Ancient Lives with Mary Beard

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, starring Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway is filling cinema seats around the world and is already a hot favourite for the Oscars. But what is it about this 3000 year old story that captures the imagination of writers, directors and audiences today?
Film director, Uberto Pasolini created his own intense take on the legend with his recent film, The Return starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as his abandoned wife, Penelope. In this bonus episode of Being Greek, Mary Beard talks to Uberto about the themes of the Odyssey that still grip us today. For Mary and Uberto it's not the man-eating giants and seductive sirens that draw them in but Homer's timeless insight into family life and the reintegration of a long absent husband and father.
Producer: Alasdair Cross

Controlling the 2nd century city of Athens with their enormous wealth and intimate connections to the most powerful families in Rome were a local mobster, Herodes Atticus and his young Roman wife, Regilla. They spent their riches on lavish display, building theatres and athletic stadiums, sponsoring the Olympic Games and endowing temples where she was installed as the priestess of the gods. But this carefully curated world of influence came crashing down with accusations of corruption, deceit and murder.
It’s a story that’s fascinated the film director Martin Scorsese for many years and he joins Mary to analyse Herodes- a man caught between two worlds as a proud Greek profiting from his relationship with the empire that’s conquered his country.
He married when he was in his 40s, choosing a bride from a powerful Roman family who was only 14. Herodes had shown signs of a violent temper from an early age- even daring to get in a fist fight with a future Roman emperor. His reputation was sealed when Regilla, eight months pregnant, was killed by the blows of one of his lackeys.
A Greek man had apparently ordered the murder of a Roman woman from a family intimately connected to the imperial court. Surely nothing could save Herodes from his inevitable downfall?
Producer: Alasdair Cross
Researcher: Anna Charalambou
Production Co-ordinator: Tanwen Hughes
Actors: Stavros Demetraki as Philostratus with other readings by Robert Wilfort
Expert Contributors: Rebecca Sweetman of the British School at Athens, Martin Scorsese, Helen Dorey of Sir John Soane's Museum and Carrie Vout of Cambridge University
Sound Design: Ilse Lademann
Commissioned for BBC Radio Four by Daniel Clarke
Special thanks to the British School at Athens, Sir John Soane's Museum, the Archaeological Museum of Marathon and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture

Meet Gerys, a Bulgarian slave who sells fruit and veg in the marketplace of Ancient Athens. He’s been bought and sold, he’s done his time rowing warships for the Athenian navy but now he’s at the centre of the Greek world. Passing his stall, squeezing his olives and buying his wares are poets and philosophers, judges and generals. He hears the debates over the future of Athenian democracy, senses its peril and witnesses its downfall as the city is conquered by Sparta and a military junta imposed on its defeated people.
When the moment comes to rebel he’s one of the first in line to join the rag-tag army of democracy, march to the top of a hill in the port of Piraeus and face down the terrifying ranks of the Spartans and their Athenian anti-democratic allies.
Victory is won against the odds but what reward do Gerys and his family win for his bravery? Mary Beard enters the world of the Greek slave and asks what it takes to become a true citizen of Athens.
Producer: Alasdair Cross
Researcher: Anna Charalambou
Actor: Stavros Demetraki
Expert Contributors: Rebecca Sweetman, Elizavet Sioumpara and Vincent Azoulay
Special thanks to the British School at Athens and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture

When the German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, pulled a shining mask from the bone-dry earth of Mycenae he is said to have telegraphed the King of Greece with the words, ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon’. The unearther of Troy was convinced that he had found more proof that the stories of Homer were based on historical fact. Here was the grave of one of the legendary commanders of the Greek forces in the Trojan War.
Later analysis rubbished Schliemann’s romantic notions, but the graves on this hillside high above the Aegean hold many more fascinating secrets and, in this episode, Mary asks what we can learn from the bones and elaborate grave goods of a Mycenaean woman that archaeologists have labelled, Gamma 58.
Homer’s stories of war, adventure, family and homecoming never lose their appeal. Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is released in cinemas this month and Ralph Fiennes played Odysseus in last year’s highly acclaimed The Return. That film's director, Uberto Pasolini joins Mary and the novelist and historian Emily Hauser in a search for the real people that lie between myth and history. Gamma 58 isn’t Helen of Troy or Odysseus’s Penelope but she has her own story to tell of male power and female agency.
Producer: Alasdair Cross
Researcher: Anna Charalambou
Expert Contributors: Emily Hauser of Exeter University, Pontus Skoglund and Eirini Skourtanioti of the Francis Crick Institute and Rachel Phillips of the British School at Athens
Special thanks to the British School at Athens, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and the Francis Crick Institute

It took quite an effort for a woman to capture attention in Ancient Greece. You could be a beautiful goddess or a savage monster but high profile career options for flesh and blood women were rather thin on the ground. So why has the name of Myrrhine survived for two and a half thousand years?
We can find her name inscribed on a gravestone in the dusty corridors of the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, painted alongside the gods on an enormous funeral vase in the National Archaeology Museum. And she appears as the most cunning of the Greek wives withholding sex from their desperate husbands in the Lysistrata- the best known and most performed of the Ancient Greek comedies.
So who was Myrrhine, how did she achieve her contemporary fame and why does she still speak to us from the stage today? Mary’s search takes her from the back streets of Athens to the peak of the Acropolis.
Producer: Alasdair Cross
Researcher: Anna Charalambou
Actors: Robert Wilfort as Cinesias and Laura Dos Santos as Myrrhine
Expert contributors: Nikolaos Papazarkades of the University of California, Berkeley, Nick Lowe from Royal Holloway University of London, Tulsi Parikh of the British School at Athens and Andronike Makres of the University of the Peloponnese
Special thanks to the British School at Athens, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, the Epigraphic Museum of Athens and the National Archaeological Museum, Athens