Comfort Classics: Michael Beer

The world is in a state of upheaval at the moment, and we’re all looking for things to make us feel less anxious. Maybe Classics can help.

Today’s interview is with Michael Beer

Is there a source from the ancient world that you find yourself coming back to when you want to feel better?

Virgil’s Aeneid. I’ve studied and taught it for a number of years, both as a work of literature and as part of modules on Augustus. I’m continually changing my mind about how I feel about it. But its themes have so many resonances today. And it has some of the loveliest imagery and language in Latin literature.

Stories from Virgil - Aeneas and Helen — Illustrations from “Stories From Virgil” (1879) by the Reverend Alfred J. Church, from the designs of Bartolomeo Pinelli.

When did you first come across this text?

In school. I studied Latin for O level, and one of the set texts was Aeneid Book 6. It was the gateway drug for me.

Aeneas2 — Aeneas and Dido in the Underworld

Can you tell me a bit about the text and its context?

It’s a mainstay of most Classics course in schools and university, particularly any that look at the Augustan era. It’s often presented as a work of explicit propaganda for Augustus and his worldview, but there is so much more. Passages such as the parade of future Romans in Book 6 and the Shield of Aeneas in Book 8 may seem clumsy and bombastic, but it’s a tremendously nuanced work about the glamour and the horror of war. The stories of Nisus and Euryalus, or Camilla, are not the work of a crude imperialist. The tensions and ambiguities of the text provide great discussions for students.

Aeneas3 — Aeneas and the shade of Creusa

What is it about this poem that appeals to you most?

So hard to choose one thing, but I think it must be the ending. We get the triumph of Aeneas over Turnus, and so theoretically a happy conclusion. And yet the ending is resolutely downbeat, with the execution of Turnus. The triumphalist national epic becomes a morally ambiguous one, with a new society about to be forged not on magnanimity and mercy, but as one stained with the blood of an execution carried out in a spirit of angry revenge. A comment on the realities of realpolitik or a subtle critique of Roman cultural identity? I change my mind almost every time I read it.

And finally… what do you do, outside of Classics, to cheer yourself up?

I find a mountain, or a forest, and I walk. Preferably listening to an audiobook. I discovered years ago that walking was a guaranteed way of lifting a mood as well as helping the thought processes: solvitur ambulando.

Michael Beer is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter.

“Since my PhD on food taboos and identity in Greek and Latin texts, I have taught classical subjects in a variety of contexts, mostly for A level and undergraduate.

My research interests are cultural identity, Greek cultural interaction with Rome, late republican Rome and early imperial period, Roman Egypt. I also have a soft spot for Elagabalus.

Most recently, I have written ‘Sensory deception and manipulation in ancient aristocratic banquets’, a chapter for an interdisciplinary volume ‘Luxury and the senses: the past, present and future’, originally intended for publication by Bloomsbury in 2019, but now scheduled for 2021/22. It attempts to link molecular gastronomy, the recipes of the Italian Futurists and the banquets of Domitian and Elagabalus. I’m currently researching attitudes to body modification, piercing and tattooing amongst Graeco-Roman elites.”