The history books have traditionally been preoccupied with royalty, politicians, noblemen, and celebrities. In Past Lives, historian Patrick Wyman has made it his mission to illustrate what life was like for the other 99% of people. People like you and me.
In the show’s debut season, Wyman explores the lives of various enslaved people throughout history, largely during his specialist area, the Roman Empire. Although we tend to think of slavery as a homogenous experience, there were actually a raft of different types of subjugation suffered by the enslaved, and Past Lives is dedicated to elucidating that vast spectrum. Episodes so far have focused on a mother and her child, a baker, a playwright, a gladiator, a saint, a sex worker, and a mining overseer.
There is one major problem with Past Lives, and while it’s an unavoidable one, it also happens to work against the podcast’s whole raison d’être.
Though nearly every episode is named for a real enslaved person from history that we are meant to then be following for the succeeding twenty-five minutes, in the vast majority of the cases, almost nothing is actually known about the subject of that instalment. The most commonly heard phrases in this series are variations on, “We know only…” and “He might have been…”, followed by various different options that are Wyman’s best guesses. It doesn’t exactly make for absorbing narratives, despite the attempt at the beginning of each episode to imagine a historical scene from that person’s perspective.
Now, considering the subjects of Past Lives lived thousands of years ago, and were not kings or politicians or other grand figures who naturally left lengthy paper trails, the lack of information available to modern day historians is not a surprise. Nevertheless, when the whole podcast is premised on its ability to explain what life was like for regular people back then, and in most cases the answer is, “We don’t know, but maybe…”, it does cast a fundamentally unsatisfying light on the whole concept.
Only in one instance to date, the story of former sex worker Neaira from Ancient Greece, whose unfair brushes with the legal system did create something of a historical record, do we even get close to conjuring one of these people back to life.
Frustratingly, even in the episode on the life of Saint Patrick — who spent six years as an enslaved man and actually wrote a first-hand account of his experience — Wyman still privileges the generic wider context over the specific details, rushing the latter into the last five minutes of the instalment.
That being said, looking at the show from a sideways angle does offer a more appealing vantage point. When it comes to the few things that are known about his subjects, Wyman is both engaging and generous in showing his workings. In practical terms, Past Lives doesn’t
so much put people in their context as conjure them from their context, and it is interesting to
hear how he goes about doing that given the often limited sources available.
Additionally, Wyman does at least achieve his goal of demonstrating the range of circumstances that an enslaved person could experience. The subjects on the podcast have ranged from unfortunate souls toiling in the brutal heat of bakeries or the treacherous conditions of mines, all the way up to the “overseers” who were charged with managing them. That vast spectrum helps to add important layers to a state that has all too often been simplified and homogenized by reductive historical narratives.
Taken as a whole, there is something quite moving about the intent behind Wyman’s project, which is so clearly well-meaning and valuable. But while his evident passion for Past Lives, and the empathy he has for those on the lowest rung of history’s ladder, are both very admirable, they also make it all the more frustrating that there just doesn’t seem to be enough information available to satisfactorily support his laudable goals.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.