Mary Beard

History is how we have learnt to think about ourselves. It's not as though the Greeks and Romans are static entities out there to be discovered and translated. We make them speak, we talk to them, and they inform what we say.

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.

What politicians do is they never get the rhetoric wrong, and the price they pay is they don't speak the truth as they see it. Now, I will speak truth as I see it, and sometimes I don't get the rhetoric right. I think that's a fair trade-off.

I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe.

Whatever you say about popular culture, people like people who know things, who are experts, and it doesn't particularly matter what they look like.

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.

It wasn't until I got to Cambridge that I discovered active discrimination against women.

The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.

A lot of sexism is just very silly... and the best response is laughter and ridicule.

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

It's a bit naff, but there is something exciting about pulling a bit of pottery out of the ground that's 2,000 years old.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.

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?

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.

I do not think that the lives of women of my generation, as a class, were blighted by the way the power differentials between men and women operated. We wanted to change those power differentials; we also had a good time.

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.

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.

One person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.

You don't overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation.

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 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.