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" One of its most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be un-civilised, with those who do not - or cannot be trusted to - share our values. "

Mary Beard

Powerful

Values

Most

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

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

" 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. "

Mary Beard

Early

School

" You don't overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation. "

" Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn't care about their appearance. "

" The thing about being a university teacher is that you're fairly tolerant about young people saying things they shouldn't have said. "

" 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. "

" I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

Mary Beard

Old Lady

Old

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" If you say to a group of women professors, 'Close your eyes and think of a professor,' what they will see is a guy. I will. And I'll stop myself and think, 'Hey, hang on, what am I doing here?' "

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

" Beard's secret is always to be slightly on the edge but to pull back from disaster at the last minute. "

" What politicians do is they never get the rhetoric wrong, and the price they pay is they don't speak the truth as they see it. Now, I will speak truth as I see it, and sometimes I don't get the rhetoric right. I think that's a fair trade-off. "

" My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history. "

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

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