If you are a history buff, this book is unsettling and that’s the point

When Mary Beard was five, a curator at the British Museum took a 4,000-year-old piece of Egyptian bread out of its glass case and held it close enough for her to see. The sight of an ordinary object, made by and for an ordinary person in a world unimaginably distant from her own, evoked in the child what the ancient Greeks referred to as “thauma”. Literally translated, the word means “wonder” or “wonderment”. But, as Beard says, “thauma was a loaded ancient catch phrase.” There was also “an element of the wow factor” in her experience.

That encounter offers a fitting entry point into Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, a slim volume by the world’s most distinguished classicist, which I read last week. It’s a wonderful meditation on the thrill of discovering that the distant past is neither dead nor settled. It can still surprise us. Beard does not treat antiquity as a mausoleum of great texts, marble statues and heroic men. She is drawn to the ordinary and often overlooked objects and fragments that allow us to glimpse how people actually lived. A piece of bread carries the physical trace of an individual life across four millennia.

Based on lectures delivered at the Universities of Chicago and Edinburgh, the book is a defence of the classics. But Beard has never been given to veneration. She has little interest in arguing that the ancient Greeks and Romans possessed timeless wisdom. Nor does she present the classical world as the uncontested foundation of Western civilisation. She is more interested in what happens when we look closely at the past and discover that it is simultaneously familiar
and strange.

That tension explains the subtitle: The Shock of the Old. “Thauma requires brain work as well as wide eyes,” Beard writes. “Wondering what the past is, how to describe it, treading the tightrope between the idea that inhabitants of the past were just like us and the idea that they were incomprehensibly alien pushes to the very frontiers of understanding.” The “shock of the old” comes from discovering that the past is never quite what we thought it was.

That is an especially precious proposition at a time when the classics are routinely summoned into arguments about cultural identity. Beard is alert to the uses — and abuses — of antiquity. Greek and Roman culture has been appropriated by fascists, nationalists and defenders of a narrowly defined “Western Civilisation”. But she also refuses the opposite temptation of throwing the classical inheritance away because it has been misused. Nobody has first rights to the past. That is why it can be examined, questioned and contested by everybody. And that’s why Beard speaks not just to the West, but to every part of the world where the invocation of civilisational unity today is flattening social complexities.