Quotes from Mary Beard

educated in the 'liberal arts' (literally 'the intellectual pursuits suited to the free')

No one did me wrong whom I did not pay back in full

They called it, in their ignorance, "civilisation", but it was really part of their enslavement

A verdade pura e dura é que as amazonas eram um mito grego masculino. (..) A ideia subjacente era que o dever dos homens consistia em salvar a civilização do domínio das mulheres.

long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?')

years that is exactly what he did, before resigning the office, retiring to his country house on the Bay of Naples and dying in his bed in 78 BCE. It was a surprisingly peaceful

Temos de pensar melhor acerca do que é o poder, para que serve e como é medido. Por outras palavras, se as mulheres não são encaradas como estando completamente dentro das estruturas de poder, decerto é o poder que tem de ser redefinido e não as mulheres?

few ancient libraries ever unearthed, in Taormina in Sicily, a combination of advertisement and library catalogue.

Autocracy represented, in a sense, an end of history.

Is it legitimate to eliminate 'terrorists' outside the due processes of law? How far should civil rights be sacrificed in the interests of homeland security? The Romans never ceased

Suetonius, in his series of biographies The Twelve Caesars

It turned out to be a lesson for the patricians – learned the hard way – that the gods communicated with plebeians too.

a parade of reluctance has often provided a useful cover for ruthless ambition.

the success of the rich was a gift bestowed by the poor. The rich had to learn the lesson that they depended on the people as a whole.

The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were, like Gaius, demonised. Those who died in their beds, succeeded by a son and heir, natural or adopted, were praised as generous and avuncular characters, devoted to the success of Rome, who did not take themselves too seriously.

Greece, once conquered, conquered her savage victor and brought culture into the rough land of Latium' (better in Latin: 'Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio').

For me, as much as for anyone else, the Romans are a subject not just of history and inquiry but also of imagination and fantasy, horror and fun.

According to Suetonius, Vespasian continued his down-to-earth line in self-deprecating wit right up until his last words: 'Oh dear, I think I'm becoming a god …

Trials for extortion and malpractice in the provinces continued, which may equally well be a sign of the persistent flouting of the law as of its proper enforcement. Many kinds of day-to-day exploitation of the provincials were simply taken for granted. The emperor Tiberius summed up the basic ethics of Roman rule rather well when he said, in reaction to some excessive profits turned in from the provinces, 'I want my sheep shorn, not shaven'.

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;

Roman lawyers were expressly forbidden to receive fees for their service, and it is often rightly said that what Cicero gained by pleading in high-profile cases was public prominence.

I no longer think, as I once naively did, that we have much to learn directly from the Romans – or, for that matter, from the ancient Greeks, or from any other ancient civilisation.

this period, they alone could elect the political officials of the Roman state; no matter how blue-blooded you were, you could only hold office as, say, consul if the Roman people elected you. And they alone, unlike the senate, could make law.

Then as now, the easiest tactic for a government trying to reduce the pension bill was to raise the pension age.