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.
Mary Beard
Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl.
People who exploit others come to spend an enormous amount of energy wondering about and justifying that exploitation.
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?
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.
I loved 'Gladiator,' and I thought its depiction of gladiatorial combat, although it was an aggrandizing picture, was cleverly and expertly done.
I don't want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard.
English country towns are often seen as a cultural wasteland, but the more cut off you are, the more the need to create things, to make your own culture.
Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.
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.
My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren't as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.
I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece.
I don't think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go - just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance - what you will find is that women's voices are not taken seriously.
We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.
If talking about arts means being pretentious, a bit like being a wine critic, then I don't feel comfy with that. You can get a lot from paintings without getting mystical about brush strokes.
One of its most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be un-civilised, with those who do not - or cannot be trusted to - share our values.
However judicious academics may be - not like me - they are all taught to see through crap.
One of the downsides of working in antiquity is that you don't have many female voices, but you certainly have a lot of male terror about the potential of women's power. It shows you very clearly that the most oppressive cultures tend to be afraid of those whom they oppress.
Classics isn't about the ancient world. It's partly about the ancient world, but it's about our conversation. It's how we try to talk to antiquity.
The reason why the British theatrical tradition is world-leading in Greek drama is because there is a flourishing tradition of people rethinking Greek tragedy.
All religions throughout history have been concerned about - and have sometimes fought over - what it means to represent God, and they have found elegant, intriguing, and awkward ways to confront that dilemma.
It's great fun being an academic because you have a certain licence to be a bit of a joker.
I knew that Trump was ghastly. I knew I'd vote for Hillary if I had a vote.
I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe.
I think most people gain some sense of how to look at a painting, but no one ever teaches you how to look at a piece of silver.
What I find very interesting is, we're not enthralled by the ancient world, and we've escaped all kinds of ancient preconceptions and assumptions and prejudices. But, nevertheless, we still make that connection between authoritative speech and male speech.
We are sold the idea of a refugee as a tiny child sitting crying, as a way of raising money, but elderly ladies and kids largely can't move. The demographic is mostly young men.
I was 11 when I started Latin - not like boys, who start early at prep school. At 14, you had to choose whether to start Greek and drop German, but my mum made a fuss, and I took Latin, Greek, French, and German at O-level, which meant I didn't do much science.
The history of art is not just the history of artists; it is also the history of the people who viewed art. And that wider perspective can help us see some of the reasons why the art of the ancient world should still matter to us.
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.
My fantasy is going into a men's loo. And listening to what they say.
You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
Fate has it in for me to be an exhibit: that funny old lady from the telly.
I receive something we might euphemistically call an 'inappropriately hostile' response - that is to say, more than fair criticism or even fair anger - every time I speak on radio or television.
I'm not in the slightest wanting to attack the women's movement here. But I think that in popular, broadly left-wing, broadly feminist discourse, there is a tendency to just label discrimination against women - and embedded assumptions about them - as misogyny and think 'job done.'
At 16, I got into local-education archaeology classes - you got to go to summer digs. It allowed me to be both intellectual and a bad girl with a wicked social life every evening!
I'm an academic. I argue; I engage with people.
I've chosen to be this way because that's how I feel comfortable with myself. That's how I am. It's about joining up the dots between how you look and how you feel inside, and I think that's what I've done, and I think people do it differently.
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.
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.
There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.
I think you have to realize that most ancient warfare is really kind of hit and run, honestly. You go and you bash down the walls of some enemy 50 miles away and you take some slaves, you take some cattle, probably a bit of cash too, and then you say goodbye and go home and you probably do the same thing next year - or try to, or they do it to you.
You don't overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation.
The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them.
The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don't think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive.
It would have been nice if the people who were criticising 'Civilizations' had actually watched it. But the popular response has been tremendous, and in the end, that's what really matters.
Nobody but an idiot would pretend that they had an error-proof way of choosing the 'best' out of hundreds of perfectly qualified applicants - not for university or for anything.
There's a basic rule of thumb that the more a culture oppresses women, or oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that.
I remember plastering the kitchen with Black Power pictures of Angela Davis.
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.
