 Mae'r stref yma yn anodol, mae'r stryda sydd yn ei gweld. Mae'r hyffordd yn ein hyffordd yn hyffordd yn gweithio'r cyfnod. Ond mae'r cyfeiriau yn enwedig, mae'r ffemol iawn i gynnig i'r hollwyr yn Hollywood, mae'r ffemol iawn i'r hollwyr i'r hollwyr yn gweithio'r ffemol iawn i gynnig i'r hollwyr. i chi'n ddweud, ond mae'n gweithio'r cyfrifol yn ymweld, fel y byddwch chi'n gwybod yn ymddangos, yn y ffyrdd yma. Welcam. Rwy'n Brian Schmidt. Rwy'n gwybod yn Y Cosmologi, ac rwy'n gweithio'r gwybod yn y Tych yn Ymddon yn Allasghaf. Rwy'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r Unedig Nesafol. A gennyn gyda'r bair hwnna diwethaf gweithio ar y Tyn ni yw hefyd peiriau yw'r amlodau iawn. Yn Ymddangos Mary Beird, ein profesiadu ceisgrannu a'r Unedig Nesafol. Mae'n canhwch ar Ffyrdd y Tyn, gyda'r Pwysig, fe fyddwnyn, fel yr hyn yn ei ffordd, ac mae'n rhoi'r ffyrdd eich vlog fi, rydyn ni'n bod yn gweithio'r blog i Ddon. Mae'n cofnir, roedd yn ddod yna heddiogol, dwi'n credu kunnaig, Not her as learned but accessible which seem to be a slightly interesting way of describing it, but often described as the world's most famous classicist, which I would say at some levels also may be damning with faint praise. That's what my husband says? To me I guess I would say she's more than that, a true public intellectual, perhaps dyma'r cyfnod o'r cwmhwysau arwyr argynwyr arweithio. Felly yn rhoi cyfnod oedd yn ystod genedlai, dyma'r cyfnod o'r amddogau cyfnod o'r cyfnod. Mae hwn yn ffodol iawn yma i hefyd i eich chesaf i fynd i chi, a'i gweithio eu chesaf i'r hodd. Yn ystod, dyma'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod. Mae'n adrodd gael ar gyfer dyma. Rwy'n meddwl gwybwy ni ein rydyn nhw. Mae'n adrodd ei fod yn llull yn cyfnodol. Mae hyn sy'n gyffredig ein bod yn ddechrau'r adrodd. Rwy'n meddwl gael ar gyfer y cyfnodol. Mae'n adrodd fel rhyw bryd i wen yn ysgrifthu gyn nhw'n gweld. Belyd don e塵i'r ymu. Blyd ei fod yn ymraed. Blyd ei fod yn yn ymraed. Rwy'n meddwl yw eu bod yn maelio gael eich teulu, sy'n fawr o'r cyllidell na ddりfodur i mi yn lleidio ysgrifennu a'r panel i'n deudio ar y cyllidell yn bleidio? Ddurwn ni'n ddweud i hynny. Proses ystod y llifon wedi всёnd a fawr i chi, teimd gwyl i'r blestau a haf o tek yn ei gweithio'r byd y cyllidell ac mae'n ddwy'n gilyddol o fasilwenydd a fïgu. Rwy'n ddim yn ddwy'n gilyddol yn d inductionol, ac mae'n ddysgu'n ddwy'r panel I set ther in a historical context. I'm a classicist, and I'm a rather old fashioned classicist in many ways. I've read Home as Odyssey since I was a teenager. There was one passage that I must have read 10 or 15 times but only noticed about 10 years ago, which is the beginning of the Odyssey. ac mae'n gwybod i gyddoedd o'r gwybod, yma, y mynd i chi'n gwneud i ddechrau Gerddorodd. Felly mae'n gweithio, mae'n gweithio'r Yngrifordd, yma'n gweithio i gyd yn Ithaca. Mae gennym ni'r lleidio, rhai amser oherwydd allwch yn bwysigol, maen nhw'n gallu'n gweithio'r gweithio, mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio. Os yw, mae'n gweithio'r gweithio. ac yn siŵn, mae'n gweithio panellopau yn ystod y cyngor yn y cerddau'r llymigau, gyda'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio, rydyn ni'n cyfrifio ar gyfer adysius, ac yn y cerddau'r cyfrifio ar gyfer adysius yma. Roeddwn ni'n mynd i'r stori o'r oedysius i'r stori o adysius yma, ond mae'n ddysius i'r stori o'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio. A'r cerddau panellopau yn ystod y cyfrifio ar gyfer adysius yma, ac mae'n gweithio yn ystod y cyfrifio ar gyfer adysius i'r stori o adysius, ac mae'n cyfrifio ar y cyfrifio ar gyfer adysius i'r stori o adysius yma, ac yn pethu'r cyfrifio ar gyfer agor aelodau, o'ch bywch yn cerddau'r cyfrifio ar gyfer adysius, i'n gweithio ar gyfer adysius. Pynalepe gwybod i'n fwyaf yw'r rhai yn y bryd yn ystod yn y gallu'r fawr chyfyddiadau, fwyaf, gwybod i'r fawr, o'r tymwcys, oherwydd felly mae'n rhaid i'ch ddweud cyhoeddion yng Nghymru, oherwydd yn ystod, oherwydd yn ystod, oherwydd yn ystod, oherwydd yn ystod, oherwydd e'n gwybod i'r gweithio. Mae'r mwy ysgrifennu ei ddweud yn ystod, oherwydd mae'n ystod, oherwydd mae'n mynd yn ystod, oherwydd mae Pynalepe i'n ystod. Now, I have I managed to read that for about 30 years of my adult life and never notice it? I don't know, but once you have noticed it, you say, here we are, here we are, guys. We're at the very beginning of Western Literature. And what's happening to women? She's been told to shut up, and even more, her son is learning to be a grown-up man by shutting his mum up. That's... It's not just that he's being a kind of an awkward teenager, he's doing what he should do. And there is no bit of the history, I will say confidently, of the history of the west, but I think it goes a lot further than that. There's no bit of the history of the west in which that scenario has not been replayed ever since. Rwy'n cael ei wneud o'r rhan o bwysig. Mae bobl King pawb pwynteth, dweud a directilicio, rhan o bwysig o'r rhan o bwysig a dyma? Is yn ôl i gynhyrchu sy'n cyfnogaeth sy'n gael eich pwyntaeth, dwi'n bod fy neu