Quotes from Mary Beard

No es fácil hacer encajar a las mujeres en una estructura que, de entrada, está codificada como masculina: lo que hay que hacer es cambiar la estructura.

In Sallust's view, the moral fibre of Roman culture had been destroyed by the city's success and by the wealth, greed and lust for power that had followed its conquest of the Mediterranean and the crushing of all its serious rivals. The crucial moment came eighty-three years before the war against Catiline, when in 146 BCE Roman armies finally destroyed Carthage, Hannibal's home base on the north coast of Africa.

into the growing conurbation was constructed in 312 BCE, a watercourse that ran mostly underground for some 10 miles from the nearby hills, not one of those extraordinary aerial constructions that we often now mean by 'aqueduct'. This was the brainchild of a contemporary of Barbatus, the energetic Appius Claudius Caecus, who in the same year also launched the first major Roman road, the Via Appia (the Appian Way, named after him), leading straight south from Rome to Capua.

Cicero's eloquence, even if only half understood, still informs the language of modern politics.

I produced offspring. I sought to equal the deeds of my father. I won the praise of my ancestors so that they are glad that I was born to them.

Whatever the exact date of the wolf herself, the baby twins are certainly later additions, made in the fifteenth century explicitly to capture the founding myth. Copies are found all over the world, partly thanks to Benito Mussolini, who distributed them far and wide as a symbol of Romanità.

she was well aware that the further up the career hierarchy she went, the fewer female faces she saw.

Rome had been under the rule of a mad sadist somewhere between a clinical psychopath and a Stalin.

Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder. There

Custodial sentences were not the penalties of choice in the ancient world, prisons being little more than places where criminals were held before execution. Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment.

Elites everywhere tend to worry about places where the lower orders congregate, and

a perverse and unruly superstition

THE LONG SIEGE, and final destruction, of Carthage in 146 BCE was gruesome even by ancient standards, with atrocities reported on both sides. The losers could be as spectacularly cruel as the victors.

By comparison, one controversial consul in 59 BCE got off lightly: he was merely pelted with excrement and spent the rest of his year of office barricaded at home.

The woman who can whisper in her husband's ear wields more power de facto, or rather is often alleged to, than the colleagues who can only send official requests and memos.

Just as the ambition of Roman slaves was usually to gain freedom for themselves, not to abolish slavery as an institution, so the ambitions of the poor were not radically to reconfigure the social order but to find a place for themselves nearer the top of the hierarchy of wealth.

letters of Cicero

The losers could be as spectacularly cruel as the victors.

despite the efforts of ancient writers to embellish them with dramatic appearances of the gods, uncanny omens and prophetic dreams – the reality of the surroundings was probably mundane. For us, 'to cross the Rubicon' has come to mean 'to pass the point of no return'. It did not mean that to Caesar.

he appealed to the support of the discontented poor within the city while mustering his makeshift army outside it.

Juvenal is not the only one to write off the priorities of the Roman people as 'bread and circuses'. Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, makes exactly the same point when he writes of the emperor Trajan that 'he understood that the Roman people are kept in line by two things beyond all else: the corn dole and entertainments'.

Viajar por el imperio no solo significaba atravesar zonas horarias tal como lo entendemos nosotros, sino moverse entre formas completamente distintas de calcular las fechas o las horas del día (es un auténtico misterio comprender cómo manejaban la agenda).

To put this the other way round, we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.

To put it another way, if women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?