HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2024-05-31T08:01:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Roman holiday: when emperor Hadrian became a tourist of ancient Egypt
items: Reviving Roman voices: Mary Beard on the remarkable life of one woman
items: Mary Beard on how to live like a Roman emperor
items: “The Roman empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths. It would not have survived”: Mary Beard on Roman Emperors
items: What was life like in ancient Pompeii? Mary Beard shares an A-Z guide

Roman holiday: when emperor Hadrian became a tourist of ancient Egypt
type: item
date: 2024-05-31T08:00:29.000Z
creator: Professor Mary Beard
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Where history happened
description: As is still the case today, the wonders and landmarks of ancient Egypt drew in the tourists in the Roman era. They would carve their names into statues of pharaohs and take cruises down the Nile. Prof Mary Beard describes what happened when a particular party of elite Roman holidaymakers – led by the emperor Hadrian – descended on Egypt’s tourist hotspots in AD 130...
encoded: Roman emperors and aristocrats were great tourists. They were as keen as we are on visiting the famous sights of the Mediterranean world, and they brought home souvenirs by the bucket-load. The best guide we have to the appearance of the lost statue of the goddess Athena inside the Parthenon at Athens, an extraordinary creation in gold and ivory, comes in the stone copies made for travellers and tourists. These range from pricey, high-quality replicas to the ancient equivalent of fridge magnets. The most sought-after destination was Egypt, and the most alluring method of transport there was, as now, a Nile cruise. Julius Caesar holidayed on the river with Cleopatra. Half a century or so later, in AD 19, we know that Prince Germanicus, nephew of the emperor Tiberius, visited the country and took a boat up the Nile south from Alexandria. Read more | In the footsteps of Germanicus - a Roman General’s journey to Egypt No tourist, however, visited Egypt in greater style – or, I suspect, with a larger retinue of support staff – than the emperor Hadrian in AD 130. And no imperial party left quite such a lasting mark of their visit. In fact, you can still see the poems commemorating this trip, written by one of the emperor’s aristocratic fellow-travellers – a woman by the name of Julia Balbilla (more on her later). They are carved into the leg of an ancient Egyptian statue, just outside modern Luxor (ancient Thebes). It might seem like a rather upmarket version of ‘Balbilla (and Hadrian) was here’. But these poems not only document a tourist experience; they shine a light onto one of those hidden women of the Roman world. Balbilla was not an ‘ordinary’ woman, but one of wealth, glamorous connections, and talent. All the same, she usually slips below the radar of modern historians. Hadrian's imperial inspection Hadrian’s Egyptian cruise was only one part of a much longer journey for the emperor and his entourage. He was the most travelled of all the Roman rulers – and sights…

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Reviving Roman voices: Mary Beard on the remarkable life of one woman
type: item
date: 2023-12-27T09:00:05.000Z
creator: Professor Mary Beard
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Roman women
description: The remarkable story of one Roman woman, pieced together from fragments over many centuries, reveals insights into family life more than 2,000 years ago. Mary Beard gives voice to the long-silent Turia
encoded: During the civil wars that tore the Roman Republic in the middle of the first century BC, leading to the birth of the empire, one Roman woman was facing her own crises – both public and private. Usually known to us as ‘Turia’, she was born into a high-ranking family and by the late 50s BC had become engaged to be married. It was obviously a ‘good match’ with a man of prospects. But before the wedding could take place, not only had her fiancé suddenly quit Rome to fight under Pompey the Great – in other words, on the losing side in the war against Julius Caesar – but, tragically, her mother and father had also been murdered in their remote house in the country. Turia moved in with her future mother-in-law, but seems to have been largely left to cope with her problems alone, or with the help of just her sister. She managed to take vengeance on her parents’ murderers and successfully fought off some of her own relations who contested her inheritance. At the same time, she sent supplies to her absent fiancé, selling off some of her own jewellery to do so. Things looked up, albeit briefly. Although Julius Caesar was victorious in the war against Pompey, he pardoned his enemies and allowed them to return to Rome, so Turia and her fiancé were eventually able to get married. But worse was to come. Just a few years later, after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, the junta who ruled the city put a price on her husband’s head, and he was forced to leave the city again. It was only thanks to Turia’s intervention on his behalf with Lepidus, one of Rome’s so-called ‘ruling three’ (alongside Mark Antony and Octavian, the future emperor Augustus), that he was allowed back – but not before she had been horribly insulted and beaten black and blue by some of the regime’s apparatchiks. Peace finally came to Rome more than a decade later, under its first emperor, Augustus – who by then had cannily reinvented himself as a responsible elder statesman. The marriage of Turia and her husband l…

