№ 584. History & Its Relics

The Roses of Heliogabalus

 

In the garden of her Cambridge home, Beard blinks in the late summer sunshine. Famously, she isn’t convinced that Rhodes should fall (Cecil Rhodes, the colonialist whose statue students at Oxford University have campaigned to have removed from Oriel College on the grounds of his racism). However, this isn’t for her a point of principle, to be applied to all statues, everywhere. “I’m very happy that some statues come down,” she says. “They always have. They always will. The idea that nothing can ever be moved is mad. What I am suspicious of is the thought that the only function they fulfil is to be admired. The book points to bigger questions about images of power. A statue may also tell us how not to be. It may tell us what a monarch isn’t, as well as what he is. They’re part of a debate.”