Quotes from Mary Beard

Cato, once it was clear that Caesar was the inevitable victor, killed himself at the town of Utica on the coast of what is now Tunisia in the most gory way imaginable. According to his biographer, writing 150 years later, he stabbed himself with his sword but survived the gash. Despite attempts by friends and family to save him, he pushed away the doctor they had summoned and pulled out his own bowels through the still open wound.

They create desolation and call it peace There

When you are about to hand control of the senate and people of Rome, the armies, the provinces, the allies to one man alone, would you look to the belly of a wife to produce him or search for an heir to supreme power only within the walls of your own home? … If he is to rule over all, he must be chosen from all.

Unlike all earlier Roman reformers, Gaius sponsored not just a single initiative but a dozen or so. He was the first politician in the city, leaving aside the mythical founding fathers, to have an extensive and coherent programme, with measures that covered such things as the right of appeal against the death penalty, the outlawing of bribery and a much more ambitious scheme of land distribution than Tiberius had ever proposed.

Roman emperors and their advisors never solved the problem of succession. They were defeated in part by biology, in part by lingering uncertainties and disagreements about how inheritance should best operate. Succession always came down to some combination of luck, improvisation, plotting, violence and secret deals. The moment when Roman power was handed on was always the moment when it was most vulnerable.

Very few towns or cities are founded at a stroke, by a single individual. They are usually the product of gradual changes in population, in patterns of settlement, social organisation and sense of identity. Most 'foundations' are retrospective constructions, projecting back into the distant past a microcosm, or imagined primitive version, of the later city.

Trump and Clinton, Perseus and Medusa, and rest my case.

thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb ('to power'), not as a possession.

This one commemorates a man called Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (the last name means 'bearded', 'long-beard' or perhaps 'beardy')

defend women's right to be wrong, at least occasionally.

Rome was no more conservative than nineteenth-century Britain. In both places, radical innovation thrived in dialogue with all kinds of ostensibly conservative traditions and rhetoric.

hostis (a 'foreigner' or an 'enemy'; the same Latin word, significantly, can mean both)

It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means

The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners.

Nuestro modelo cultural y mental de persona poderosa sigue siendo irrevocablemente masculino

SPQR is still plastered over the city of Rome, on everything from manhole covers to rubbish bins. It can be traced back to the lifetime of Cicero, making it one of the most enduring acronyms in history. It has predictably prompted parody. 'Sono Pazzi Questi Romani' is an Italian favourite: 'These Romans are mad'.

in the reign of the emperor Nero, when someone had the bright idea to make slaves wear uniforms, it was rejected on the grounds that this would make clear to the slave population just how numerous they were.

But the last century of the Republic was more than a mere bloodbath. As the flowering of poetry, theory and art suggests, it was also a period when Romans grappled with the issues that were undermining their political process and came up with some of their greatest inventions, including the radical principle that the state had some responsibility for ensuring that its citizens had enough to eat.

This historical scepticism is healthy. But it misses the bigger point: that whatever the view of Suetonius and other ancient writers, the qualities and characters of the individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history and its major developments.

Aemilius Paullus may have had this in mind when he remarked: 'A man who knows how to conquer in battle also knows how to give a banquet and organise games.' He is usually taken to have been referring to the connection between military victory and spectacle; but he may have also been hinting that the talents of a successful general did not go far beyond basic organisational expertise.

Democracy' (demokratia) was rooted politically and linguistically in the Greek world. It was never a rallying cry at Rome, even in its limited ancient sense or even for the most radical of Roman popular politicians. In most of the conservative writing that survives, the word means something close to 'mob rule'. There is little point in asking how 'democratic' the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.

As Carthage went up in flames in 146 BCE, one eyewitness spotted him shedding a tear and heard him quoting from memory an apposite line on the fall of Troy from Homer's Iliad. He was reflecting that one day the same fate might afflict Rome. Crocodile tears or not, they made their point.

And soon, as Tacitus put it, the Britons were dressing up in togas and taking their first steps on the path to vice, thanks to porticoes, baths and banquets. He sums this up in a pithy sentence: 'They called it, in their ignorance, "civilisation", but it was really part of their enslavement' ('Humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset').

Es habitual pensar que las mujeres que ocupan cargos de poder están derribando barreras o apoderándose de algo a lo que no tienen derecho.