Quotes from Mary Beard

At a very rough guess there might have been between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy in the middle of the first century BCE, making up perhaps 20 per cent of the total population. They

A woman did not take her husband's name or fall entirely under his legal authority. After the death of her father, an adult woman could own property in her own right, buy and sell, inherit or make a will and free slaves – many of the rights that women in Britain did not gain till the 1870s.

Livy tells how in 214 BCE individual Romans were called upon to pay directly to man the fleet: a nice indication of the patriotism that surrounded the war effort, of the emptiness of the public treasury, but also of the cash that there still was in private hands, despite the crisis.

Un amargo destino persigue a los romanos, y el crimen de dar muerte a un hermano , desde que la sangre del inocente Remo fue derramada en la tierra, una maldición que recayó sobre sus descendientes».

There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies.

Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say.

Caesar had a shrewd eye for his public image, and the Commentaries is a carefully contrived justification of his conduct and parade of his military skills. But it is also an early example of what we might call imperial ethnography.

Two hundred years later there was little to patrician privilege beyond the right to hold a few ancient priesthoods and to wear a particular form of fancy footwear.

All too often, even the most glamorous rebels are just as unappealing, under the surface, as the imperialist tyrants themselves.

Cicero may even have convinced himself, whatever the evidence, that Catiline was a serious threat to the safety of Rome. That, as we know from many more recent examples, is how political paranoia and self-interest often work.

Once the outcome is known, it is easy to present the period as a series of irrevocable and brutal steps in the direction of crisis or as a slow countdown to both the end of the free state and the return of one-man rule. But the last century of the Republic was more than a mere bloodbath. As the flowering of poetry, theory and art suggests, it was also a period when Romans grappled with the issues that were undermining their political process and came up with some of their greatest inventions

whatever the views of Suetonius and other ancient writers, the qualities and characters of the individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history and its major developments.

no proposals or even amendments could come from the floor; in the case of almost every piece of proposed legislation we know of, the people voted in favour of what was put before them. This was not popular power as we understand

Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organisation, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than fifty-three years, something previously unparalleled?' Who indeed?

He spotted, for example, the importance of religion, or 'fear of the gods', in controlling Roman behaviour

He sums this up in a pithy sentence: 'They called it, in their ignorance, "civilisation", but it was really part of their enslavement' ('Humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset').

they create desolation and call it peace'

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?

Cicero himself had large amounts of money invested in low-grade property and once joked, more out of superiority than embarrassment, that even the rats had packed up and left one of his crumbling rental blocks.

Para conseguir su imperio, los romanos no aplastaron brutalmente a pueblos inocentes que se ocupaban de sus propios asuntos en pacífica armonía hasta que las legiones aparecieron en el horizonte

in most circumstances, ancient weapons were much better at wounding than killing outright; death followed later, by infection).

Unchecked competition eventually did more to destroy than to uphold the Republic.

By the mid second century BCE, the profits of warfare had made the Roman people by far the richest of any in their known world. Thousands upon thousands of captives became the slave labour that worked the Roman fields, mines and mills, that exploited resources on a much more intensive scale than ever before and fuelled Roman production and Roman economic growth.

The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed.