can't go back very easily to Rome. It gets like so many of the things sort of just dispersed. And for decades, it was lost. It seems she spent part of the next 100 years, marking the grave of a racehorse in Chicago [laughter]. A racehorse called Cleopatra, ha-ha-ha, right? But it was eventually rediscovered, and it's now in the American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. But I think here, if you start to say, "Look, can you find -- you know, are there different versions of these figures? Or a different way of seeing these figures through -- by women and of women?" I think the answer is yes. And here is Lewis, doing a really extraordinary Death of Cleopatra. When, after hundreds of years in which largely male painters and sculptors have shown us, Cleopatra, about to die in a rather glamorizing romantic pose. >> Tim Gunn: Very. >> Mary Beard: And she's holding up the snake and she is about to kill herself. Here you see Cleopatra in her death agonist. So you've got the black artist, sculpting the Egyptian queen, who was part, nevertheless, of the Roman power structure. You know, the mother of Julius Caesar's children, child, at least. And she is saying you can look at this differently. So I think, in writing the book, in the final version, I always had kind of Edmonia Lewis, in my head, just kind of thinking, so what would Edmonia Lewis have done with this? And you know, can we get those discordant traditions? It's not all that easy with Roman emperors. It is in part a blokey subject, you know. >> Tim Gunn: Yes, it is, indeed. >> Mary Beard: It is. You know, that's, you know, like it or not. But it is not an entirely blokeish subject. And so I hope I've managed a little bit where I can to put a diverse view, you know into it, even if only occasionally. >> Tim Gunn: And you did indeed, and I have to say, it woke me up and I wanted to know much more about her work. >> Mary Beard: Yeah, that's extremely interesting. >> Tim Gunn: Yeah. Are you up for some questions? >> Mary Beard: I am up for some questions? Yeah, why not? >> Tim Gunn: Wonderful. Let's see. Oh, this is interesting. >> Mary Beard: [Laughs] That sounds a bit worrying when people say, "This is an interesting question," it meant, this is when you can't anticipate. >> Tim Gunn: Where did the emperors get their ideas of power? And who were their role models? >> Mary Beard: That's extremely interesting question. [ Laughter ] In part, they're getting it from earlier Roman traditions. In part, they are sort of pretending to be traditional Roman political leaders. And one of the things they do is, you know, we call them emperors and, yes, they had words for emperors, imperator or princeps. But their official titles are titles drawn from earlier democratic Rome. So they're sort of modeling themselves as autocrats using the vocabulary of earlier democratic Roman leaders. But there's also a very kind of edgy boundary between the Roman emperor and earlier kings or monarchs from the eastern Greek world, particularly Alexander the Great, you know. Every Roman Emperor sort of sees Alexander the Great somewhere in the hinterland. But that becomes terribly edgy because Romans were dreadful orientalists, really in Edward Said's terms. And they both looked on the east as a source of representations of power and mystery. But also, as a terrible warning lesson about what happens when an emperor becomes an eastern style tyrant. So the worst you could do as a Roman emperor was to hold your shoe out like this, for someone to kiss, because that is showing that you have picked up eastern habits. And so they're always on a kind of ambivalent boundary, I think, between Romanness and different versions of what monarchy might be. So it's strictly they're part of the -- you know, they're reinventing themselves the whole time. >> Tim Gunn: Fascinating, it really is. And it had to be very anxiety provoking [brief laughter]. >> Mary Beard: I think, you know, there is no one -- you know, I don't mean to sound like a monarchist. But there is no one more anxious about what it is to be a Roman emperor than a Roman emperor, right? Or no, what am I? >> Tim Gunn: Understandably. Yeah. >> Mary Beard: Some of these images. I mean, we think of them rightly in a way as our images that are being disseminated to show the power of the emperor. And that's certainly the case. I think some of them are made for the emperor to see, to remind himself of what he might be and what he should be. And a lot