Livy
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Join Natalie Haynes and guests for half an hour of comedy and the Classics from the BBC Radio Theatre in London.
Natalie is a recovering comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greece and Rome. Each week she takes a different figure from the Ancient World and tells their story through a mix of stand-up comedy and conversation.
Today she stands up in the name of Roman historian Livy, who gave us Hannibal crossing the Alps and the inspiration for Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Meticulously researched facts or a damn fine story? History or myth? Mostly the latter, but priceless nonetheless.
Elephants, early science and a lot of essential information from a thousand years ago.
With special guests comedian - and history buff - Al Murray and classicist Professor Llewelyn Morgan. Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:04.9 | Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Livy. |
| 0:18.8 | The historian Livy ought to give him his full name, Titus Livia's Patavinas. |
| 0:23.4 | He was born in Padua, Patawenum, to the Romans, around 59 BCE. |
| 0:28.2 | And we don't know very much about him, but not for the usual reasons on this programme. |
| 0:32.9 | His life is attested just fine, and lots of his work survives. |
| 0:35.9 | The reason we don't know much about him beside his work is because Livy was a monomaniac. Livy loves history. He loves it. He loves it |
| 0:45.5 | more than I do, and I like it a lot, right? Although I only like ancient history, which I date |
| 0:50.6 | from any time before the death of Constantine or something. Everything after that, to me, modern history. |
| 0:56.0 | Although good news, of course, it meant that for me, Wolf Hall Thriller. |
| 0:58.6 | No idea what was going to happen. |
| 1:01.8 | I honestly thought she was going to get off for ages. |
| 1:05.1 | I couldn't believe it. |
| 1:07.6 | You're kidding. |
| 1:08.7 | My mum is like, really? |
| 1:10.7 | So, Livy is a massive history nerd. |
| 1:12.9 | He starts writing his immense history of the city of Rome at the age of about 30. |
| 1:19.4 | And he is only interrupted 40 years later by his own death. |
| 1:26.3 | He writes 142 books of the history of Rome. |
| 1:32.4 | We've got about 35 of them. |
| 1:34.2 | We've got pretty much a quarter of his output. |
| 1:36.8 | He sets out to cover pretty much seven centuries of history |
... |
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