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Mary Beard on how to live like a Roman emperor
type: item
date: 2023-11-24T11:16:03.000Z
creator: Professor Mary Beard
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
description: Popular historian Mary Beard tackles some of the biggest questions about life as a Roman emperor, from what they actually did all day to whether they were really as bloodthirsty as legend suggests
encoded: What did Roman emperors actually do all day? Were they really as bloodthirsty as legend would suggest? And why was food so important? Speaking to Matt Elton, popular historian, author and broadcaster Mary Beard tackles some of the big questions about life as a Roman emperor, profiling some extraordinary figures along the way. View Green Video on the source website Articles by Mary Beard What was life like in ancient Pompeii? An A-Z guide Why Rome ruled the world Why Rome still matters Mary Beard is the author of Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World (Profile Books, 2023)

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“The Roman empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths. It would not have survived”: Mary Beard on Roman Emperors
type: item
date: 2023-09-26T07:20:13.000Z
creator: Professor Mary Beard
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Life in ancient Rome
subject: Roman rulers
description: Mary Beard tells Matt Elton what life would have been like for Rome’s emperors – from the path to the top to the almost inevitable sticky end
encoded: Your new book covers a swathe of the history of ancient Rome, from Julius Caesar to Septimius Severus and beyond, but starts by introducing a less familiar figure. Who is he, and why did you lead with him? The book kicks off with the story of a teenager from Syria who came to the Roman throne in AD 218 and who was assassinated in 222. Known as Elagabalus [officially Marcus Aurelius Antoninus], he certainly wasn’t one of Rome’s greatest hits, but he is an emperor around whom the most extravagant stories have collected. If you think Nero or Caligula were over the top, you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve looked at Elagabalus! We’re told that when he invited people to dinner, he showered them with rose petals – with so many petals that his guests were smothered and died. He is said to have been the earliest known user of the whoopee cushion in western history: he would have his slaves go around and let the air out of dinner guests’ cushions so that they ended up on the floor. He’s also reputed to have married a Vestal Virgin [a priestess sworn to chastity] and made a human sacrifice. In short, Nero was a pussycat in comparison. I start the book with Elagabalus because the point about such stories isn’t whether or not they’re true. (My guess is that they’re not, but were invented after Elagabalus’s time to besmirch his memory.) My pitch is that, in a way, it doesn’t matter if they are literally true, because they’re true in another sense: they represent Roman fears about what the worst kind of emperor would be like. They’re saying that you never know where you are with a bad emperor – that emperors are never what they seem, and that some of what lies at the heart of Roman imperial power is deceit, deception and fakery. In the orbit of the emperor, you can never believe your eyes. Even nature might be corrupted. Elagabalus’s alleged tricks included only eating fish when he was inland, and having snow brought to his summer gardens. Again, these stories paint a picture of a…

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What was life like in ancient Pompeii? Mary Beard shares an A-Z guide
type: item
date: 2020-06-27T02:05:00.000Z
creator: Professor Mary Beard
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Life in ancient Rome
description: Buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, and gradually disinterred from the middle of the 18th century, Pompeii is probably the world's most famous archaeological site. But what was life like for the Romans who lived there, pre-eruption? Not that different from our own, as Mary Beard reveals in her A to Z of the ancient town, complete with yob culture, nightlife and plonk...
encoded: A... is for artists at work House makeovers? Style gurus? Des res? Painters and decorators did a roaring trade in Pompeii, transforming dark and often pokey interiors with a lavish coat of paint much as they do today. And we now have a precious glimpse of how the painters operated. In one house, recently uncovered, a team of three or four decorators were interrupted by the eruption almost in mid-brush stroke, scarpering as the ash fell and abandoning their tools, 50 pots of paints, and a bucket of fresh plaster precariously balanced up a ladder. The assistants had been busy slapping on the plaster and the broad washes of colour, while the masters had drawn out the design in rough sketches and were painting the figures and the fiddly bits. View oEmbed on the source website B… is for banking The Romans didn’t have cheques or credit cards, but there were money lenders, the banks of the day. The most famous Pompeian banker is Lucius Caecilius Jucundus (now best known as the hero of the early parts of the Cambridge Latin Course). Some of his records and receipts, stashed away in the attic of his house, give an idea of his business activities. Banker is actually a bit of a euphemism – he was mainly an auctioneer profiting on both sides of the transaction, charging the seller a commission and then lending money to the buyer at a healthy rate of interest. Read more about Pompeii: how much of Pompeii was preserved after the devastation? When was Pompeii first excavated? C... is for cafe culture The latest estimate reckons that there were about 200 cafes and bars in the town altogether – about one for every 60 residents. A counter usually ran along the street to catch the passing trade, selling cheap takeaway food from large jars. Wine was stacked up behind it and there were tables in a back room for sit-down eating and drinking. It was the reverse of today’s society, where the rich eat out and the poor cook up at home. In Pompeii, the poor, living in tiny quarters with no fa…

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