Quotes from Mary Beard

Those who have punished others without a hearing,' they insisted, 'ought not to have the right to be heard themselves.

In some cases, even learned Roman lawyers misunderstood what they read in the Twelve Tables. The idea that a defaulting debtor who had several creditors could be put to death and his body divided between them, in appropriately sized pieces, according to the amount owed, looks like one such misunderstanding (or so many modern critics have hoped).

Whether people liked or loathed him, he [Octavian] was in many ways a puzzling and contradictory revolutionary. He was once of the most radical innovators Rome ever saw.

took no chances with Caesarion, given his supposed paternity. Now aged sixteen, he was killed.

Mine ends with a culminating moment in 212 CE, when the emperor Caracalla took the step of making every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered and completing a process of expanding the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship that had started almost a thousand years earlier. SPQR

They create desolation and call it peace' is a slogan that has often summed up the consequences

The Latin word for 'rams', rostra, became the name of the platform and gave modern English its word 'rostrum'.

Roman writers tended to take it for granted that the origins of the senate went back to Romulus, as a council of 'old men' (senes)

In short, as the last part of this chapter reveals, the empire created the emperors – not the other way round. Governors

London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement

The bottom line is that it is politically naïve (as well as unfair) for a government to underfund the state education system and to take little effective action on social justice, and then to blame 'leading universities' for not righting the wrongs they have perpetuated.

don't sweeten the pill of bad pay for new

received a classical education

Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit. 'Fierce Rome', that is, 'had been captured by captive Greece.

If being a decent soul is maternal, then fine. I'll call it human

Denn bei historischer Forschung geht es doch gerade darum, Fremdartigkeit zu erhalten.

How far is it useful to see Roman history in terms of imperial biographies or to divide the story of the empire into emperor-sized (or dynasty-sized) chunks?

One of the purposes of 'culture', after all, is to make seem 'natural' claims that are not naturally at all; the flimsier the argument, the more noisily it is supported.

One of the things that history is good for is puncturing our sanctimonious self-satisfaction about our own moral rectitude

In fact, a marriage was normally contracted, as the Romans put it, 'by practice': that is, in our terms, 'by cohabitation'. If you lived together for a year, you were married. It

recognize phrases