Instant Classics

In the first episode of a five-part series, Mary and Charlotte tell the story of Queen Cleopatra’s early years. Forget, for the time being, Elizabeth Taylor rolling out of a rug, poisonous asps and baths of asses’ milk. Focus instead on inbreeding and incest, because Cleopatra, child of Ptolemy the Flute-Player, married her brother, Ptolemy 13th. When he died in suspicious circumstances, she married another brother, Ptolemy 14th. 

Mary and Charlotte discuss why the Ptolemy dynasty of Egypt was so fixed on keeping it in the family. In the second half of the episode, they explore the controversial issue of race in Cleopatra studies. On one hand, she was born into a dynasty from Greece which prided itself on inbreeding. On the other, it seems likely that beneath the official accounts, a great deal of cavorting went on beyond the royal household. The main reason it is so hard to reach any definitive conclusion is that ancient writers were uninterested in race as we understand it. They seemed not to fixate or even be interested in skin colour. 

The episode ends with Cleopatra primed to meet Julius Caesar. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

There is a whole series of reliable modern biographies of Cleopatra (as well as many more unreliable accounts). This is a short selection of the trustworthy:

D. Roller: Cleopatra: a biography (Oxford UP, pb, 2011)

S. Schiff, Cleopatra: a life (Virgin books, pb, 2011)

J. Tyldesley, Cleopatra: last queen of Egypt (ProfileBooks, pb, 2009)

For the wider history of the dynasty:

Alan Bowman: Egypt after the Pharaohs (British Museum Press, pb, 1996)

L. Llewellyn-Jones, The Cleopatras (Wildfire, pb, 2025)

For Alexandria and its culture:

E. Richardson, Alexandria: the quest for the lost city (Bloomsbury, pb, 2022)

Islam Issa, Alexandria: the city that changed the world (Sceptre, pb, 2024)

For Cleopatra and race:

In addition to the biographies cited, you can get an idea of the debates, here:

https://theamericanscholar.org/black-cleopatra/

https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas112pomonavalentine/chapter/haley-shelley-1993-black-feminist-thought-and-classics-re-membering-re-claiming-re-empowering-in-feminist-theory-and-the-classics-edited-by-nancy-rabinowitz-and-amy-richlin-2/

@instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube

@insta_classics for X

email: [email protected]

Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole 

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mary and Charlotte talk to artist Grayson Perry about why he hates classical civilisation. Grayson is one of Britain’s most famous artists - he won the Turner Prize in 2003, has been exhibited in major exhibitions across the globe, published books and presented television programmes. 

Earlier this year, Grayson delivered the Rumble Fund Lecture 2026 at King’s College London, entitled ‘Why I hate classical civilisation’. Needless to say, Mary and Charlotte want to know why - and also see if they can encourage him to think more positively about his relationship with the ancient world. 

Grayson talks about the tedium of learning Latin at school, his irritation at the endless classical imitations in British architecture and asks why bad people - names are mentioned - hold up the classics as the peak of civilisation. 

Mary and Charlotte hit back. Just as many radicals and revolutionaries have been inspired by the classics as dictators or would-be dictators. Mary wishes she’d had the chance to teach Latin to Grayson. There’s a thought… 

Content warning: This episode features bad words beginning with the letter ‘f’. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, a book accompanying Perry’s British Museum exhibition, was published by the British Museum Press, 2011.

An image from Perry’s The Rap of the Sabine Women (1981) can be seen on the Stedelijk Museum website.

@instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube

@insta_classics for X

email: [email protected]

Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole 

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, Mary and Charlotte’s special guest is… Mary Beard! On the day of publication of her new book, Talking Classics, Mary does just that - talks classics with Charlotte. 

Talking Classics is a summation of Mary’s 50 years study of the ancient world. In this intimate conversation, Mary talks about discovering a fascination with history as a child and her teenage delight in joining the local dig (and, more importantly, apres-dig) in Shropshire. She also discusses the value she finds in studying the classical world - the way we’re forced to acknowledge kinship and difference with other cultures, develop empathy, tolerate difference and reflect upon our own values. 

In the second half, Mary and Charlotte look at how the classical world has been adopted by different causes throughout history. Some we might approve of - like resistance to tyranny and gay rights - others which are more uncomfortable, like fascism and imperialism. And we hear the fascinating story of Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, a left-wing classicist in Italy, who had to show Hitler and Mussolini around the sites of Ancient Rome. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

This isn’t meant to be an advert (!), but the new book is Talking Classics (Profilebooks). By the way, this is Charlotte writing, I highly recommend it!

