As her latest Roman opus hits our screens,the classics scholar is as unapologetically thoughtful as ever – and much more likely to swear about British attitudes to Pompeii than she is about Twitter trollsThe problem with Roman history, says Mary Beard, and is that “its just irredeemably blokeish. It’s conquests,and whether it’s not conquests, then it’s engineering, and whether it’s not engineering then it’s Roman military tactics. You don’t see the child miners or the slaves,and you don’t think: ‘How the hell would you collect that column from Egypt to Rome?’”Beard lives in Cambridge, where she is professor of classics, and a fellow of Newnham College since 1984. Her house looks as whether it is built of books,and her husband pops in periodically offering milky coffees. whether it weren’t for her TV career, which began in this century, or decades into her academic career,it is highly doubtful (to me) that she would absorb picked up the epithets she has outspoken, subversive, or controversial,dangerous.
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Source: theguardian.com