Instant Classics

Last episode, Mary and Charlotte looked at how Homer’s Odyssey was reinterpreted in the Ancient World by writers like Euripides, Virgil and Ovid. In this episode, they show how it shaped English fiction - from Shakespeare through to Madeline Miller. They are joined by Jonty Claypole - Instant Classics producer and co-host of the Secret Life of Books podcast.

One of the great turning points of English literature was George Chapman’s translations of Homer in the 1590s and 1600s which introduced a new generation to Homer’s writing - including Shakespeare who seems to respond to Chapman (and Homer) in plays like Troilus and Cressida and The Tempest.

A hundred years later, the novel emerges with a series of books - Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews - which are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, responses to The Odyssey. Homer also inspired some of the greatest poems in the English language, including John Keats’ On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and Tennyson’s Ulysses.

Finally, Mary, Charlotte and Jonty look at how The Odyssey continues to inspire revision and reinterpretation - whether Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad or Madeline Miller’s Circe.

Further reading:

Richard Holmes’ recent book The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief (Harper Collins, 2025) contains a brilliant description of Tennyson’s Ulysses and the circumstances behind its competition.

Several modern versions of Homer are discussed by Henry Power in his Homer-Haunted: the many after-lives of an ancient poet (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Edith Hall explores how the various themes of the Odyssey have been adapted by many modern authors in The Return of Ulysses: A cultural history of Homer’s Odyssey (free online).

Jonty’s podcast is Secret Life of Books, which he co-hosts with Sophie Gee. Recent episodes go into more depth on some of the topics above - including whole episodes on Tennyson’s Ulysses and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

There is a free online text of Chapman’s Homer here

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Producer: Jonty Claypole

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Theme music: Casey Gibson

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Ever since the Odyssey was composed, people have retold the story, played with it or used it as a departure point for similar or related stories. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte look at what happened next. How the Odyssey inspired other writers long before Christopher Nolan thought of adapting it for the big screen.

As now, the ancients were drawn to certain episodes more than others. One was the cyclops, who becomes the unlikely subject of a satyr play (think Benny Hill sex comedy) by the playwright Euripides in the 5th century BCE. two hundred years later, the poet Theocritus imagines the cyclops as an articulate, love-sick shepherd. Meanwhile, Apollonius of Rhodes responded to the epic scope of Homer’s story with the Argonautica - a famous story about Jason and his crew of Argonauts searching for the Golden Fleece.

Roman authors were equally drawn to the Odyssey. Virgil used it as a template for a foundation myth for Rome - a Trojan prince leaves Troy, experiences various adventures, including a trip to the underworld, and ends by founding Rome. Ovid, who takes a rather less referential approach to the Odyssey in his Metamorphoses, has a brilliant scene where he retells the Circe story from the point of view of Odysseus’ men as they are turned into pigs.

Further reading

The Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes is available in World’s Classics and Penguin Classics English translations

Plutarch’s Gryllus is available online in translation

Theocritus’s Idylls are available in translation online - Idyll 11 is the Cyclops poem

Ovid’s Metamorphoses can be found in many translations, and also a decent one online. Circe and her pigs appear in book 14

Virgil’s Aeneid – there are many recent translations including by Sarah Ruden from Yale and online.

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Producer: Jonty Claypole

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson



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Few elements of ancient Rome have inspired quite such lurid speculation – by the Romans as well as ourselves – as the vestal virgins. Mary and Charlotte enter the (imaginary) temple of Vesta to separate fact from myth.

The Vestal Virgins were six (at any given time) priestesses who tended the eternal flame at the Temple of Vesta - goddess of hearth, home and family. As their name suggests, they weren’t allowed to have sex, although could retire from duties (and marry) at the age of 30. Maintaining chastity was evidently a challenge of the job - or perceived as one - because several vestals were put to death for breaking their vows over the centuries. In exchange for this life of piety, they enjoyed certain privileges - such as being able to sit in the front row of the colosseum - and were power-brokers in Rome, even looking after Julius Caesar’s will (for any Dune fans, think Bene Gesserit!)

Charlotte grills Mary about an early article she wrote on the Vestals in 1980, in which she argued that the role of the virgins wasn’t to adhere to traditional notions of female purity, but actually to challenge them - the vestals shared privileges unique to married women, unmarried women and men. They were both gendered and ungendered, which is what makes them so compelling. Fifteen years later, Mary wrote another article which took (slight) issue with her earlier one, questioning to what extent the Romans even had ‘traditional notions’ of gender.