The story of Hitler’s visit to Rome is told by Bianchi Bandinelli, not available in English, sadly. The Italian version is Hitler e Mussolini, 1938 (E/O pb, 1995) but it has been translated into French and German. There is a collection of photos of the visit here: https://www.europeana.eu/en/collections/person/165124-ranuccio-bianchi-bandinelli A documentary film has also been made of which there is a short trailer online, with 1930s footage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3WdVcSybG4) 

On Classics and the proto-gay movement of the the 19th century, there is a chapter by Philip E Smith in Powell and Raby (eds), Oscar Wilde in Context (Cambridge UP, 2013) and a book by Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Cornell UP, 1994)

The appropriation of classics by far right and misogynist “causes” is the theme of Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men (Harvard UP, 2018), and Curtis Dozier, The White Pedestal (Yale UP, 2026)

Mary writes of the ambiguities of Roman Britain in the story of the British Empire, in “Officers and Gentlemen?”, in A Swenson and P Mandler (eds), From Plunder to Preservation (British Academy, 2013)

@instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube

@insta_classics for X

email: [email protected]

Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole 

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mary and Charlotte explore the story of Perpetua, a young Christian woman tortured and murdered in the Roman arena in Carthage (modern day Tunisia) for her faith in the 3rd Century CE. Astonishingly, Perpetua kept a diary during her last days - right up until the point she was led into the arena - recording her life, dreams and fearless conviction that death was better than renouncing God. Even more astonishingly, this diary survives, incorporated into a longer account of her martyrdom narrated by another hand.. 

Perpetua describes the attempts by both her father and the presiding Roman official to convince her to just say the words that will save her life. She describes her inability to do this, even though it means depriving her baby of its mother. She also describes several of her dreams in the days before her death. The narrator takes over to recount what happened next. Perpetua was mauled by animals and finally despatched by a gladiator. 

Perpetua’s account is so remarkable, many have questioned its authenticity. The current scholarly verdict is that it is real, providing a rare insight not only into female experience in the Roman Empire - but a woman living through extreme circumstances. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

You can find an online translation of Perpetua’s diary here: https://www.ssfp.org/pdf/The_Martyrdom_of_Saints_Perpetua_and_Felicitas.pdf

Barbara Gold, Perpetua: Athlete of God (Oxford UP, pb, 2021) and Sarah Ruden, Perpetua: the woman, the martyr (Yale UP, 2025) are accessible introductions to Perpetua (both including translations of the whole or parts of the text)

More specialist studies include; 

Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano (eds), Perpetua’s Passions (Oxford UP, 2012)

Thomas J. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (Oxford UP, 2012)

@instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube

@insta_classics for X

email: [email protected]

Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole 

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Antigone is one of the most regularly staged Greek tragedies with great actors lining up to play the part. Juliette Binoche, Juliet Stevenson and Gillian Anderson have all had a crack in recent years. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte look at why Antigone is such an enduringly interesting role. She is sometimes framed as a female Hamlet caught between family loyalties and the needs of the state. 

Antigone was written by Sophocles in the mid-5th Century BCE. It tells the story of King Creon’s attempts to restore order to the city of Thebes following a civil war. He orders that the body of the defeated rebel Polynices should lie unburied as punishment. Antigone, sister of Polynices, disobeys this order and gives her brother proper burial rites (as the gods demand). Creon sentences her to death for betrayal. 

Antigone is often portrayed as a proto-feminist icon - the brave woman standing up to the patriarchy. But is this really what Sophocles intended? King Creon has far more lines and is, like Antigone, caught in an impossible situation. There’s even one way of viewing the play as a parable on what happens when women meddle in the affairs of the state. 

It is, of course, precisely these ambiguities that make Antigone so popular. It raises questions that can never be answered and its relevance shifts from generation to generation. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

There is a big book by George Steiner on the history of Antigone: Antigones (Oxford UP, pb, 1986), including Hegel and much more.

More approachable are sections of Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: the subversive power of Greek myth (Wildfire, pb, 2021) and the video lecture by Simon Goldhill, https://www.cambridgegreekplay.com/talk-wheres-the-tragedy-in-antigone-by-prof-simon-goldhill

Nelson Mandela mentions the performance on Robben Island in his Long Walk to Freedom (Back Bay Books, pb, 1995).

Mary describes her own changing views of the play in Talking Classics (Profile books, 2026)

@instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube

@insta_classics for X

email: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices