Monica Lewinsky defends Mary Beard in Twitter row over black Roman Britons

Public figures from Monica Lewinsky to JK Rowling and Diane Abbott are lining up to support Mary Beard, after the the classical historian found herself at the centre of a storm of Twitter abuse at the weekend.

Beard came under fire after she wrote that a BBC educational video that showed a black Roman soldier was “pretty accurate”. The video, uploaded to YouTube by the BBC last December, had been criticised by some viewers as being anachronistic, but Beard wrote on Twitter that “there’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain”.

What followed, according to Beard in her blogpost response on the TLS, was “a torrent of aggressive insults, on everything from my historical competence and elitist ivory-tower viewpoint to my age, shape and gender”. This was made worse after academic Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the bestselling book on risk, The Black Swan, joined her critics.

“The BBC was effectively applying quotas retroactively (I mean, really retroactively),” Taleb wrote on his own blog. “Any dissent from the statistical errors made by the politically correct police is treated as apostasy. Effectively, scholarship is dead in the UK.”

On Sunday evening, Taleb tweeted that Beard had “used the feminist cover”: “Fundamentally, saying ‘I am a woman hence I have a license to call everyone who bothers me a misogynist’ infuriates me.”

But Beard has been supported on Twitter by UK MPs including Stella Creasy, Diane Abbott and Jess Phillips. “Man alive @wmarybeard takes some crap on here,” tweeted Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. “Remember women keep being clever and opinionated that’s what decent people see and admire.”

Labour MP Stella Creasy called Beard a “national treasure trove of knowledge”, while Angela Rayner, shadow secretary of state for education, offered “solidarity to a phenomenal woman & professor who has significant trolls as she dares to be a woman with an opinion”.

“Mary, you’re one of my great heroes. Never forget how many people love your work & support you. Ignore the morons & the kneejerk lowlifes,” tweeted the BBC world affairs editor and author John Simpson.

While figures from wider culture as diverse as Lewinsky, Paralympian heroine Tanni Grey-Thompson and cookery writer Nigella Lawson offered their backing, Beard’s fellow academics also threw their weight behind her:

Historian David Olusoga told the Guardian: “The historical record tell us that there were black Africans and North Africans in Roman Britain, and the archaeological record scientifically proves both contentions. What Twitter has proved over the past few days, with the same level of scientific certainty, is that there are a worryingly large number of people who will angrily dismiss inconvenient facts and professional expertise when the expert in question is a woman.”

He continued: “It is hard to believe, even in the febrile swamp of Twitter, that the expertise of a male professor, of similarly impeccable credentials, would have been similarly dismissed, or that they would have had such bile and hatred poured upon them. Once again Mary Beard, one of our national treasures (and she’ll kill me for calling her that) is made the lightning rod for a storm of misogyny and furious, wilful ignorance.”

Other authors followed, with The Fault in Our Stars writer John Green praising her “great scholarship” in the “roaringly good read” on ancient Rome, SPQR. Rowling – no stranger to Twitter attacks herself – highlighted the abuse of Beard with the comment: “A historian gave her expert opinion on ethnic diversity in Roman Britain. What Happened Next Will Not Amaze You.”

Lewinsky added a graphic image of support to endorse a Beard tweet saying “the struggle goes on”.

Beard herself said she had not yet received a response from Twitter about the abuse and challenged her followers to “try shifting the story from trolls to Roman Britain”. “Hope Prof Taleb @nntaleb will join in suggesting good outcome wd be for people to go visit local Roman sites & have a good argument,” she wrote on Sunday night.

Cambridge University’s faculty of classics – where Beard works – released a reading list on Monday morning, in support of the professor. “In the faculty we welcome and encourage public interest in, and reasoned debate about, the ancient world, such as Professor Beard has always sought to encourage,” the statement read. “The evidence is in fact overwhelming that Roman Britain was indeed a multi-ethnic society.”