ar yr amser mawr. I can guarantee, I'll not be proved wrong, of course, but I can pretty well guarantee there's not a woman on the planet who doesn't know what that feels like. There are all kinds of other factors involved. There is race and there's class and there's privilege of all kinds of other ways. But actually, when it comes down to it, the history of the world is a history of men not listening to women. Hi by that. The world could do to listen to a lot of other people, I have to say, but they certainly should start by listening to women. Hard for me to argue, as someone who watches within a university, conversations occur and being gobsmacked sometimes by how they play out. So that is a particular case of Penelope, because she is portrayed, I guess, from my memory of reading that when I was young, as what I would describe as a very, I had a very strong mother, so I've been indoctrinated in some form of feminism, even if it wasn't particularly described that in my youth. And to me, she was just a very weak character, Penelope. Penelope is really savvy. Penelope, she's the one, she should tell the bar to shut up, and she's the one who's got all those blokes crowding into the palace. Odysseus is still coming back. They all think, right, okay, I want to marry that woman, because then I will be king of this outfit. And what does Penelope do every night? Well, she says to them, okay, you can marry me when I've finished my piece of weaving. And every day she weaves that, every night she pulls it out, and so she never finishes the piece of weaving. Now that, you can say, as many an ancient Greek would have, there's female wiles for you. You can't ever trust a woman, can you? She never does what she's going to say. But, you know, in a sense, Penelope, okay, there is one image of her as the perfect faithful wife who was waiting for Odysseus to come back home. But she's damn smart, you know, and what I think is extraordinary is that even the damn smart middle-aged savvy woman who's been rearing this monster Telemachus, I mean, she gets monstered by him. And does what he says, you know? And I guess as it is interesting from my male perspective, I guess I see that as perhaps a woman not empowered, but what you're telling me is she actually was empowered within the confines of society of the day. Yeah, she's, you know, she's fighting it. She's fighting it unsuccessfully. And, you know, and I think you can say, look, you know, this is almost 3,000 years ago, and it doesn't matter, whether Penelope is told to shut up or not. But actually, within the context of, first of all, classical, but then European and more wide culture more generally, that scene has never ceased to be replayed. And that's, you know, if it was just a one-off bit of aberrance, you know, the beginning of a very old work of Western literature, you know, who cares? But it's actually that you see there in a nutshell what has happened ever since. So let's talk about some of the works back in this time where women seemingly are empowered or have power, but it's always done in a very simple way. You can choose whichever one you want, but since we're talking, I guess, if we look at Agamemnon, for example, in the same story of the war, how is strength in female portrayed? I mean, I think ancient Greece has been a very interesting lens through which to look at this. And it's partly an interesting lens because there are, at first sight, a number of powerful women. I'm not talking about daily life. I'm meaning the mythological stories, the literary fictions, really, of ancient Greece. And one of the things that kind of attracted me to it as a subject to study, you know, if you're a sort of feisty feminist teenager, you don't like studying a society which is simply a load of patriarchy and sexism from top to bottom. You do get entranced, and there is something complicated about this. You get entranced by the powerful women who take control, you know, Medea, who's deserted by Jason, saying that I'd rather stand in the battle line ten times than give birth to a baby once. You know, who do you think you're brave? Oh, guys. And so there is a very strong rhetoric there of women, fictional women only, fictional women speaking out. Now, what I think you come to see later, you know, happily I didn't come to see it until after I felt more confident about my own relationship to this subject, is what happens to powerful women in Greek fiction, something bad, you know? You know, the idea, you know, there is Clytemnestra, you know, the wife of Agamemnon, who kills the bastard actually when he comes back from the Trojan War, he's slaughtered their daughter in order to get good omens from the gods in order to sail to try. She's taken a lover and she kills him. But every moment that you see male, female power in the ancient world, you know that you can write the end of the story. This is going to go, female power always goes to the bad. Right? And that's, and there is not a single example I'm prepared to pledge this where female power works well. Women in Greek fictionalised mythology are there to show that women