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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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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Thinking through how you look to your enemies is helpful. That doesn't mean that your ideology is wrong and theirs is right, but maybe you have to recognise that they have one - and that it may be logically coherent. Which may be uncomfortable.
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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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English country towns are often seen as a cultural wasteland, but the more cut off you are, the more the need to create things, to make your own culture.
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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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I was 11 when I started Latin - not like boys, who start early at prep school. At 14, you had to choose whether to start Greek and drop German, but my mum made a fuss, and I took Latin, Greek, French, and German at O-level, which meant I didn't do much science.
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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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My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history.
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I don't want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard.
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Classics isn't about the ancient world. It's partly about the ancient world, but it's about our conversation. It's how we try to talk to antiquity.
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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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My fantasy is going into a men's loo. And listening to what they say.
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In 1984, I returned to Newnham College at Cambridge University to teach after completing my Ph.D. there a couple of years earlier. Almost all of my colleagues in the university's classics department were men, and my office at the all-women's college was in the dorm.
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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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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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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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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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I think most people gain some sense of how to look at a painting, but no one ever teaches you how to look at a piece of silver.
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When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration.
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I was into Black Power, and my practice Oxbridge essay was a rant. The headmistress said I'd never get in with that, but she was probably wrong. I was the ideal combination: a swot who was also a bad girl.
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I knew that Trump was ghastly. I knew I'd vote for Hillary if I had a vote.
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I think, when I was 25, nobody in the world knew who I was.
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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.