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Three years later, Beard gave a second lecture for the same partners, entitled "Women in Power: from Medusa to Merkel". It’s an issue that you have to keep looking at, and there has never been a moment in the history of the west when people didn’t argue about who did or did not have a right to speak about something – Socrates was killed for it!
What Was Everyday Life Like In Pompeii? | Pompeii with Mary
As her concern with dormice suggests, she is a historian who has always been fascinated by the stereotypes we have of ancient Rome: both how they came into being, and how valid they are likely to be. At one point, she sketched out an argument for a second referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. Some of her articles were controversial enough to be reported in the papers, generally with the nuance stripped out. Her case rested on the very nature of democracy, for which the presence of a ballot box was a necessary but not sufficient condition. Mary Beard at home in Cambridge, between busts of the Greek poet Sappho and the Roman emperor Vitellius.
They included, in 1980, her pioneering work on the Vestal Virgins, which, fashionably, used techniques borrowed from anthropology to reshape thinking about the priestesses who served the Roman goddess of the hearth. I thought that most of the readers’ comments would be negative,” she told me in December, “but many more of them were positive.
Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town; Dirk Rewind TV: Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town; Dirk
Photograph: BBC Mary Beard visits Herculaneum and Pompeii, in a story not about the volcano but the people who were prematurely buried by it. 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.This is also how she teaches – with an unusually sincere attachment to the principle that the pedagogical process should be rooted in an encounter, a relationship and a dialogue. TheBookOfPhobiaaAndManias traces the rich and thought-provoking history in which our fixations have taken shape. And, although there was laughter and invention, I'm not sure that bumping into a closed door aspires to the heights of modern comedy, even when accompanied by the ditsy loose-limbed rhythms of 1950s jazz.
Mary Beard | The Guardian Passing the dormouse test | Mary Beard | The Guardian
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. In 1995, the year she turned 40, Beard’s academic career looked as if it was going nowhere in particular. Her breakthrough book, Pompeii (2008), combined her academic methods with a relaxed, approachable address. Her mother was headmistress of a junior school, her father an architect, 'an endearing public-school boy, you know, [pause] drunkard, [pause] you know.
Not many of these properties have been found – unlike the town itself, it’s harder to know where to look for them.
Mary Beard: ‘The ancient world is a metaphor for us’ Mary Beard: ‘The ancient world is a metaphor for us’
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. 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).
She found that this kind of public writing could be conveniently slotted in around parenting duties, and it had the attraction of being immediate: “You could see the fucking thing in print the next week. In public, in private and in her academic writing she is sceptical, wary of consensus, the kind of person who will turn any question back on itself and examine it from an unexpected angle.