I’ll redo my Rome work

DO YOU suppose they’d let me re-sit my history O level? I’m guessing not, particularly as O levels were scrapped about 327 years ago. But if they were prepared to overlook that minor technicality, I’m sure I could improve on my utterly shameful grade E.

It’s mostly thanks to all the splendid TV history shows we’re lucky enough to enjoy these days. The sort to which we’re now regularly treated, such as MEET THE ROMAN EMPERORWITH MARY BEARD (9pm, BBC2), are able to bring the subject to life quite magnificently, making it absorbing, colourful, even fun.

Back in the day (sorry, horrible expression; remind me never to use it again), history programmes, by law, had to be grey, stodgy and dull. And as for how the subject was taught at school, woe betide any history teacher who tried to inject “fun” into a lesson.

They’d have been out on their ear, banished as swiftly and as ruthlessly as a modern-day biology teacher who tried to teach biology.

OK, I exaggerate a tad. But you take my point. Learning history, at least to those of us without a natural aptitude for it, used to feel like something of a chore.

Whereas now, thanks to presenters such as Mary, it can be an absolute joy.

Mary is particularly good with the minutiae: those little details which often reveal far more than the big stuff.

For example, in tonight’s documentary, which delves into everyday life for Roman emperors both legendary and long forgotten (“beyond the formal masks, propaganda and parades”), we hear about the emperor Domitian (81-96 AD) and his gross yet apparently engrossing hobby of stabbing flies with his stylus.

“He used to lock himself away for hours on end,” she tells us.

The stylus, of course, was the device with which the Romans wrote on their newfangled wax tablets – but Domitian soon twigged it could have other uses.

And he wasn’t the only one. Hadrian apparently used his to gouge out a slave’s eye.

And Julius Caesar reached for his in an admittedly not wholly successful bid to fend off his assassins (on reflection, a better use might have been to write them a rather strongly worded letter of complaint.)

Mary also reveals the etiquette a citizen had to observe if meeting an emperor in person.

A close pal? “You got to kiss him on the cheek – even the lips,” she tells us.

If he held out his hand for you to kiss that instead, she adds, this was “a mark of your inferiority.”

And if you had to kiss his feet? “That was a mark of total subservience.”

I suspect there were further options but I’m relieved to report that Mary leaves it at that.