Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics – Details, episodes & analysis

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Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics

BBC Radio 4

Comedy

History

Frequency: 1 episode/44d. Total Eps: 55

Natalie Haynes takes a fresh look at the ancient world, creating stand-up routines about figures from ancient Greece and Rome.

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Apple Podcasts

🇨🇦 Canada - standUp
04/09/2026
#12
🇬🇧 Great Britain - standUp
04/09/2026
#3
🇬🇧 Great Britain - comedy
04/09/2026
#98
🇩🇪 Germany - standUp
04/09/2026
#11
🇺🇸 USA - standUp
04/09/2026
#24
🇫🇷 France - standUp
04/09/2026
#6
🇨🇦 Canada - standUp
03/09/2026
#15
🇬🇧 Great Britain - standUp
03/09/2026
#3
🇬🇧 Great Britain - comedy
03/09/2026
#88
🇩🇪 Germany - standUp
03/09/2026
#8

Spotify

🇬🇧 Great Britain - trending
15/08/2026
#186
↗
🇬🇧 Great Britain - trending
14/08/2026
#195
↗

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Score global : 32%

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Saturnalia

Friday, December 27, 2024 • Duration 27:30

No togas today please. Natalie celebrates the mid-winter festival of Ancient Rome, Saturnalia. According to Catullus, it's the 'best of days'.

Expect cross-dressing, sweets, drinking games and the wearing of special pyjamas. Oh and anarchy and jokes. Sounds a bit like a Christmas pantomime? Not surprising, according to veteran pantomime dame André Vincent, who traces the origins of panto back to the fifth century. Early in that same century - late antiquity - a Roman Christian named Macrobius wrote the most comprehensive extant guide to Saturnalia, which was celebrated in some places, in one way or another, until possibly the eleventh century.

You are invited to be part of this festive show which includes gifts for the entire Radio Theatre audience (cue noisy rustling of sweet bags) and the wearing of traditional Saturnalian pointy hats (the 'pileus') to celebrate. Even Professor Llewelyn Morgan has one. Honest.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery

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Tacitus

Monday, August 12, 2024 • Duration 27:31

Tacitus is the great historian of imperial Rome. His writing is beautiful, unsettling, extraordinarily persuasive. We know many of his likes and dislikes about people and politics, but facts about his personal life? Not so much.

His memoir of Agricola tells us much fascinating detail about Roman Britain: that it's an island (the Roman fleet sailed all the way round, just to check), that it's very close to Spain (with only Ireland in between); that invading Anglesey was a great victory for the Romans. He notes that it rains a lot, but omits to mention the Druids. He is also, he says, dedicated to writing impartially. Natalie may disagree. Who needs evidence when you have Tacitus' persuasive prose? It's not as if we can cross-check, because so little of the written record of the time survives to us. Natalie's guest, (modern) historian Dan Snow, finds this hard to fathom. Her other guest, Professor Llewelyn Morgan, knows it's unwise to lament the lost work. We should value what remains and hope that some new bits of Tacitus may appear in the future.

And it turns out that by boat, Britain IS actually close to Spain. Travelling overland was hard going in Tacitus' day, so compared to that, the sea journey to Spain was easy.

Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. Here she explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be biographical, topographical, mythological or epic, but they are always hilarious, magical and tragic, mystifying and revelatory. And they tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery

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Martial

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 • Duration 27:29

Epigrams, jokes, highly-polished poems in praise of the Emperor. Oh, and absolute filth. These are what made the name of the first-century Roman poet Martial. It has taken nearly two thousand years for Martial's work to be considered a fit subject for study by classicists. His poems to the Emperor may have been as highly crafted as a Fabergé egg, but nestled beside these jewels, in the same volume, were works of 'incomprehensible obscenity'. The Romans loved both, apparently. His work is still funny, and still shocking.

Natalie is joined by Professor Llewelyn Morgan and comedian Robin Ince to discover what we can learn about the poet and his readers from his work, and if he can still make us laugh.

Spoiler: he can.

‘Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. She explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be biographical, topographical, mythological or epic, but they are always hilarious, magical and tragic, mystifying and revelatory. And they tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.

Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery

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Homer: The Odyssey

Sunday, September 4, 2022 • Duration 34:57

Natalie retells Homer's epic story in an extraordinary tour-de-force performance recorded in the BBC's Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House. The ancient original would most probably have been performed from memory, and Natalie does the same: twenty-four books in twenty-seven minutes. It's a story of homecoming.

Odysseus returns from the Trojan War, loses all his men in the course of his adventures, pauses for some pleasurable interludes of infidelity and some less pleasurable interludes of kidnap, and finally returns to his wife Penelope on the island of Ithaca after ten years of war and a further ten years of travelling.

