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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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" 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. "

Mary Beard

Price

Speak

Politicians

" I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe. "

Mary Beard

Somewhere

Room

" Greek myths, early Roman history, is configured around violence against women. And I think we need to get in there, get our hands dirty, face it, and see why and how it was. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I knew that Trump was ghastly. I knew I'd vote for Hillary if I had a vote. "

" I was not much good as a waitress. "

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

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

" If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine. "

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

Mary Beard

You

Ask

" 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. "

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

" There is nothing inherently conservative in the ancient world. "

" 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.' "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You always regret upsetting people needlessly. "

" A lot of sexism is just very silly... and the best response is laughter and ridicule. "

" What is the role of an academic - no matter what they're teaching - within political debate? It has to be that they make issues more complicated. The role of the academic is to make everything less simple. "

" 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. "

" Roman military tactics were much over-rated. All the clever ones had the same idea, which was to go round the back. "

Mary Beard

Clever

Back

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

" I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud. "

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

" My mom was born before women had the vote in general elections in England. "