are incapable of ruling. So the myth of matriarchy that we often think about, look back in those early Greek myths and you see powerful women, no you don't, you see a justification for the rule of men because women can never be trusted to rule. Look at the Amazons, you know? The warrior women race. What happens to the Amazons? They get slaughtered. What about someone like Antigone who strikes me as being maybe... She doesn't have a happy ending. She had a dignity. I mean I think men have always said that about Antigone. That's their dignity, you know? But I think, look, I'm oversimplifying and over-critifying it because if the nuances of Greek literature was quite as simple and straightforward as I'm saying, I think it's pretty much that, but if it was quite as simple, it would be a pretty unsophisticated thing to be reading. And I think that one of the challenges of Greek literature, it's, apart from the poetry of Sappho, everything that survives is written by men. Part of the challenge of Greek literature is that some of these male playwrights can actually ventrally inquise a version of women's complaints. So they build into these plays, although the end is always the same. They can construct an image of gender wars in a way that I think does engage you. So I would not like you to think that people like Euripides or Sophocles are not worth reading because the women always die in the end, although that's broadly speaking true. They are actually on the way to that. They are problematising it. They are saying, so what might the woman's voice sound like here? Go to Roman, the poet of it, who's as nasty a piece of work as you could want, I think, but he writes a series of poems in which he imagines what the abandoned women of classical mythology would say to the men who abandoned them. Now, in the end, we're not going to elevate Ovid to be a pioneer of any sort of modern feminism, but what I think is interesting is that Ovid can at least play with that idea and say, what would it be like to be on the other side of this? And you find other aspects of kind of interesting attempts to think outside the box. There's a famous little bit of Greek mythology, which is a question of, do men or women enjoy sex more? And there's only one person who can answer this question, and it's the prophet Tiresias, who in the gender fluidity of the ancient world, which is something in a sense I think we're seeing again, in the fluidity of the ancient world, Tiresias has spent several years as a woman. So you have the male prophet who has been female. But of course what Tiresias comes out with is the idea that women have the best time in sex. Playing into another kind of ancient conceit, which is the poor phallic patriarchal man, is always outsmarted by the woman. Now, how many times have we heard that? So I'm actually curious, because at one point I read the complete works of Sappho, which if you've done so, you'll realize it's actually not a huge accomplishment, because it's not much. Sappho was apparently revered as a very capable poet of her time, but how was she portrayed back then? I mean, as near as I can tell, they again had a way to diminish her. She ends up throwing herself off a cliff. Yet another example of the creative, in this case powerful with her words, Sappho, ends up committing suicide in love for a man. So you have the lesbian poet of antiquity, lesbian both in the sense that she comes from the island of Lesbos and giving her word to our sense of the word lesbian. They called her the 10th muse, a brilliant poetry, but she always, they have to be got rid of, so she falls in love with this fine character and throws her and commits suicide. So I think that, as I said, I don't want to credify this, because the end of the story is always the same, but the way you get there is not always the same, and I think quite a lot of... I think this is going to sound very... I don't mean it to sound conservative, but I think that some of the people in the world who see the ambivalences and the difficulties of oppression most, well, they're not only the oppressed, they're sometimes the oppressors. But I have a benevolent enough view of human nature that I think that it is actually morally and emotionally hard to oppress another class, and you have to go to enormous intellectual lengths to justify that to yourself. We've seen that all over the world. It's tough, and I think that Ancient Greece and Rome in terms of the gender politics of Ancient Greece and Rome have bequeathed to us some quite complicated ways in which men justify the oppression and suppression of women. So did women ever get the last word, and so I'm thinking of Fulvia, and that's covered in your book. It strikes me that she didn't she get the last word in, sort of one way or another. We can talk about that. There's a very nasty story about the wife of Mark Antony who in the middle of Roman civil wars gets to see the head of her enemy, Cicero, displayed in the Roman Forum. They've decapitated him, and they've put the head up in the Roman Forum in the middle of a very nasty civil war. The story is that