Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

It's a watercolour hanging on the wall of the Walker Gallery in Liverpool.

It's by Samuel Austin.

He taught art, but he had to leave his job at a ladies' academy because the students found him

distractingly good-looking. He painted this in 1826. It's a picture of a city. The caption says

Carthage, the city of Queen Dido, the queen who responded to the refugee crisis triggered by the Greek sacking of Troy by taking in boatloads of survivors.

Among them the famous hero, Aeneas, who's in this picture.

Eneas, whose descendants were the founders of Rome.

But Carthage was in Africa. Wikipedia tells me it was in

modern-day Tunisia. And I've never been to Tunisia, but the architecture in this picture looks

strangely familiar. It's classical or maybe neoclassical. So where are we? Well, before we

establish the subject of this edition of

free-thinking, we need to get our bearings. I need somebody who's a classicist and a

critic. So Natalie Haynes, where are we? We are in Carthage as imagined by Rome, as

imagined in turn by neoclassicists in the 19th century.

So we're looking at a long history of interpretation and reinterpretation.

We really are.

And then of course you have to take into account the fact that this version of Carthage that

we're seeing is imagined by Virgil when he writes the

Aeneid and that he in turn is reimagining the Greeks. He is reimagining Homer. So when we see

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