Professor Dame Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, delivers the Gifford Lecture "Tyranny and democracy". It is the fifth lecture in the series "The Ancient World and us: from fear and loathing to enlightenment and ethics".
This lecture is about politics ancient and modern. What political inheritance do we imagine we can trace back to the ancient world? On what does our admiration for Athenian democracy rest, or our hatred of Roman autocrats?