Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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Beard has been surprised by cyberspace. 'When I started, I thought, oh help. This is cheap, tawdry, debased form of journalism, blah blah. I have come to find that it's a hugely interesting form of journalism in the most surprising way. I can use the layers of the web to take people to places that would never appear in a broadsheet. For instance, I can give the English and the Latin texts of the Res Gestae. You can talk up, not down.' She enthuses about 'this incredible reach. What's exciting is the combination of this IT Leviathan with a sort of intimacy. My cynical colleagues will say, "Beard, you're being naive. Think about the power relations. Where are the poor and the elderly on the web?"' Pompeii: one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history. We know how its victims died, but this film sets out to answer another question - how did they live? Gleaning evidence from an extraordinary find, Cambridge professor and Pompeii expert Mary Beard provides new insight into the lives of the people who lived in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius before its cataclysmic eruption.

Up Pompeii with the roguish don | Mary Beard | The Guardian

a b c d e f "BEARD, Prof (Winifred) Mary". Debrett's People of Today. 2008 . Retrieved 16 July 2008.Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE , FSA , FBA , FRSL (born 1 January 1955) [1] is an English scholar of Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of Classics at the University of Cambridge. [2] She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature. Bomb threat tweet sent to classicist Mary Beard". BBC News. 4 August 2013 . Retrieved 29 January 2017. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Profile Books, 2015 / Liveright Publishing, 2015); ISBN 9780871404237

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

Today,' she concedes, 'I would put it differently. Now I would probably sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury.' But she's unrepentant. 'Yes, I do think I should have said what I said. That's what academics are for. Speaking their minds is what you want your poor little dons to do.' Beard's outspokenness got her noticed. When she was offered a blog by Guardian Unlimited, 'Peter [Stothard, the current TLS editor] said, "You should do a blog for us." So I did. I was a complete tyro. I didn't ask myself, do I want to do a blog at all? It just took off.' There’s a recent vogue for retelling the stories of the sidelined women of classical history and literature. Does reimagining their lives help or hinder our understanding of the period? A Don's Life". The Times Literary Supplement. Archived from the original on 20 November 2012 . Retrieved 19 November 2012. Pompeiians worked hard but they also had fun. They liked to gamble, socialise in bars, drink their wine (and we tried the Neapolitan wine that is supposedly the closest to what the Romans drank, the Lacrimae Christi – very nice but the expert on wines was my friend), go to brothels and baths. The baths, again against popular thought (also shown convincingly in the BBC production) would not be at all attractive to us now. The large public pools did not have circulating water. Beard also tells us that sexuality was not more pronounced in their society than it is in ours. Beard thinks that rather than sex itself, what was at stake was power, male power, and this was expressed through the proliferating penises. Pompeiians were also believers. Their eating habits were somewhat different from ours; it seems that the wealthy ate at home (reclining as seen in the Hollywood recreations) but the great majority, that is, the less wealthy, ate out in sort of 'fast-food' outlets. Their religion was a mixture of the Roman (no text, no tenets, communal, open system, more based upon acts such as animal sacrifice than ritual) and the Oscan (the previous population) which means greater elements with an Oriental origin. 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!Already before the eruption of 79 AD many smaller earthquakes and a partly evacuation took place, dispelling the notion that Pompei was captured in a way fully representative of an actually fully functional Roman town. It was not until 1989 that she published the first book under her name alone – and it was nothing to do with classics. It was called the Good Working Mother’s Guide, a practical handbook that included advice on maternity benefit, how to interview a nanny, and the best way to hand-express milk (“First of all stroke or massage your breasts for a few minutes, starting from the top and working down and round towards the nipple … ”). It was an unlikely project for a young classics don, but was an example of Beard’s pedagogical instinct in action: reading it, you can sense she didn’t want to waste painfully acquired knowledge if it could be useful to others. “It’s true,” she told me, “that millions of women have sussed this and don’t immediately think: ‘I’ll write a book about it.’ But it seemed a fun thing to do.” On 5 January 2019, Beard gave the sesquicentennial Public Lecture for the Society for Classical Studies, marking the 150-year anniversary of the organisation. [31] The topic of her presentation was "What do we mean by Classics now?" a b "Appointments, reappointments, and grants of title". Cambridge University Reporter. CXXXV.20 (5992). 2 March 2005. Beard's standalone documentary Julius Caesar Revealed was shown on BBC One in February 2018. [50] In March, she wrote and presented "How Do We Look?" and "The Eye of Faith", two of the nine episodes in Civilisations, a reboot of the 1969 series by Kenneth Clark. [51]