RHLSTP | Richard Herring

Mary Beard

16 February 2024

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Emperor of Rome

Another live RHLSTP Book Club coming fittingly from the oldest recorded Roman City in England, Colchester. Rich and Mary discuss whether they might be on the site of Camelot, Boudicca's decision to level the place to the ground and what year it might have happened, plus the controversy over which month Pompeii met its fate. But mainly they talk about her fab book Emperor of Rome and her podcast Being Roman. Did the excesses and jokes of the Roman emperors really happen? Is Donald Trump like Elagabalus? How do we know that Augustus was called on to judge the case of the slave who killed someone with a chamber pot? Are we able to find out about the lives of ordinary Romans? And where is the earliest known depiction of the crucifixion and how would the person who drew it feel about it being discussed so many hundreds of years later?