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Hello, everyone, it's Tom Holland here and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic

themes in ancient history.

And today we are looking at the Trojan War.

Here's a short extract of that episode.

Hello everybody and welcome to Layton House in Kensington in London.

It's a gorgeous, beautiful, very grand house full of Arabic touches and classical

touches, gorgeous garden where we had an Athelstan party. And we've come here because we need

a sumptuous location for an imperious guest. And that guest is the most famous classicist in the world

and a woman to whom I owe personally an enormous amount because she was the person who first

read Rubicon, my first book on classical history in manuscript. So ever since, I've been incredibly grateful to her,

as well as being her biggest fan. And it is, of course, the great, the one and only Mary Beard.

Tom, thank you very much. I mean, Leighton House is my favourite place in London, and it's great to

talk to you. And you've just

done what you always do. You always say, when you introduce me, she was really kind to me back in

the day before I'd written Rubicon. You were Professor of Classics at Cambridge. You've written

a lot of wonderful books aimed at more popular market as well as all your academic studies.

So you've written books on the Parthenon, for the general reader, Pompeii, the Caesars.

And we're meeting here because we thought it would be fun, the two of us, to discuss the most iconic subjects in ancient history, classical history,

...