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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Mary Beard

Political

Debate

Complicated

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

" When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration. "

" I'm an academic. I argue; I engage with people. "

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

Mary Beard

Through

See

" I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it, I got more interested and got better at it. "

Mary Beard

Good

School

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" It wasn't until I got to Cambridge that I discovered active discrimination against women. "

" You always regret upsetting people needlessly. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The reason why the British theatrical tradition is world-leading in Greek drama is because there is a flourishing tradition of people rethinking Greek tragedy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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. "