Fulvia takes a pin out of her hair and she pierces the tongue of the head. The tongue which Cicero, whose head it was, had given some of the most devastating hostile speeches against her husband. That's a scene that has been very popular with later painters who've done things like imagine Fulvia taking the head home, putting it on her bed, and doing it. A very erotic pose. Huge thing. A little weird. I think that, look, we can spin that story and we can turn it over to his head and think that this is righteous female revenge. When it's told by ancient writers, this is an example of true horror. This is the woman who is doing precisely what you fear women might not be able to do. She is not respecting the head of the dead. She has a very nasty record of doing all those things that women are supposed to do, like seducing innocent poets. She's transgressing. She transgressively involves herself in military activity. She ends up, and the civil war does, as wars often do, in a sense kind of shake a bit of Rome and certainties about gender. But it's very interesting that Fulvia is involved in a siege at the town of Perugia, modern town of Perugia. She's inside and it's one of the most vivid glimpses that we get of ancient army culture, because what has survived from the town of Perugia is the sling bolts that go backwards and forwards, each with basically a message on, up yours, Octavian, and this kind of thing. In the way that we're told, I don't know if it's true, that soldiers in the Second World War wrote messages onto the bombs they dropped, into, in a sense, a rather crude version of sexual power over the enemy. Well, students sometimes ask, when we're talking about female anatomy in the ancient world, when do we first know the words for things like clitoris? Well, fascinatingly, the first use of the word clitoris, known in Latin, is on one of these sling bullets, which is aimed at Fulvia, and it says on it, this bullet is going for Fulvia's clitoris. Now, if you start to think that Fulvia was someone who had great respect and was an upstanding moral lady who claimed some authority in ancient Rome, think of the squaddys on the other side saying this is going for Fulvia's clitoris. Okay, yes. Sorry, I've been... Ancient literature is like this. So, when we go through and think about how things maybe haven't changed as much as we'd like them to, one of the things that you said that struck me is, one of the most obvious things to come out was repeatedly used as explanatory tools for otherwise unexplained events. So, they were used as sort of that way, and you talked a little bit about how perhaps that same prop is being used to get certain members of the royal family. I mean, it's absolutely standard in Roman culture and also in later court culture where you've got one man rule in a palace to explain the sometimes old and inexplicable events that happen behind the palace walls that you can't see. You say, oh, it's the woman, it's the Empress. So, many of you, I'm sure, have read Robert Graves's I, Claudius, where Livia manages the wife of the Emperor. We're told she poisons anybody she doesn't happen to like. So, any unexplained death is poisoning by this Machiavellian character. I think it always comes as quite a shock to people to say, you know, look, she might have been quite a nice sort of homely character. All this might be fiction and projection, but when that hits home is when it comes out in, something, you know, the British royal family's been having a bit of a rocky time lately in more ways than one, but I was very struck in all the stories of Harry and Meghan, how you had, and I think interestingly, the female of the royal family, the mixed race female, you know, why is it that our smiley ginger-haired prince is wanting to leave his royal deity and go to Canada? It's Meghan Markle. Now, we have absolutely no idea whatsoever what has gone on between Harry and Meghan, there's no way we're ever going to get it. But we are, our press, at least, is absolutely convinced that somehow the explanatory tool here is the female interloper. And that happens really commonly throughout politics, in the secrecy of politics. I remember when I was quite young how Nancy Reagan was always used to explain why Ron was doing something very stupid as if Ron couldn't, wasn't culpable, doing something very stupid by himself. And in the UK, Sherry Blair coped it when Tony did things that we didn't want. No, that did stop eventually when Tony did things that we really, really didn't want and it became implausible that it was Sherry. But there's that sense that, it's a kind of Cherché la femme in order to blame. You want to be able to blame the woman. So another thing that you've talked a lot about is essentially women seizing power through the Me Too movement. And I guess I'm kind of struck by, well... Seizing power, I think, is putting it a bit... I would say it's a way of asserting and saying we are going to drive the agenda. Yes, I think seizing power would just be a bit beyond what I would say, but go on. OK, fair enough. But if you think of women in the Aristophanes