Quotes from Mary Beard

Claudius knew a good deal about Etruscan history. Among his many learned researches he had written a twenty-volume study of the Etruscans, in Greek, as well as compiling an Etruscan dictionary.

It is also clear that the original performances, in public celebrations of all kinds, from religious festivals to the 'after-party' of triumphs, were unruly, raucous occasions, attracting a wide cross section of the population of the city, including women and slaves. This is in sharp contrast to classical Athens, where the theatre audience, though larger than at Rome, was probably restricted to male citizens, unruly or not.

Rome was the only place in the ancient Mediterranean where the state took responsibility for the regular basic food supplies of its citizens.

to become a man (or at least an elite man) was to claim the right to speak.

Women, in other words, may in extreme circumstances publicly defend their own sectional interests, but not speak for men or the community as a whole.

In the Afghan parliament, apparently, they disconnect the mics when they don't want to hear the women speak).

Just keep mum and "block" them' you're told.

we should be thinking more about the fault-lines and fractures that underlie dominant male discourse.

It is, however, with Hillary Clinton that we see the Medusa theme at its starkest and nastiest.

Putting it bluntly, having women pretend to be men may be a quick fix, but it doesn't get to the heart of the problem.

We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for

When we look, for example, at the Parthenon for the first time, we look at it already knowing that generations of architects chose precisely that style of building for the museums, town-halls, and banks of most of our major cities.

Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, 'they have lived' – that is, 'they're dead'.

Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing: that's living (venari lavare ludere ridere occest vivere).

Public speech was a—if not the—defining attribute of maleness. Or, to quote a well-known Roman slogan, the elite male citizen could be summed up as vir bonus dicendi peritus, 'a good man, skilled in speaking.' A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.

it doesn't much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it's simply the fact that you're saying it.

No one has ever framed a better critique of Roman imperial power than the words put into the mouths of rebels against Rome by Roman writers themselves.

I found the city built of brick and left it built of marble,' this

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. It is an idiom that effectively repositions women back into the domestic sphere (people 'whinge' over things like the washing up); it trivialises their words, or it 're-privatises' them.

Si no percibimos que las mujeres están totalmente dentro de las estructuras de poder, entonces lo que tenemos que redefinir es el poder, no a las mujeres.

But all tactics of that type tend to leave women still feeling on the outside, impersonators of rhetorical roles that they don't feel they own. Putting it bluntly, having women pretend to be men may be a quick fix, but it doesn't get to the heart of the problem.

For a start it doesn't much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it's simply the fact that you're saying it. And that matches the detail of the threats themselves

If I have played my part well, then give me applause.

Although we read of occasional Romans, usually the 'bad' ones in these stories, complaining that foreigners or the low-born are taking away their birthright, the overall message is unmistakeable: even at the very pinnacle of the Roman political order, 'Romans' could come from elsewhere; and those born low, even ex-slaves, could rise to the top.