Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm Jonathan Banness, and every week I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

And this week's episode is even more special than usual because we have not won, but two experts.

Welcome to the show, Professor Sarah Deadevo and Nandini Ponday, where I ask them, how did they think about diversity in the ancient Mediterranean?

Welcome to Get Curious, have we got an episode for you? We're going into the time machine and you know there's no place I love to go more than that.

So you know on our show, we've learned that we can't apply our contemporary understandings of gender, sexuality and race to the past.

Today we're going back to Greco Roman antiquity to learn more about ancient understandings of diversity. Our guests are amazing. I'm so excited that they're here.

First we have Sarah Deadevo, who is an assistant professor of classics at Stanford University. Come on resume. She's also the author of the new book, Untangling Blackness and Greek antiquity.

Title is giving me everything. Welcome Sarah and we have Nandini Ponday, who is an associate professor of classics at Johns Hopkins University.

She studies ethnic and cultural diversity in the Roman Empire. Welcome to getting curious you too.

Thank you, thank you, Tana, that I feel like you should introduce my classes because I just feel like a drum roll would follow and then students would do all their work.

Oh my gosh, I would be a really good hype person for like college professors. I feel like here's the thing. I was mining my own business this one day on getting curious and we were interviewing Sarah Bond, who we love.

And that's how we discovered all of your gorgeous work. I always thought that like Greece and Rome were operating in like different times and that like there was like no overlap.

I just thought that it like basically just looks like gladiator kind of like fuzzy like you know wheat and there was like kind of any ask music playing everywhere.

Dashed it a little bit of Pompeii and I was like I get it. Honey, I don't get it. So just like very fascinated by like how people understood things in different times.

And I think I'm also really fascinated by like that. Encrat me if I'm wrong either of you want to jump in here, but like race was still a thing even back then it was just like different.

You're good. Right.

Absolutely. And I think even what race means is so explosive because when we think about race, we can't not think about skin color. But like you were saying, even if we think about family orientations, how someone identifies, how many husbands or wives someone has.

There's so many other ways of figuring out how to categorize people. So I feel like this is an area that we all want to revisit it. We need to remember that we have these modern goggles and that we can't take them off completely.

But being really conscious of it is useful. I think we need to do that for every category. And when it comes to skin color, we need to be especially careful because of the ways that anti blackness still informs our present.

And how it is to say black equals slavery through time immemorial and we never even need to think about why we have that assumption or how that assumption is one that was built on slave traders in the 15th century onward really entrenching their policies through practice and language.

And it actually does not apply in the same ways to a time period centuries millennia before a single person was forced to be transported from Africa to the Americas.

And if we work with an expansive definition of race as power shaping populations and controlling populations through categories that are often imaginary or based on changeable factors, sometimes skin color, sometimes gender, sometimes other things.

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