Quotes from Mary Beard

I was nearly struck by lightning on an excavation in Turkey.

When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration.

I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe.

I'm exploring the long history of women, first of all, being silenced and, secondly, not being taken seriously in the political and public sphere. It's a call to action through understanding and through looking at ourselves again and trying to reformulate the whole question of women and power.

I do not think that the lives of women of my generation, as a class, were blighted by the way the power differentials between men and women operated. We wanted to change those power differentials; we also had a good time.

Thinking through how you look to your enemies is helpful. That doesn't mean that your ideology is wrong and theirs is right, but maybe you have to recognise that they have one - and that it may be logically coherent. Which may be uncomfortable.

I used to think that the British press were particularly awful to Cherie Blair. I think Blair's foreign policy was a complete disaster, but the British press, when they wanted to explain why Blair took unexpected moves, they did create Cherie as the power behind the throne.

In real life, Oxford and Cambridge are two excellent universities, like many others in the country. They are full of highly intelligent, hard-working, and quite ordinary students and teachers.

In 1984, I returned to Newnham College at Cambridge University to teach after completing my Ph.D. there a couple of years earlier. Almost all of my colleagues in the university's classics department were men, and my office at the all-women's college was in the dorm.

I have lots of heroes and heroines, mostly unsung and including my husband.

What interests me is the idea that classics is actually quite democratic. It isn't only the toff, upper-class subject it's often thought to be. Every generation enjoys rediscovering it.

There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us.

You can't always worry about offending people.

We make two mistakes about the ancient world. One is to assume they were better than us - that, for instance, the ancient Olympics didn't involve money-making. The opposite mistake, and just as common, is to think our Olympics are much more civilised than ancient sporting competitions. Neither is true.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.

Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn't care about their appearance.

There is no argument that I won't take seriously.

My mom was born before women had the vote in general elections in England.

We lived in the schoolhouse of the village school in Church Preen, in deepest Shropshire, and my mum was the schoolmistress. She taught the juniors, and one other teacher taught the infants. I went there from the age of three, no doubt as a form of childcare.

Greek myths, early Roman history, is configured around violence against women. And I think we need to get in there, get our hands dirty, face it, and see why and how it was.

I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it, I got more interested and got better at it.

Roman culture was marked by a reluctance ever entirely to discard its past practices, tending instead to preserve all kinds of 'fossils' – in religious rituals or politics, or whatever – even when their original significance had been lost.

Black Lives Matter, was founded by three women;

Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.