Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit

‘Vestis virum reddit’ they’d say in ancient Rome: and the recent career of Mary Beard testifies to the conviction two millennia on that clothes do indeed make the man – and woman too. Here is the brainy superstar of Newnham College, one of the leading classical historians of our era. Yet the focus all too often has been not on her intellect but instead the drab matter of what Professor Beard chooses to wear.

If such superficiality is a worrying symptom of our culture’s condition, that only makes Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit (Wednesday, BBC2, 9pm) even more essential viewing for us to learn how to avoid decline and fall.

This four-part series is part history, part travelogue, as Professor Beard is our guide from the chilly north of England to the Sahara, Spain to Israel, Algeria to the Rhine. Somehow this vast area came to be conquered and ruled by a people who traced their roots back to a once modest town in the middle of Italy. You will know the myth of how Rome was founded by the twins Romulus and Remus after they had been abandoned in the forest and brought up by a she-wolf or ‘lupa’. Beard gives the tale a scandalous twist with the revelation that the Latin word also translates as – how can one put it? – a Roman lady of the night. There’ll be no dozing off at the back of the class when Professor Beard’s in charge.

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