Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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The book explores different facets of life in the old city of Pompeii. The chapters are divided into different sections, each one dealing with a different topic. So from politics to entertainment, from social lives of the people to their family lives, Mary Beard takes us through each aspect of life in Pompeii. She brings out the flavour of the city as it was with ease but also manages to help you prepare for the city as it is now. Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World (as editor with John North, 1990); ISBN 0-7156-2206-4 She goes behind the scenes of the Great Pompeii Project, where restoration teams have gradually removed the layers of time and deterioration from the frescoes and mosaics of houses closed to the public for decades. And with the help of point-cloud scanning technology, Pompeii is seen and explained like never before. Honorary graduates | University of St Andrews". Archived from the original on 7 July 2016 . Retrieved 25 January 2020.

What Was Everyday Life Like In Pompeii? | Pompeii with Mary

The world's most controversial classicist debunks our movie-style myths about the Roman town with meticulous scholarship and propulsive energy' Laura Silverman, Daily MailWhen people were running away from destruction in 79 AD, after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, they had no idea that 2000 years later they would be famous and the subject of fascination and speculation to many. If you are one of these many, then you need to read this book. Right away! Beard has been a Labour Party member and describes herself as having a socialist disposition, being a committed feminist and an anti-racist. [97] [98] [99] [100] [101] On 14 February 2014, Beard delivered a lecture on the public voice of women at the British Museum as part of the London Review of Books winter lecture series. It was recorded and broadcast on BBC Four a month later under the title Oh Do Shut Up, Dear!. [24] The lecture begins with the example of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, admonishing his mother to retreat to her chamber. [25] (The title alludes to Prime Minister David Cameron telling a female MP to "Calm down, dear!", which earned wide-spread criticism as a "classic sexist put-down". [26] [27] [28]) Three years later, Beard gave a second lecture for the same partners, entitled "Women in Power: from Medusa to Merkel". It considered the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded, and how idioms from ancient Greece are still used to normalise gendered violence. [29] She argues that "we don’t have a model or a template for what a powerful woman looks like. We only have templates that make them men." [30] Mary Beard: We are living in an age when men are proud to be ignorant". Evening Standard . Retrieved 3 December 2017.

BBC Two - Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town

George Osborne in 'advanced' talks with Greek PM over return of Parthenon Marbles". The Telegraph. 3 December 2022 . Retrieved 4 December 2022– via www.telegraph.co.uk. She is never tempted, she told me, to abandon the day job and focus purely on her media career. Cambridge is grounding. It is her home. She is respected by her peers: perhaps because her media success came late, she has never lost academic credibility, and her colleagues regard her as an invaluable standard bearer for the subject. As her former Newnham colleague Helen Morales – now at the University of California – said: “She might be meeting Manolo Blahnik in the morning, but it’s the Res Gestae in the afternoon.” (She has an unlikely friendship with the shoe designer, whom she met at a party; she has several flat pairs of his shoes, her favourites being “my little red Manolos”.) Opening in 1963 New York, to Renaissance Florence, to the birth of theatre in fifth-century Athens, and the Sex Pistols shattering Thatcherite Britain - take your seat for the history of performance. One of the puzzles of Pompeii is where the kids went to school. No obvious school buildings or classrooms have been found. The likely answer is that teachers took their class of boys (and almost certainly only boys) to some convenient shady portico and did their teaching there. A wonderful series of paintings of scenes of life in the Forum seems to show exactly that happening – with one poor miscreant being given a nasty beating in front of his classmates. And the curriculum? To judge from the large number of quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid scrawled on Pompeian walls, the young were well drilled in the national epic.

In 2013 she presented Caligula with Mary Beard on BBC Two, describing the making of myths around leaders and dictators. [44] Interviewers continued to ask about her self-presentation, and she reiterated that she had no intention of undergoing a make-over. [45] For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town | Mary Beard | The Guardian Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town | Mary Beard | The Guardian

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Profile Books, 2015 / Liveright Publishing, 2015); ISBN 9780871404237 Beard’s main inquiry is to find out how the Pompeiians actually lived. For example: how they organised themselves socially, whether they lived in areas according to wealth and/or profession. In this she proves that they lived in a very mixed manner. There were no ‘quartiers’. She also looks at how the homes and shops were laid out and decorated. Even if the rooms feel rather enclosing and with small windows, Pompeiians favoured mural paintings displaying opening vistas. A fair amount of the frescoes has survived but these are now in the Archaeological Museum in Naples. This museum, like the mountain, is a strongly recommended complementary visit. In the museum shop I found a wonderful and very fat book with the paintings; it is now sitting at home waiting for my eyes and time La pittura pompeiana. In her account Beard presented the four styles of painting that span a period of close to three centuries. She also looks at finances and where the money came from and how it related to the very international commerce that was engaged in this Mediterranean port (exotic and expensive dyes from the East, the food staple ‘garum’ from Hispania and a striking 'Indian' statuette). Their politics had to be somewhat provincial since the major decisions that affected the Republic/Empire were made in Rome. Of course only men could vote but curiously several men made references to outstanding women when seeking the voters.A mark of her leap into the celebrity stratosphere is the avalanche of daily requests she receives. These have included, aside from several politely declined offers of a makeover from the Daily Mail, invitations (also politely declined) to appear on the diving show Splash!, on the celebrity version of The Great British Bake Off and on Celebrity Mastermind. Of the last she said: “God, just imagine it. Either you’d look like a complete nerd or everyone would be saying, ‘She doesn’t know a thing.’” The first volume of the bewitching ‘Chrestomanci’ series by Diana Wynne Jones. Charmed Life arrives in an explosion of magic in this edition illustrated by Alison Bryant and introduced by Katherine Rundell. Out and about, she is regularly flagged down by fans, often, but not always, young women. (One admirer, Megan Beech, published a poem called When I Grow Up I Want to Be Mary Beard – a phrase that now adorns T-shirts worn by her fans. Characteristically, Beard befriended Beech after they connected on social media, and Beech is now studying for a PhD at Newnham.) Caterina Turroni, a television producer who has worked with Beard since the Pompeii documentary, recalled filming with her in Tiberius’s villa on Capri in 2013, when a party of English schoolgirls spotted the cameras. “You could hear them saying, ‘What if it’s her?’ ‘Do you think it’s really her?’ and then they saw her and they went insane – it was like they’d seen a boyband.” Discover the captivating origins and hidden meanings of the flags that we all know today in this sparkling tour through this universal subject!