Quotes from Mary Beard

To put it another way, the individual rich voter had far greater voting power than his poorer fellow citizens.

a reminder that the body beautiful was not so very far from the body brutalised.

Traditional restraints and conventions broke down, one by one, until swords, clubs and rioting more or less replaced the ballot box.

That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government? This

In 58 BCE Cicero's enemies argued that, whatever authority he had claimed under the senate's prevention of terrorism decree, his executions of Catiline's followers had flouted the fundamental right of any Roman citizen to a proper trial.

Muchos romanos ricos hablaban algo de griego, mejor que el latín que podían saber los teanos, pero no siempre demasiado bien. Se sabía que los griegos de verdad se burlaban despiadadamente del terrible acento romano.

The history of art is about how we look. It is not only about the men and women who – with their paints and pencils, their clays and chisels – created the images that fill our world, from cheap trinkets to 'priceless masterpieces'. It is even more about the generations of humankind who have used, interpreted, argued over and given meaning to those images.

In Rome there was no doctrine as such, no holy book and hardly even what we would call a belief system. Romans knew the gods existed; they did not believe in them in the internalised sense familiar from most modern world religions.

The modern idea that the female nude implies the existence of a predatory male gaze was not first thought up, as is often imagined, in the feminism of the 1960s. As Part One will explain, what is believed to be the very first life-sized statue of a female nude in classical Greece – a fourth-century BCE image of the goddess Aphrodite – provoked exactly the same kind of debate.

who wryly observed that no one would believe there was a plot against an emperor until he was found dead?

Nonetheless, whatever mystery surrounds them, the Olmec have left us a powerful in-your-face reminder that across the world, when people first made art they made it about themselves. From the very beginning art has been about us.

At the same time, in Rome, fears about outsiders flooding into the city were whipped up in a way familiar from many modern campaigns of xenophobia.

Edgy in a different way was the idea of the asylum, and the welcome, that Romulus gave to all comers – foreigners, criminals and runaways – in finding citizens for his new town. There were positive aspects to this. In particular, it reflected Roman political culture's extraordinary openness and willingness to incorporate outsiders, which set it apart from every other ancient Western society that we know.

It is hardly surprising that working class movements in many countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a memorable precedent, and some winning rhetoric, in the ancient story of how the concerted action of the Roman people wrung concessions from the hereditary patrician aristocracy and secured full political rights for the plebeians. Nor is it surprising that early trades unions could look to the plebeian walkouts as a model for a successful strike.

Quo usque tandem ignorabitis vires vestras?' ('How long will you go on being ignorant of your strength?')

In 63 BCE the city of Rome was a vast metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, larger than any other in Europe before the nineteenth century; and, although as yet it had no emperors, it ruled over an empire stretching from Spain to Syria, from the South of France to the Sahara. It was a sprawling mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and

Caesar instantly convened an assembly to elect one of his friends, Caius Caninius Rebilus, to the vacant post for just half a day. This prompted a flood of jokes from Cicero: Caninius was such an extraordinarily vigilant consul that 'he never once went to sleep in his whole term of office'; 'in

carefully manipulated display lay behind these reports (and whatever the uncanny similarity with a far better known miracle worker of the first century CE), eyewitnesses are

Cicerón hizo ejecutar a los hombres sumariamente, sin ni siquiera un juicio de farsa. Con triunfalismo, anunció sus muertes a la entusiasmada multitud con un famoso eufemismo de una sola palabra: vixere, «han vivido»; es decir, «están muertos».

As he struck the terrible, fratricidal blow, he shouted (in Livy's words): 'So perish anyone else who shall leap over my walls.' It was an appropriate slogan for a city which went on to portray itself as a belligerent state, but one whose wars were always responses to the aggression of others, always 'just'.

Augusto convirtió explícitamente la conquista global —y una visión territorial « compacta» de un imperio centrado en Roma, en vez del viejo mosaico de Estados obedientes— en la razón de su gobierno.

The Greek city-states were as keen on winning battles as the Romans were, and most had little to do with the brief Athenian democratic experiment.

is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors.

cultural anxieties are often a privilege of the rich.