Welcome back to our series on Objects of Crisis in which we look at
objects in the collection of the British Museu m to learn about
how people in the past have tackled major challenges, how they have prevailed
and sometimes faultered and today it is my
great pleasure to welcome Mary Beard
scholar, broadcaster, trustee of the British Museum
to ask her which object she has looked at.
The choice for me was very, very easy
there is a truly wonderful bronze head of the first Roman emperor Augustus
in the British Museum collection. It's a haunting head, it's very popular
partly because it still has its inlaid eyes so it doesn't have that vacancy
which so many ancient statues seem to have when the inlay has come out of their eyes
and I suppose I've been studying it for about 45 years which is a bit horrifying!
But my views about it and its importance have changed, it's a terribly...
it's a classic image of this first Roman emperor
but why is it in the British Museum?
It's in the British Museum
because it was fought over, it was controversial,
it was right at the middle
of first century power games,.
It's from a statue, it was once a full-length statue
it now only survives as a head.
A statue that must have been put up
in the province of Roman Egypt by the Roman officials as a kind of marker
of Roman power over the province so
So it starts its life as stamping the image of the Emperor
on the extremities of empire.
So that must have been right after the conquest
of the Roman conquest of Egypt and the integration of Egypt as a province
into the expanding Roman Empire?
It actually wasn't found in Roman Egypt
it was found further south in Sudan,
in what was then the Meroitic kingdom of
Rome's awkwardly hostile neighbours,
they no doubt thought that the Romans were their
awkwardly hostile neighbours too,
we don't really see it from their point of view.
But it was discovered
under the steps of a temple in the capital of the Meroitic kingdom
the city of Meroe. Why was it there? It can only be that uh
the people of Meroe in their ongoing conflicts, low-level conflicts with the
Romans in the in the province of Egypt they'd actually gone invaded,
snatched this statue, or at least its head, to be a marker of
their victory over Rome.
So the statue starts out life
as a mark of Roman power but that makes it a target
for Rome's enemies, who then as it were claim that statue for themselves, cut off
its head presumably in a wonderful gesture of
their control and they bury it under the steps of one of the main
temples of their city.
So what did the Romans do?
normally you know you, this is really defiant, you
take down the image of the ruler and you take it away
with hostages, so what did the Romans... what did Augustus do about that?
It's not a particularly decisive moment sure
look it's a decisive moment when you go and get that head and
you know you've got the simple little victory but
throughout the Roman Empire and particularly on its margins
you're going to be having repeated struggles, you know we call them border
struggles about power struggles it's about whose
image we see about who's boss here and the Roman
empire is much less orderly and rule-bound
than we give it credit for I mean basically what
they want is no trouble
they haven't got the manpower to
really stamp their control in a very active way over the
landscape, that's why statues are so useful for them
In a way they were there to guarantee cohesion?
You could put it like that, I don't
think that I would put it exactly like that I see where you're coming from
I think that I would kind of you know dig one layer deeper down
than that and say; how we image power,
how we image the divine, how we image ourselves in statue and painting
and what those images are for is always absolutely
central area of debate in any culture I mean I think one of the things that we
find with all you know even in our current debates about
the controversy over statues you know we're still wondering you know is a
statue just a blob, you know, is it a lump of stone?
Or a lump of metal? You know, it's not alive, we're alive,
the statue is powerless or is there something more in the statue
that does encapsulate the power and the character of the person or the
god he's represented?
Yeah or of the person, of the people who
put it up you know if you put up the
statue of somebody who was a slave trader
and a benefactor of his hometown
long after his death then it's all about those people who put
up this statue and make a statement with it
and then it sits there for us to look at it if we look at it because
all these statues the 19th century put up across the cities of Europe
mostly are not ever looked at they are just part of the the kind of city
furniture you know but of course sometimes and this is the
case now we very closely look at the symbolic
political meaning and that always leads us to ask who put them up, why were
they put up, who wanted to make which kind of statement
and are we still fine with that statement
or do we think today this statement does not represent
who we feel we are or who we feel we should be?
