Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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At the age of 18 she was interviewed for a place at Newnham College, Cambridge and sat the then compulsory entrance exam. She had thought of going to King's, but rejected it when she discovered the college did not offer scholarships to women. Although studying at a single-sex college, she found in her first year that some men in the University held dismissive attitudes towards women's academic potential, and this strengthened her determination to succeed. She also developed feminist views that remained "hugely important" in her later life, although she later described "modern orthodox feminism" as partly "cant". Beard received an MA at Newnham and remained in Cambridge for her PhD.

Pompeii skeletons reveal secrets of Roman family life - BBC Pompeii skeletons reveal secrets of Roman family life - BBC

Mary Beard attended an all-female direct grant school. During the summer she participated in archaeological excavations; this was initially to earn money for recreational spending, but she began to find the study of antiquity unexpectedly interesting. But it was not all that interested the young Beard. She had friends in many age groups, and a number of trangressions: "Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl." Oh Do Shut Up Dear! Mary Beard on the Public Voice of Women". Radio Times. Archived from the original on 1 August 2021 . Retrieved 1 August 2021.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Up Pompeii with the roguish don | Mary Beard | The Guardian

One-person rule, she said, “does not just operate through political reform or by military power, important as they may be. It works by inscribing the autocrat indelibly into the world of his or her subjects.” She referred to Augustus’s autobiography, Res Gestae (“Things Achieved”) – a rather indigestible account of peoples conquered and temples restored. “It is a piece of enormous self-justification,” Beard explained. “He is saying: ‘I liberated the state.’ And it is full of strategic omissions. He doesn’t say: ‘I tore out someone’s eyeballs with my bare hands.’” (Suetonius, his biographer, later claimed he did.) It would not have taken much to have transformed the lecture into a television programme – the tone, smart and clear but not condescending, was very BBC2. George Osborne in 'advanced' talks with Greek PM over return of Parthenon Marbles". The Telegraph. 3 December 2022 . Retrieved 4 December 2022– via www.telegraph.co.uk. Classicist Mary Beard on Feminism, Online Trolls and What Ancient Rome Can Tell Us About Trump". Time.com. 4 September 2018 . Retrieved 7 December 2021. Beard in Pompeii filming her 2016 series for the BBC. Photograph: BBC/Lion Television/Caterina Turroni Today,' she concedes, 'I would put it differently. Now I would probably sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury.' But she's unrepentant. 'Yes, I do think I should have said what I said. That's what academics are for. Speaking their minds is what you want your poor little dons to do.' Beard's outspokenness got her noticed. When she was offered a blog by Guardian Unlimited, 'Peter [Stothard, the current TLS editor] said, "You should do a blog for us." So I did. I was a complete tyro. I didn't ask myself, do I want to do a blog at all? It just took off.'

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The fact that albeit Pompei was a relatively small town it clearly formed a part of a far reaching empire, evidenced by imports (Indian small statues) and exports (rotting fishsfauce called Garum found in Spain and England) from and to everywhere. This eclecticism has given her the means to range widely through the ancient world in her public work. So has the fact that her scholarship has been relatively mainstream, rather than at the bleeding edge of academic fashion. “She often represents herself as quite traditional though she also likes also to think of herself as transgressive,” said Greg Woolf. “The traditional bit is dominant: she does think you need to know Latin and Greek to be a classicist. She’s not about demolishing classics as a subject. She likes to do interesting things from the canon.” Beard is a great name even for a female professor, and I mean no disrespect when I say she has a determinedly ungroomed look. But traipsing as scruffily as eccentric high donnery would permit amid the evocative ruins of Pompeii, she was the perfect teller of this engaging story, which wasn't about the volcano – or leafy hill, as they probably still thought of Vesuvius before it went off in AD79 – but the sort of people who were prematurely buried by it. There were the familiar eerie plaster casts of those captured in the drama of dying, but more telling, she said, was a recently discovered cellar of skeletons – the remains of fleeing citizens huddled here against the darkening, falling skies. You could tell a lot from bones: those of the wealthy bore the green residue of precious ornaments they had about them; here was a leg bone swollen with an infection consistent with spending too much time with possibly incontinent strangers in the surprisingly unsanitary public baths. Most astonishing, though, were the teeth of 10-year-old twins suffering from congenital syphilis, proving – Mary said with the kind of excitement most of us reserve for a good win on the scratchcards – that whoever brought syphilis to Europe, it wasn't Christopher Columbus, as previously thought (by those who think about these things). It suggested too that chronically ill children – even poor ones, without green bones – might have been cared for by a family support network, rather than, as I have always assumed, put on a mountainside to be eaten by wolves. Beard exemplifies something rare, said Jonty Claypole, the BBC’s director of arts and one of the executive producers of the new Civilisations. “It’s never about her,” he said. “To be a true public intellectual is like offering a form of public service. A lot of people don’t realise that: they confuse being a public intellectual with their ego.” He counted off those he regarded as her predecessors: “Bertrand Russell, Kenneth Clark, Susan Sontag, Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, Stuart Hall, Simon Schama … ” Figures like these emerge only once in a generation, he said. “She looks at the world through the deep lens of the ancient world, and she shifts arguments.” Between 1979 and 1983, Beard lectured in classics at King's College, London; she returned to Cambridge in 1984 as a Fellow of Newnham College and the only female lecturer in the classics faculty. [5] [8] Rome in the Late Republic, which she co-wrote with Cambridge historian Michael Crawford, was published the following year. [18]