comedy and Lystradda trying to seize power by withholding sex, so do you think the Me Too movement is going to keep going or do you think it's going to end up being sort of dismembered by traditional institutions reasserting their power? I'd like to think that Me Too was the start of a big change. I'd like to think that, and I hope that's the case. I mean, I think the difficulty here is that it's in the process between being a hashtag and actually being getting something done. Now, we don't know what's going to happen with Harvey Weinstein, you know, and I think my money would probably be on that he will in some way get off. Does that mean that the Me Too movement was a futile gesture? No, it doesn't. I think that things, certainly in that business, will never go quite back to what they were before. But whether more widely hashtag Me Too will become a way of women asserting and claiming power, I don't know, and I partly don't know, because I think that if your analysis is necessarily that, why is it possible for those things to happen? Well, that actually has to be because of the power structure of, in this case, we're talking about the movie business, and it follows, I think, that if you want those things not to happen, it is almost an essential that the power structure has to change. You know, hashtag Me Too is extremely good at pointing us to that. But actually, when still there are so few female directors and producers in Hollywood, when there are still so few of those female directors who get recognition, until that happens, then things won't change as quickly as most of us would like. So, yeah, there's an interesting question about, I guess, how we do bring equality. Before we get to that, because we're going to have to wrap up here pretty quick, some of the things that struck me, I was saying, okay, so we've talked about the western world, and I just quickly went by one of my colleagues here suggested, let's say, what are the top women of classical China? And it turns out they can be broken into sort of two bits, beautiful and evil power models. So very similar. So are we dealing with not just what I would say a societal construction, are we dealing with just a flawed design of the human species here? We're dealing with a societal construction, but we're dealing with the societal construction that I believe repeats itself over the planet. And I think it's always very, you know, it's difficult to talk about cultures in which you have not grown up and internalised their norms, but I've done the same with you. I've asked and read, and it seems to me that we've got something which is fairly universal. The fact that it's universal doesn't mean it's natural. The way I feel that my generation of women was always put down and put back in our box, and it's done in the ancient world, and in almost any other historical society, was it is not natural for you to be doing what you're doing. The trouble about nature is that nature is a societal construction. And we can change it. Nature is a kind of shorthand for what we think always happens. So I'm always trying to figure out how to fix things, and this will be the last thing that we, I guess, discuss. How do we get equality? There are differences between men and women at some level. The challenge is that whenever you have some sort of separation then I would always say that it would seem that separate is never equal. But I guess I'm struck by the fact that you are in Noonam College, which is a all woman. So, I mean, is that the solution where you need to have some freedom from men to survive, or was it just an accident? I don't think, if I was inventing the educational system all over again, I don't think I would stop by segregating it by sex. I think that currently in Cambridge, a woman's college is extremely useful in terms of the historical development of a university which was all blokes for 650 years. So everything around you is like being in a blokeish, white blokeish world, actually. All the pictures on the walls, the chairs are all made for men. Everything, the lavatories are always better for the men. Everything is done for men. So I think having a kind of college that can act as a ginger group is a good idea. I don't think it solves. I wouldn't say that that's the solution. I think the solution is a long struggle in changing how we think about ourselves in our heads. That I think is... I'm not going to live to see that. But I'll just give you one example of how we're all implicated in this sense that women are not... Women are not in positions of power. If you say to an audience like this, and I say to myself, close your eyes and think of a professor. Just think of a professor. What almost everybody will see is a relatively elderly male in a white coat. Be a scientist. I see that image. And I am a bloody professor. So when your own imagination doesn't see you, even though that's what you are, that I think is an indication of the sort of gap that there is between us and equality. Well, it is a gap which I think we're on a very slow march to fix but I think we'll finish on that. Thank you.