I agree but the argument is better framed as Mary Beard is a modern scholar with a rigid intersectional world view that is highly moralistic and highly judgmental from the perspective of modern norms around violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.
I'm not acquainted with her work, but after reading the transcript your comment seems... highly moralistic and highly judgmental?
The whole interview reads as very sober, she mentions elements that are at odds with the pop culture understanding. She very explicitly takes head on this type of criticisms.
>I think the question of how you judge these people is very tricky. People often write in to me and say, "I don't like the way that you do sometimes make judgments about X as a mass murderer, when they're 2000 years in the past. Surely, it's often said, "You should be judging them on their own terms, not on your terms."
> I've got two responses to that. One is, quite often, these people were hostilely judged in antiquity itself, but we rather brush that under the carpet. Julius Caesar, for example, it's reckoned now that he may well have killed about a million Gauls in his campaign against Gaul, and there were people in Rome who said he was committing crimes against humanity. This is not a new invention that Caesar was a war criminal, there were people in Rome who said that. So I think we have to be very careful always to listen out for the discordant voices in antiquity itself. But I think perhaps more important is that the job of the historian, and this kind of explains I think why we sometimes find there's a flip flop here between one sort of judgment of Alexander the Great and another, you know, favorable or not favorable, same with Caesar, whatever, is that the job of the historian I think is to have stereoscopic vision. I think it is important to understand these characters in their own context, and in their own terms, and how people, by the standards of their time, yes, I think you should do that. But I think that the modern historian can't just leave their own moral values, you know, at the library door. I do at a certain point have to say I find the conquests of Alexander the Great, very, very uncomfortable, and I think what I particularly dislike in terms of our modern appropriation of them is the way we somehow seem to go along with approving of what they did. I might not want to disapprove of it, I might want to say, in part, that by the standards of their own time was okay, but I do have to say it's not the standards of ours, and we have to realize that there are moral issues and questions about what happened in antiquity that we shouldn't be afraid of bringing to the surface. I'm very happy to do that. I mean, I think it's quite interesting, I've chosen a group of men for my most influential Rome, I think I had no choice but to do that. I can also say, but I think there is something about the misogyny of the Roman Empire that I deplore. And you have to be able to hold those two views at the same time, I think.
That's not sneering, it's just not falling in to the trap that whitewashes the brutality of the past. Should future historians only consider our proclaimed ideals? Our notions of virtue? Will the War on Terror be seen just as a "cool" period, morally-neutral?
>>But I think that the modern historian can't just leave their own moral values, you know, at the library door.
But everyone knows what those values are, because largely (with a few nuances) we all share them. We don't need an historian to remind us that war or slavery is bad. I want to know what Romans think of slavery. I can probably guess what a modern historian thinks of it.
I think much of our modern day conflicts are about disagreements over those values though.
> We don't need an historian to remind us that war or slavery is bad. I want to know what Romans think of slavery. I can probably guess what a modern historian thinks of it.
But she isn't just saying "it's bad" for no reason, she depicts the problems and the triumphs. It's not about how Romans thought about slavery, it's about providing a full and complete picture of a historical period or person, warts and all.
As a great example: most of the current political movement in America emphasizes that in the 1950s or so one man's average salary afforded him a better station in society than it does now. But that same observation leaves out that... Well, this wasn't true for any woman, or many minorities. If we just never mention that last part because "duh, I don't need a historian to tell me that" we end up with flawed rosy glasses by which we view such worlds and the policies and people who created them.
Ironically, the rhetoric you cited actually demonstrates the GP’s point, in part. Beard gave a weak answer: a shallow deflection that suggests credibility but glosses over her own bias.
> violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.
Which is a very anachronistic way of looking at things and very unscholarly, too bad, I really wanted to get into her books. I guess the Protestant moralism and virtue-signalling got to her (there are exceptions to this, especially in the German world, but it is my impression that the Anglos never really fully adopted the Romans and the Roman worldview, and I'm including Gibbon in here).