I think that's absolutely right and I think we
always ought to see and often in the past it's quite hard to untangle this
but we have to see there's a triangulation here between
the person represented, the person putting the statue up
you you know in the modern world you very rarely put up a statue to yourself
somebody else does it and the people who look at it and of course the people
who put the statue up and the people who
look at it they they're not homogeneous they change over time
they have different views about what they're doing and they have different
views about what they're seeing I think that
statues really, although we like to say
they were put up to celebrate the people and in part that must be true
I think the job of the statue, the function of the statue
is to help they're actually helpful in
debates about who we are, who we think we are, who
we want to admire but also debates about us you know and
I think that that is really crucial you know
you look at people who rightly i think in my view i mean
i think in almost everybody's view
rightly deplore let's say this the money of enslavement that
lay behind some of the most prominent statues in our public
spaces we rightly deplore that i think those
statues are partly there to remind us about ourselves and to ask us if we're
kind of quite convinced that we're clean and they're dirty? Where's modern
enslavement going on? And you know i'm as
guilty of this as anybody I don't look
at where the parts for my mobile phone are made
or by whom on what conditions and for me the role of the statue is to
nudge us and to produce and to ask us about ourselves
as much as or as well as asking us about these old fusty old blokes in the past.
So how do you balance because you don't put
the statue up as this is a contribution to public
debate the moment we put it up um let's get together around the statue
and debate controversially the ambiguous track record of this person.
So when that shifts and we become aware of aspects of that person which for us
are no longer acceptable which for us do not embody the ideals
according to which we aspire to live together as community also as a global
community and what what happens to the statue?
I think the the basic point here is that one size does not fit all
right and that there could be almost no one in the
world who thinks that all statues that were
ever put up should stay and that none should come
down and what we debate is which should come down or which
should stay. Nor do I think that the act of taking
statues down, you know this goes for the statue of the emperor Augustus,
that isn't erasing their history it's giving them more history.
The history of the so-called Meroe head
of Augustus that history is is actually embodied by
the iconoclasm, the looting and the power so it's you know you
don't get rid of something's history by removing it
I think that what what I would just press people to see
a bit more than they do you know I you know I'm going to confess I was very
pleased when Colston came down I'm not you know I'm not sitting here um
saying that I'm that i'm a great statue lover at all costs
but I think we have to see that that function of the statue is celebration
that's just one moment in the statues history you know
and it is a moment and for those there it's an important moment
but like many things in the world statues change their function
over time and they play different roles and they become different and they're
looked at differently and I think it can be useful
and I think profitable in terms of debate like we're having now I think
it's a good debate to say I don't want that anymore
one just has to be a bit careful about a degree of modernist self-righteousness
in all this you know and that's what you know i do want to say
so when we put up statues of our heroes what are they going to look like in 150
years time? What are people going to be saying about
us so acceptable you could no longer see us
in the public sphere so I think that these statues are
in part about generating a bit of humility
in the present which often tends to be rather over confident in its own moral
values and I think also it goes back to the um
you know the debates about what a statue is
I mean sometimes I look at these statues of Victorian gentlemen who they are
mostly gentlemen and almost none of them do I feel kind
of really on my side but I also think
you're just a statue and I'm alive we are now we control you
we use you how we want if we want to take you down we can
if we want to leave you up and say we don't want to do things like that
anymore or to say sometimes look
we have to remember where some of our wealth came from it's
no good pretending that we're all clean
we are the beneficiaries like it or not
of in this country enslavement and what are we going to do about it
you know because in the end what we're going to do about it is not
just take statues down we've got to do something
and there is a kind of way in which this is another function of statues and
always has been they sort of stand in for the person
or the ruler and we sort of deal with them
at a kind of symbolic level well let's get real
let's do something at a real level
And our discussion is just one contribution to this
going into the museum and taking the
debate out of the museum
Let's hope that's what I'd like.
Thank you so very much Mary.
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