of the most impressive and most certainly identified sculptures of Roman emperors come from archaeological sites that we know to have been imperial palaces. You know, partly they're trying to convince themselves that they're the ruler of the known world. >> Tim Gunn: I have to say we have excellent questions. >> Mary Beard: Of course [laughs]. >> Tim Gunn: How reliable is Suetonius in comparison to other ancient historians, say Tacitus? >> Mary Beard: He's differently reliable. >> Tim Gunn: Okay. >> Mary Beard: [Laughs] You know, there's a kind of usual hierarchy here that Tacitus is seen, and I think partly rightly, as the analytic genius. Tacitus is the person who dissects the corruption of the Roman Empire and reveals autocracy for what it is. And Suetonius is taken as the gossipy one, you know, who picks up what people are saying in the palace corridors. Now in part, that is true. But I think in some ways Suetonius is very good at showing us how people actually talked about these guys. And also, he has a very key observational power. You know, he's lived and worked in a palace before. Whatever he did wrong with Hadrian's wife, he knew what it was like to live in a royal palace. And there's an extraordinary bit in his Life of Nero, where he captures what it is like when power is slipping away from people. And several people made this parallel actually in the last days of your previous president. When people in the White House staff didn't turn up, you know, as power was going, people didn't come to work. They'd gone. Suetonius had made that point before about Nero. He said, you know, there's been a revolution on the margins of the Roman Empire. The soldiers are rebelling. What's the sign of that? Suetonius says Nero calls out for his servants to come and, you know, fill his water bottle, whatever, and nobody comes. So, you know, you know power is ebbing away when the servants don't show up. And that's quite a profound point, I think. >> Tim Gunn: It is, indeed. Fascinating. All right, Mary, here is a good one [laughter]. You can have dinner with one of the twelve Caesars. >> Mary Beard: Ah. [ Laughter ] >> Tim Gunn: Who, why and what dish do you hope is served? [ Laughter ] >> Mary Beard: Well, I'm afraid it's got to be Vitellius. [ Laughter ] >> Tim Gunn: Will there be anything left for you to eat? >> Mary Beard: Yeah, I think he was quite a generous host. I think he'd see Roman oat cuisine at its finest. I think you'd have to hope you didn't overdo the rotten fish sauce, because that's what Romans -- >> Tim Gunn: [Laughs] I've read about that. >> Mary Beard: -- smothered everything with. But he had some of the most amazing dishes, where he would bring, you know, stuffed boar on a great silver shield into his dining room. But inside the stuffed boar, you would find it was stuffed with what? Chickens, right? [Laughter] Every dish would be a surprise. That's what you'd think. [ Laughter ] >> Tim Gunn: All right, this is a great question to conclude on. This will be our last. What advice do you have for young historians who are just entering the field? >> Mary Beard: Don't let the buggers get you down [laughter] is what I think [laughs] you'd say. You know, lots of people will say, what are you doing this for? Why are you, you know -- why are you interested in all those? Well, let's say it's ancient history. You know, why are you interested in people 2,000 years ago? And you say, you think to yourself, not only are they very interesting, but also for me, part of the point of doing ancient history is to think differently about the present. >> Tim Gunn: Absolutely. >> Mary Beard: Not just to think about the past, I find the past interesting, but I live now. And what images of emperors do right across two millennia is help me think about power now. >> Tim Gunn: They inform our present. Yeah. >> Mary Beard: And that's what you say, you say, look, you think I'm boring and my head is stuck in the past. Historians are the people you need if you want to think about the present. >> Tim Gunn: Absolutely, agreed. [ Applause ] Mary, I want to thank you for a fabulous hour. And this has been a treat and a pleasure. Thank you so much. >> Mary Beard: Well, thank you, Tim. Thank you. [inaudible]. [ Applause, Cheering ] Let me -- a person is only as good as the person who is asking the questions. >> Tim Gunn: Ah [laughs]. [ Applause ] It's a great evening. And remember, it's not over. Mary is going to be signing your book. Thank you, everyone.