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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 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. "

Mary Beard

You

Enemy

Goodbye

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

" 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 have lots of heroes and heroines, mostly unsung and including my husband. "

" I have always thought the women's movement traded too much on outrage and not enough on ridicule. "

" 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. "

" People who exploit others come to spend an enormous amount of energy wondering about and justifying that exploitation. "

" You have to do what you feel comfortable with. "

" We lived in the schoolhouse of the village school in Church Preen, in deepest Shropshire, and my mum was the schoolmistress. She taught the juniors, and one other teacher taught the infants. I went there from the age of three, no doubt as a form of childcare. "

" 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. "

" One of the great things about history is that it sort of isn't a done deal - ever. The historical texts and the historical evidence that you use is always somehow giving you different answers because you're asking it different questions. "

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

" It's great fun being an academic because you have a certain licence to be a bit of a joker. "

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

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

Mary Beard

You

Ask

" 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. "

" I'm not in the slightest wanting to attack the women's movement here. But I think that in popular, broadly left-wing, broadly feminist discourse, there is a tendency to just label discrimination against women - and embedded assumptions about them - as misogyny and think 'job done.' "

" There is no argument that I won't take seriously. "

" I've chosen to be this way because that's how I feel comfortable with myself. That's how I am. It's about joining up the dots between how you look and how you feel inside, and I think that's what I've done, and I think people do it differently. "

" 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. "

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

" The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don't think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive. "

" All religions throughout history have been concerned about - and have sometimes fought over - what it means to represent God, and they have found elegant, intriguing, and awkward ways to confront that dilemma. "

" Fate has it in for me to be an exhibit: that funny old lady from the telly. "

Mary Beard

Old Lady

Old

" 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. "

" 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! "

" My fantasy is going into a men's loo. And listening to what they say. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Wherever possible, I try to see things from the other side of the dividing line and to read civilisation 'against the grain.' "