Twitter feuds

People of colour in Roman Britain, Mary Beard, and Twitter feuds

Ah, Twitter, where we all go when in need of racism-fueled drama and BBC Bitesize, the one-stop shop for all things revision and learning. But what does one get when the two are combined? In the case of a particular 2017 set of Twitter feuding, it’s Mary Beard - world-renowned Classicist and Cambridge Professor - and some guy who thinks he knows more about Roman History than she does, fighting over a character in a BBC Bitesize video.

In December 2016, BBC Bitesize posted a video about life in Roman Britain on the BBC Teach YouTube channel, and it featured a Roman family with a dark skinned father who is a soldier. And this angered Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the standard heavily opinionated, but lacking in the brains department troll that Twitter is unfortunately home to, who works at an American far-right radio show called the Infowars. His illthought out tweet was as follows: ‘Thank God the BBC is portraying Roman Britain as ethnically diverse. I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?’ .

Mary Beard certainly does. And with years of experience teaching Classics, she’s certainly knowledgeable, replying with a stylish ‘that is indeed pretty accurate, there’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Britain’ .

By: Imogen Day

You’d think it would stop there; someone who’s actually knowledgeable about the subject has stepped in. But no! Racist and historically inaccurate Twitter doesn’t work like that. Taleb kept going, and before too long, he had presented a series of evidence about how ‘SubSaharan genes have evaporated’ in native Britons, while Beard maintained that there were indeed dark skinned people in Britain at the time.

With hindsight, we can see that they were arguing about slightly different points: Beard about how not every person in Britain at the time was white, and Taleb on how people of colour were such a minority their genes did not get passed down.

However, while Taleb has a point, it is Beard with the stronger argument. Because of geographical reasons, there were not as many people of colour in Roman society as there were white, but there were still some high profile figures with dark skin. One example was Septimus Severus, born in Libya, who commanded legions at Hadrian’s Wall, and later became Rome’s first African Emperor. Or the Ivory Bangle Lady, whose body was found in York - unsurprisingly, wearing ivory bangles - whose skull suggested that she had African ancestry and was brought up in a warm climate.

Because both of these examples were not excavated with exact details of their skin colour, by, for example, having a written record of their appearance buried with them, this just further proves that the BBC Bitesize video is historically accurate. The Romans weren’t a racist society - they were classist. The Romans would have respected a black military commander as they would have respected a white one, but a black slave and a white slave would have been treated with the same contempt.