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.
Interpretation
History helps us understand our identities and influences our thoughts.
In this quote, Mary Beard emphasizes that history is not a mere collection of facts about past civilizations like the Greeks and Romans; rather, it is an active process of engagement where we interpret and communicate with historical figures. Our understanding of the past shapes our identity and informs our contemporary discussions, suggesting that history is dynamic and deeply intertwined with how we perceive ourselves today.
In practice
In a lecture about the relevance of history in modern society.
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.
You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century.
The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.
And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.
Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.
Faith is being loyal to you unseen reality within
God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.
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