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" I loved 'Gladiator,' and I thought its depiction of gladiatorial combat, although it was an aggrandizing picture, was cleverly and expertly done. "

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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. "

" I do not think that the lives of women of my generation, as a class, were blighted by the way the power differentials between men and women operated. We wanted to change those power differentials; we also had a good time. "

" For whatever reason, some sorts of women's silence were broken by MeToo. This is the optimistic bit. And that will lead to a much more careful attention to women's voices. "

" I think, when I was 25, nobody in the world knew who I was. "

" Grey is my hair colour. I really can't see why I should change it. "

" The history of art is not just the history of artists; it is also the history of the people who viewed art. And that wider perspective can help us see some of the reasons why the art of the ancient world should still matter to us. "

" I think you have to realize that most ancient warfare is really kind of hit and run, honestly. You go and you bash down the walls of some enemy 50 miles away and you take some slaves, you take some cattle, probably a bit of cash too, and then you say goodbye and go home and you probably do the same thing next year - or try to, or they do it to you. "

" You can't always worry about offending people. "

" No women in ancient Rome ever had the vote. "

" I don't want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nobody but an idiot would pretend that they had an error-proof way of choosing the 'best' out of hundreds of perfectly qualified applicants - not for university or for anything. "

" When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice. "

" 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. "

" We make two mistakes about the ancient world. One is to assume they were better than us - that, for instance, the ancient Olympics didn't involve money-making. The opposite mistake, and just as common, is to think our Olympics are much more civilised than ancient sporting competitions. Neither is true. "

" Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge. "

" Gender is a key marker of power and powerlessness. Most of the structures of how our world works are biased in terms of men. "

" I don't think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go - just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance - what you will find is that women's voices are not taken seriously. "

" If talking about arts means being pretentious, a bit like being a wine critic, then I don't feel comfy with that. You can get a lot from paintings without getting mystical about brush strokes. "

" You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. "

" The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really. "

" If you ask me what is civilisation, it's little more than an act of faith. "

" I have always hated fancy dress parties. "

" I'm actually in a tradition of classicists with a big public face who like sounding off. "

" In general, I never think it is a good idea to try to recreate past successes. You have to strike out on your own, for better or worse. "

" One person's barbarity is another person's civilisation. "

" I was nearly struck by lightning on an excavation in Turkey. "

" 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. "

" At 16, I got into local-education archaeology classes - you got to go to summer digs. It allowed me to be both intellectual and a bad girl with a wicked social life every evening! "