History rocks: The stars of the teachers of antiquity
Thanks to The Odyssey, ancient history has never been more popular, with touring rock star historians packing out auditoriums all over the country.
Two blokes sitting in armchairs on stage rabbiting on about Greek mythology – how interesting can that be? Well, as it turns out, very.
It was playwright Alan Bennett who, in The History Boys, described history as “just one f—ing thing after another”, but people do not seem bothered by that at all. Ancient history has never been more popular. And The Odyssey effect means events on the subject are going gangbusters.
This new cultural phenomenon of history on stage involves chart-topping history podcasters and others transforming into high-production live theatrical and conversational touring acts. Shows such as The Rest is History with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, and Tristan Hughes’s The Ancients, pack major concert halls and theatres when they go on tour to bring deep-dive academic storytelling and banter to live audiences.
I went to see Tristan Hughes, who has just wrapped his first Australian tour. In Brisbane he took to the Concert Hall stage at QPAC for a couple of hours with Alastair Blanshard, the Paul Eliadis professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Queensland. Blanshard is a Greek cultural historian with a strong research interest in the legacy of Greco-Roman culture.
These two basically just chin-wagged about Heracles (or Hercules if you prefer the Roman version) for a couple of hours. There were projections as well as chat, followed by a Q and A, but that is about it.
Sounds simple and it is. Fane Australia specialises in this sort of fare. It curates, produces and promotes live stage shows, cultural tours and public speaking engagements. Fane brings global talent – including bestselling authors, historians, chefs, comedians and cultural icons – to theatres and live venues across Australia.
And it’s working, because the Concert Hall was pretty packed with a wide variety of people, nerds one and all in their own way.
People are gorging on this intellectual fare nowadays … No bells and whistles, just brain food
Among the history superstars Fane tours is author William Dalrymple, who specialises in the history and literature of India, South Asia and the broader Islamic world, focusing heavily on the British East India Company, Mughal history and the cultural and commercial connections between ancient India and the rest of the world. Riveting stuff? Depends on your point of view, I guess, but when Dalrymple tours he packs out auditoriums.
We went to see him at Brisbane Powerhouse where they put on an extra show to accommodate Dalrymple’s fans. Another historian rock star is Bettany Hughes, whose books and TV programs are hugely popular. She was a big hit at last year’s Brisbane Writers Festival.
People are gorging on this intellectual fare nowadays. It is a nicely analogue form of entertainment – old school and with limited technology besides what is really just a slide show accompanying the chit-chat. No bells and whistles, just brain food. No elaborate sets or huge cast to manage … that must be nice and must keep costs down. I’m assuming Fane fly their stars business class, at least, and put them up in swish hotels, though.
And they just keep on coming. Another rock star historian will soon be with us – Dame Mary Beard – touring in November with her show, An Evening with Mary Beard: Talking Classics.
Beard begins her tour across the ditch in Christchurch and Auckland before she hops over here for a tour beginning in Adelaide on November 20 that takes in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and Perth.
Subscribe for updates
Beard is one of the world’s most renowned classicists and is a leading public intellectual. A former professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Newnham College, she has spent more than four decades making the ancient world accessible, exciting and endlessly relevant to modern audiences.
She is the bestselling author of numerous books, including SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome; Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World; Women & Power: A Manifesto; and the Wolfson History Prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. Her latest book, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, is out now through Allen & Unwin.
A familiar face on television, Beard has presented several acclaimed BBC series including Meet the Romans; Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit; Civilisations; and Inside Culture. She is also the classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement.
Recognised by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people, Beard was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2018 for services to the study of classical civilisations. She is the recipient of the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, the Bodley Medal and holds honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale and the University of St Andrews, among others.
Described by the Financial Times as “the rock star scholar of Ancient Rome”, Beard has built an unparalleled reputation for making the classical world vivid, surprising and irresistibly human.
On her Australian tour she will be in conversation with some very special guest hosts and will invite audiences to ask their burning questions, because, as she insists, the classics are best explored through talking.
Drawing on her new book Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, Beard will share why it’s not compulsory to be excited by antiquity, but it really is a shame not to be.
You may ask: “What is exciting about a piece of bread 4000 years old? Or some pots of paint abandoned in the eruption at Pompeii? Why should we be bothered with the distant past anyway?” And Beard will have the answer and make a compelling case that the life, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome have something to offer everyone.
Promising “amazement, surprise, pleasure, puzzlement, even revulsion”, Beard will draw on 50 years of teaching and research to make a bold and incisive case for why classical studies remain thrillingly relevant today.
Rather than treating the ancient world as a shrine to greatness, she presents it as something messy, surprising, contested and continually capable of shocking us. From the everyday lives of ordinary Romans to the ways revolutionaries from Marx to Mandela found intellectual resources in classical study, Beard demonstrates that the distant past shapes how we understand our own world in ways we can’t afford to ignore.
Copies of Talking Classics will be available at each event and signed by Mary Beard after the show, which is nice. So, fellow history buffs, I will see you there.
An Evening with Mary Beard: Talking Classics will take place at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, on November 20, and at QPAC’s Concert Hall, Brisbane, on November 24.
Want to see more stories from InDaily SA in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily SA as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily SA". That's it.
Free to share
This article may be shared online or in print under a Creative Commons licence