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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. "

Mary Beard

Look

Thinking

Mean

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

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" 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. "

" I have always hated fancy dress parties. "

" I remember plastering the kitchen with Black Power pictures of Angela Davis. "

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

" It's a bit naff, but there is something exciting about pulling a bit of pottery out of the ground that's 2,000 years old. "

" There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" When you look at me on the telly and say, 'She should be on 'The Undateables,'' you are looking at a 59-year-old woman. That is what 59-year-old women who have not had work done look like. Get it? "

Mary Beard

Women

Woman

" 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. "

" However judicious academics may be - not like me - they are all taught to see through crap. "

Mary Beard

Through

See

" 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'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. "

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

Mary Beard

You

Ask

" 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. "

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

" 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! "

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

" I think that what will help women get into positions of power - well, day nurseries, equal pay, family-friendly working hours. And I think all that's important. I used to think it was the solution. I now think it's enabling, and it's important, but still we have got head work to do about this. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

Mary Beard

Old Lady

Old

" 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. "