Further reading

Mary’s landmark (this is Charlotte’s editorialising!) article on the Vestal Virgins (“The sexual status of Vestal Virgins”) was published in the Journal of Roman Studies 1980; her reassessment is in R Hawley and B Levick (eds), Women in Antiquity: New Assessments (Routledge, pb, 1995)

Booklength studies of the Vestals include:

Robin Wildfang, Rome’s Vestal Virgins (Routledge, pb, 2006)

S. A. Takacs, Vestal Virgins, Sibyls and Matrons (UTexas Press, pb, 2008)

Ariadne Staples, From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins (Routledge, pb, 2012)

For their portraits: Molly Lindner, Portraits of the Vestal Virgins (UMichigan Press, 2015)

At the time she wrote her first article on the Vestals, Mary was very influenced by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (Routledge, pb, reissued 2002; originally published 1966)

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Producer: Jonty Claypole

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson



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Mary and Charlotte talk to best-selling author Robert Harris about his new novel ‘Agrippa’. Robert Harris has published 16 novels, of which nine have been made into films, including The Ghost Writer, Enigma and the Oscar-winning papal thriller Conclave. Five of Robert’s novels are set in Ancient Rome: the Cicero Trilogy, Pompeii and Agrippa.

Robert discovered Agrippa while researching the Cicero Trilogy and became increasingly interested in this decisive, but largely forgotten figure, whose legacy is everywhere in Ancient Rome. He describes what interested him in the story: the friendship between the aristocratic Augustus and his plebeian sidekick, and the tension that inevitably developed between the two. He compares Augustus and Agrippa to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, only with higher stakes.

Further reading:

We covered the history of this period in the last episode, with further reading in the shownotes.

If you haven’t read Robert’s other Roman novels, they are all available in paperback:

Pompeii (Arrow pb, 2009) (A younger Mary Beard “fact-checked for the hard-back version of this – though didn’t find many mistakes!)

The Cicero Trilogy, Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator (Arrow pb, 2009, 2010, 2016)

Aprippa is published in hardback by Hutchinson Heinemann, 27 August, 2026

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Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson

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Of all the Roman Emperors, Augustus has the reputation of being the most… well… august. That is to say, competent, level-headed and judicious. Not to mention one of the few who died of natural causes. But, according to Mary and Charlotte, the main reason Augustus got anything done is because he had a secret weapon in the form of Marcus Agrippa.

We don’t know much about Marcus Agrippa’s early life, because he didn’t come from the aristocracy, but by the time he was thirty Augustus couldn’t do much without him. There is evidence that Agrippa managed the battles for which Augustus is famous, including the Battle of Actium, while Augustus pulled another sickie. When not defeating Rome’s enemies, Agrippa put a great deal of energy into building works. He constructed baths, temples (including the original Pantheon) and aqueducts. There are even stories of him getting onto a boat and rowing amidst the faeces of the Cloaca Maxima - Rome’s sewage system - to oversee improvements.

While Agrippa did not come from the upper classes, he ended up there. He is buried with the imperial family in the mausoleum of Augustus (which you can still visit) and his great-grandson Nero became emperor. Perhaps, when we call some great figure ‘august’, we should call them ‘agrippan’ instead!

Further reading:

Lindsay Powell, Marcus Agrippa: Right-hand man of Caesar Augustus (Pen and Sword, pb, 2023) is the fullest recent biography of Agrippa (otherwise, in English, you have to go back to the 1930s)

For the archaeology, the Pantheon in Rome remains Agrippa’s greatest and most visible monument, with his name prominently displayed (albeit rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian, probably to a new plan).

The probable residence of Agrippa and Julia in Rome lies underneath the later, Renaissance, Villa Farnesina near the Tiber bank. Both were exquisitely decorated. You can still see Raphael's designs in the later villa. Most of the major ancient paintings from Agrippa’s property have been removed to the Palazzo Massimo museum. The archaeology is briefly discussed here: https://www.digitalaugustanrome.org/records/villa-farnesina/

Paintings from another villa owned by Agrippa, at Boscotrecase outside Pompeii, can be seen in the Met Museum in New York.

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@insta_classics for X

email: instantclassicspod@gmail.com

Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci

Producer: Jonty Claypole

Video Editor: Jak Ford

Theme music: Casey Gibson



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