Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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Where does Emperor of Rome stand in relation to your previous books – I’m thinking of SPQR and Twelve Caesars ? In February 2018, in response to a report in The Times of Oxfam employees engaging in sexual exploitation in disaster zones, Beard tweeted "Of course one can't condone the (alleged) behaviour of Oxfam staff in Haiti and elsewhere. But I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain 'civilised' values in a disaster zone. And overall I still respect those who go in and help out, where most of us would not tread." [82] This led to widespread criticism, in which Mary Beard was accused of racism. [83] In response, Beard posted a picture of herself crying, explaining that she had been subjected to a "torrent of abuse" and that "I find it hard to imagine that anyone out there could possibly think that I am wanting to turn a blind eye to the abuse of women and children". [84] Personal life [ edit ] Beard filming in Rome, 2012 The book that made me a feminist". The Guardian. 16 December 2017. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 6 January 2018. Using the latest forensic techniques it is now possible to determine what those who perished in the disaster ate and drank, where they came from, what diseases they suffered, how rich they were and, perhaps even more astonishingly, the details of their sex lives. In 2007–2008, Beard gave the Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. [23]

Mary Beard (classicist) - Wikipedia

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]Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World (as editor with John North, 1990); ISBN 0-7156-2206-4 After you’ve done it for 40 years, it’s not that you think “Phew, thank God I’m out” – I had a great time, it was marvellous, and I feel so privileged that I spent a career doing what I was really interested in. But it’s time to go – I’m now 68 and I’ve got other things I want to do. The next stop’s the care home, so please, let me have another bite at some other cherries before that! Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture Series". University of Chicago. Archived from the original on 1 October 2020 . Retrieved 5 June 2018. Beard exemplifies something rare, said Jonty Claypole, the BBC’s director of arts and one of the executive producers of the new Civilisations. “It’s never about her,” he said. “To be a true public intellectual is like offering a form of public service. A lot of people don’t realise that: they confuse being a public intellectual with their ego.” He counted off those he regarded as her predecessors: “Bertrand Russell, Kenneth Clark, Susan Sontag, Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, Stuart Hall, Simon Schama … ” Figures like these emerge only once in a generation, he said. “She looks at the world through the deep lens of the ancient world, and she shifts arguments.”

Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town - Mary Beard - Google Books Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town - Mary Beard - Google Books

a b Williams, Zoe (23 April 2016). "Mary Beard: 'The role of the academic is to make everything less simple' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 3 December 2017. Part of the problem is that the city's population was not, as Doctor Who suggested, wiped out in a single day amid a wholly unanticipated cataclysm. On the contrary: all but the brave or foolhardy had already fled their homes before the climactic pyroclastic surge descended from Vesuvius to entomb the remaining Pompeiians for good. The implications of this for archaeologists and historians, as Beard makes clear in a typically invigorating chapter, are profound: for what we have frozen in Pompeii is not a scene from everyday life, but rather a place that was already well on its way to becoming a ghost town. The denuded character of the houses bears witness less to a taste for minimalism, than to wholesale evacuation. The Sather Professor". University of California, Berkeley Department of Classics. Archived from the original on 10 August 2012 . Retrieved 16 July 2008.In 1994 she made an early television appearance on an Open Media discussion for the BBC, Weird Thoughts, [34] alongside Jenny Randles among others. This was characterised in an article in 2021 as follows:

Pompeii - Life and Death in a Roman Town ( Mary Beard ) Pompeii - Life and Death in a Roman Town ( Mary Beard )

Prof. Mary Beard profile". Debrett's People of Today. Archived from the original on 23 March 2012 . Retrieved 29 July 2015. There were other sections of which I wasn’t as fond. The chapter on religion, for example, coming after sections on sex and sports, was kind of a letdown. But that’s just me. Like I said, this is a tour, and different people want different things on a tour. Honorary degree recipients for 2018 announced | University of Oxford". Ox.ac.uk. 22 March 2018 . Retrieved 20 May 2019. With unparalleled access to Pompeii and featuring cutting-edge modern technology, Mary Beard guides us through this amazing slice of the ancient world. Beard is the classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement, where she also writes a regular blog, "A Don's Life". [3] [4] Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as "Britain's best-known classicist". [5] The New Yorker characterises her as "learned but accessible". [6] Early life and education [ edit ]Beard is a great name even for a female professor, and I mean no disrespect when I say she has a determinedly ungroomed look. But traipsing as scruffily as eccentric high donnery would permit amid the evocative ruins of Pompeii, she was the perfect teller of this engaging story, which wasn't about the volcano – or leafy hill, as they probably still thought of Vesuvius before it went off in AD79 – but the sort of people who were prematurely buried by it. There were the familiar eerie plaster casts of those captured in the drama of dying, but more telling, she said, was a recently discovered cellar of skeletons – the remains of fleeing citizens huddled here against the darkening, falling skies. You could tell a lot from bones: those of the wealthy bore the green residue of precious ornaments they had about them; here was a leg bone swollen with an infection consistent with spending too much time with possibly incontinent strangers in the surprisingly unsanitary public baths. Most astonishing, though, were the teeth of 10-year-old twins suffering from congenital syphilis, proving – Mary said with the kind of excitement most of us reserve for a good win on the scratchcards – that whoever brought syphilis to Europe, it wasn't Christopher Columbus, as previously thought (by those who think about these things). It suggested too that chronically ill children – even poor ones, without green bones – might have been cared for by a family support network, rather than, as I have always assumed, put on a mountainside to be eaten by wolves. Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations (Profile Books, 2013 / Liveright Publishing, 2013); ISBN 1-78125-048-0 For most people, this would be a cautionary tale; for Beard, it was evidence that such battles cannot be shirked. Embedded in her refusal to be silenced, in her endless online engagement, is a kind of optimism: the idealistic, perhaps totally unrealistic, notion that if only we listened to each other, if only we argued more cogently, more tolerantly and with better grace, then we could make public discourse something better than it is.