‘Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. Here she explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be biographical, topographical, mythological or epic, but they are always hilarious, magical and tragic, mystifying and revelatory. And they tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.

This is the eighth series of the show and all the other episodes are available as podcasts on BBC Sounds.

Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery

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Lucretius

Sunday, August 28, 2022 • Duration 28:49

The poet Lucretius's major work is a six-book poem on epicurean philosophy and physics. Doesn’t sound exactly promising? But his contemporaries and poetic descendants RAVED about it, even Cicero, who is mean about everyone. Ovid says that ‘the verses of sublime Lucretius will die only on the day the world ends’. But the world nearly did end for his work because only one manuscript survived, lost for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance.

Guests include Professor Llewelyn Morgan and Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanists UK. Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery

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Spartan Women

Sunday, August 21, 2022 • Duration 28:57

Uniquely in the ancient world, women from Sparta had extraordinary rights and freedom. Relatively speaking. They were educated: they learnt to dance, sing, recite poetry and to keep fit, in a regime where physical beauty and feminine strength were prized. They were not expected to marry until they reached maturity, which meant fewer of them died in childbirth. Their gods were female and so was the company they kept, since boys were separated from their families at age seven, and raised to be soldiers in this highly militarised society.

With guests Professors Edith Hall and Paul Cartledge Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery

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Pompeii

Sunday, August 14, 2022 • Duration 28:54

It seems that classical scholars are wrong about the date of the volcanic eruption that destroyed the ancient city of Pompeii almost two thousand years ago. It's taken a few ripe pomegranates and some squashed grapes, carbonised by pyroclastic flow, to change our minds about this UNESCO World Heritage Site. The eruption was definitely in the year 79, but the month? Most written sources mistakenly suggest it was August but if you know your fruit, you will know that pomegranates and grapes ripen in the autumn in Italy. So the presence of these fruit in the remains of the city suggest the eruption must have taken place later in the year.

Natalie draws on the blisteringly dramatic account of the disaster by Pliny the Younger, writing to his friend, the historian Tacitus. She talks to archaeologist Dr Sophie Hay, who has spent nineteen years living and working in Italy and is a leading expert on the site. There are poignant details: many bodies discovered there were carrying keys, because people expected to be able to return to their homes once the eruption had subsided. Others had pillows wrapped around their heads to protect them from the pumice and lava raining down on them as they tried to escape.

With guests Dr Sophie Hay and Professor Llewelyn Morgan

Producer Mary Ward-Lowery

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Clytemnestra

Wednesday, June 9, 2021 • Duration 27:29

"Rock star classicist" and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. In these series she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.

Today Natalie stands up for Clytemnestra, who has been characterised as the worst wife in Greek mythology. This is open to debate: she's certainly a good mother, if a little bit murderous of her husband. But it turns out that Agamemnon probably deserves it. After all he sacrifices one of their daughters to Artemis without a second thought and then turns up at home years later with Cassandra, the future-seeing woman he has 'won' as a prize (also read: trafficked and enslaved) at the Battle of Troy. These actions demonstrate a certain lack of respect for his wife, as well as cruelty of the highest order. Cassandra reads the room, obviously, but nobody listens to her. Clytemnestra has a good legal brain and states her case convincingly. But it's unlikely to end well.

With Professor Edith Hall. Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery

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Jocasta

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 • Duration 27:43

Today Natalie stands up for Jocasta, whose second marriage was to Oedipus. Now for some spoilers if you're thinking of watching or reading Sophocles' play Oedipus Tyrannus.

After some years of happy marriage and four children, Jocasta discovers that Oedipus is, in fact, her son, and the murderer of her first husband (his father) Laius. Jocasta only has a few lines in the famous play, but we learn a remarkable amount about her character. She is smarter than her husband, quicker to understand what's happening and its implications. She is courageous. And she is quicker to act.

The story - in all its forms - is still spellbindingly shocking today.

With Professor Edith Hall. Produced by Mary Ward-Lowery for BBC Audio in Bristol

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Pandora

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 • Duration 27:51

Today Natalie stands up for Pandora, she of the box. Which turns out to have been a jar, and not a box, or a casket, or any of the other receptacles that have been depicted as containing all sorts of evils, and of course hope. It's Erasmus' fault, for a 16th century mistranslation.

A mythological equivalent to Eve with a bit of Sleeping Beauty thrown in, Pandora is described as 'beautiful evil', an irresistible punishment meted out on mankind by the god Zeus, who is annoyed with Prometheus for stealing fire. Pandora is made from clay and given a lovely silvery dress by Athene, and from her all women are descended. Once her jar is opened by Epimetheus (he was warned! but he didn't listen), and all the evil flies out, then mankind's carefree life is at an end. So, not really Pandora's fault at all.

With Professor Edith Hall.

Producer Mary Ward-Lowery

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Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

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Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify