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.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

People who exploit others come to spend an enormous amount of energy wondering about and justifying that exploitation.

Mary Beard

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?

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

I loved 'Gladiator,' and I thought its depiction of gladiatorial combat, although it was an aggrandizing picture, was cleverly and expertly done.

Mary Beard

I don't want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

However judicious academics may be - not like me - they are all taught to see through crap.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard

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.

Mary Beard