Quotes from Mary Beard

I do wonder if, in some places, the presence of large numbers of women in parliament means that parliament is where the power is not.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb ('to power'), not as a possession.

But my basic premise is that our mental, cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male. If we close our eyes and try to conjure up the image of a president or – to move into the knowledge economy – a professor, what most of us see is not a woman.

According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen.

Whichever side won, as Cicero again observed, the result was set to be much the same: slavery for Rome. What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one-man rule was really a war to choose between rival emperors.

all the evidence from ancient Rome suggests that slavery as an institution was taken for granted, even by slaves. If they had a clearly formulated aim, the best guess is that Spartacus and his fellow escapees wanted to return to their various homes – in Spartacus' case probably Thrace in northern Greece; for others, Gaul. One thing is certain, though: they managed to hold out against Roman forces for an embarrassingly long time.

the empire created the emperors – not the other way round.

More interesting is another cultural connection this reveals: that unpopular, controversial or just plain different views when voiced by a woman are taken as indications of her stupidity. It is not that you disagree, it is that she is stupid: 'Sorry, love, you just don't understand.

what recently nurtured the tyranny was nothing other than our inaction … Weakened by the pleasure of peace we learned to live like slaves

first recorded example of a man telling a woman to 'shut up';

And some of the modern admirers of the gentle philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius would be less admiring if they reflected on the brutality of his suppression of the Germans, proudly illustrated in the scenes of battle that circle their way up his commemorative column that still stands in the centre of Rome; though less famous, it was clearly intended to rival Trajan's and was carefully built just a little taller (see plate 10). 70.

For the origin of literature at Rome was closely connected with Roman overseas expansion: 'The Muse imposed herself in warlike fashion on the fierce inhabitants of Rome,' as one second-century BCE author described it. The beginning of empire and the beginning of literature were two sides of the same coin.

Among all the things we fancy we have inherited from ancient Rome, from drains to place names, or the offices of the Catholic Church, the calendar is probably the most important and the most often overlooked.

Sallust was particularly eloquent on the theme. In his other surviving essay, on a war against the North African king Jugurtha at the end of the second century BCE, he reflects on the dire consequences of the destruction of Carthage: from the greed of all sections of Roman society ('every man for himself'), through the breakdown of consensus between rich and poor, to the concentration of power in the hands of a very few men. These all pointed to the end of the Republican system.

Caesar corrected the error and, for the future, established a year with 365 days, with an extra day inserted at the end of February every four years. This was a far more significant outcome of his visit to Egypt than any dalliance with Cleopatra.

Child labour was the norm. It is not a problem, or even a category, that most Romans would have understood. The invention of 'childhood' and the regulation of what work 'children' could do only came fifteen hundred years later and is still a peculiarly Western preoccupation.

How have we learned to look at those women who exercise power, or who try to? What are the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms (what kind of misogyny, aimed at what or whom, using what words or images, and with what effects)? How and why do the conventional definitions of 'power' (or for that matter of 'knowledge', 'expertise' and 'authority') that we carry round in our heads exclude women?

What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually. It is power in that sense that many women feel they don't have – and that they want.

There is little point in asking how 'democratic' the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.

it is easy to imagine the widespread pleasure when in 167 BCE Rome became a tax-free state: the treasury was so overflowing – thanks, in particular, to the spoils from the recent victory over Macedon – that direct taxation of Roman citizens was suspended except in emergencies, although they remained liable to a range of other levies, such as customs dues or a special tax charged on freeing slaves.

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

What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn't do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man (or at least an elite man) was to claim the right to speak. Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness.

Two central tenets of Republican government were that office holding should always be temporary and that, except in emergencies when one man might need to take control for a short while, power should always be shared.

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