Mary Beard Quotes
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I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it, I got more interested and got better at it.
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One of the downsides of working in antiquity is that you don't have many female voices, but you certainly have a lot of male terror about the potential of women's power. It shows you very clearly that the most oppressive cultures tend to be afraid of those whom they oppress.
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You always regret upsetting people needlessly.
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I think that what will help women get into positions of power - well, day nurseries, equal pay, family-friendly working hours. And I think all that's important. I used to think it was the solution. I now think it's enabling, and it's important, but still we have got head work to do about this.
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Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn't care about their appearance.
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We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.
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Gender is a key marker of power and powerlessness. Most of the structures of how our world works are biased in terms of men.
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My fantasy is going into a men's loo. And listening to what they say.
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I'm exploring the long history of women, first of all, being silenced and, secondly, not being taken seriously in the political and public sphere. It's a call to action through understanding and through looking at ourselves again and trying to reformulate the whole question of women and power.
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There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us.
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A lot of people will always say, 'I really know nothing about the ancient world.' But there's lots and lots of things people know. Partly, they've been encouraged to think they're ignorant about it. In some ways, the job to do is show people that they know much more than they'd like to admit.
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Whatever you say about popular culture, people like people who know things, who are experts, and it doesn't particularly matter what they look like.
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It's great fun being an academic because you have a certain licence to be a bit of a joker.
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Roman military tactics were much over-rated. All the clever ones had the same idea, which was to go round the back.
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I think, when I was 25, nobody in the world knew who I was.
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If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?
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What interests me is the idea that classics is actually quite democratic. It isn't only the toff, upper-class subject it's often thought to be. Every generation enjoys rediscovering it.
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History is how we have learnt to think about ourselves. It's not as though the Greeks and Romans are static entities out there to be discovered and translated. We make them speak, we talk to them, and they inform what we say.
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In real life, Oxford and Cambridge are two excellent universities, like many others in the country. They are full of highly intelligent, hard-working, and quite ordinary students and teachers.
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When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.
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You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
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There's a basic rule of thumb that the more a culture oppresses women, or oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that.
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We are sold the idea of a refugee as a tiny child sitting crying, as a way of raising money, but elderly ladies and kids largely can't move. The demographic is mostly young men.
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The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.