Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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With unparalleled access to Pompeii and featuring cutting-edge modern technology, Mary Beard guides us through this amazing slice of the ancient world.

The Fires of Vesuvius — Mary Beard | Harvard University Press The Fires of Vesuvius — Mary Beard | Harvard University Press

The world's most controversial classicist debunks our movie-style myths about the Roman town with meticulous scholarship and propulsive energy' Laura Silverman, Daily Mail Bomb threat tweet sent to classicist Mary Beard". BBC News. 4 August 2013 . Retrieved 29 January 2017.She goes behind the scenes of the Great Pompeii Project, where restoration teams have gradually removed the layers of time and deterioration from the frescoes and mosaics of houses closed to the public for decades. And with the help of point-cloud scanning technology, Pompeii is seen and explained like never before. 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] McCrum, Robert (23 August 2008). "Interview with Mary Beard, the classical world's most provocative figure". The Observer . Retrieved 4 December 2017.

The cult of Mary Beard | Mary Beard | The Guardian The cult of Mary Beard | Mary Beard | The Guardian

But the trouble this got her into with her bien pensant colleagues was as nothing to the reaction she got from her post-9/11 statement in the London Review of Books that, 'however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think'. Again uproar, hate mail and obloquy. But Beard simply dusted herself down and set about replying to her postbag.Partly they’re larger-than-life recreations of us. They have our faults but they’re bloodier and more lascivious; they have more exciting sex lives, that’s part of it. But also they’ve formed a template of power and what power is since the ancient world itself. So I think we’re curious about how they did it, even if we disapprove. It’s always a timely moment to think about one-man rule and the politics of corruption, dictatorship and autocracy She is never tempted, she told me, to abandon the day job and focus purely on her media career. Cambridge is grounding. It is her home. She is respected by her peers: perhaps because her media success came late, she has never lost academic credibility, and her colleagues regard her as an invaluable standard bearer for the subject. As her former Newnham colleague Helen Morales – now at the University of California – said: “She might be meeting Manolo Blahnik in the morning, but it’s the Res Gestae in the afternoon.” (She has an unlikely friendship with the shoe designer, whom she met at a party; she has several flat pairs of his shoes, her favourites being “my little red Manolos”.) People have been obsessed with the lives of the emperors almost since the end of the Roman empire – what is it that appeals so much? It's probably the classics as much as her cheerful nature that makes the professor, on first encounter, not so much 'dangerous' as an angst-free zone, tough-minded and inwardly secure. Was this, I wondered, to do with growing up an only child? 'It was enormously good fun,' she replies, happily recalling her beginnings in rural Shropshire. This approach was neatly displayed in her bestselling history of Rome, SPQR (2015). The early history of Rome, the era of its fabled seven kings, is notoriously difficult to untangle. There are few, if any, contemporary sources. The whole story slides frustratingly away into legend, with the later Romans just as confused as we are about how an unremarkable town on a malarial swamp came to rule a vast empire. One way of handling this material might have been simply to have started later, when the historian’s footing among the sources becomes more secure. Instead Beard asked not how much truth could be excavated from the Romans’ stories about their deep past, but what it might mean that they told them. If the Romans believed their city had started with Romulus and Remus, with the rape of the Sabine women – in a welter, in other words, of fratricide and sexual violence – what can we learn about the tellers’ concerns, their preoccupations, their beliefs? According to Greg Woolf, “One of the things Mary has taught is to look at the window, not through it, because there isn’t really anything behind it.”

Mary Beard: ‘The ancient world is a metaphor for us’ Mary Beard: ‘The ancient world is a metaphor for us’

Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture Series". University of Chicago. Archived from the original on 1 October 2020 . Retrieved 5 June 2018. A Point of View, The Oxbridge Interview". BBC Radio 4. 27 November 2011 . Retrieved 29 January 2017. Corresponding Members - Archaeological Institute of America". Archaeological.org . Retrieved 10 November 2018. 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.

TheBookOfPhobiaaAndManias traces the rich and thought-provoking history in which our fixations have taken shape. A Don's Life". The Times Literary Supplement. Archived from the original on 20 November 2012 . Retrieved 19 November 2012. Where does Emperor of Rome stand in relation to your previous books – I’m thinking of SPQR and Twelve Caesars ? 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.”

Mary Beard: ‘The last thing I’d want is a world in which we Mary Beard: ‘The last thing I’d want is a world in which we

One of the puzzles of Pompeii is where the kids went to school. No obvious school buildings or classrooms have been found. The likely answer is that teachers took their class of boys (and almost certainly only boys) to some convenient shady portico and did their teaching there. A wonderful series of paintings of scenes of life in the Forum seems to show exactly that happening – with one poor miscreant being given a nasty beating in front of his classmates. And the curriculum? To judge from the large number of quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid scrawled on Pompeian walls, the young were well drilled in the national epic. The official religion of the town sponsored solemn sacrifices and raucous festivals celebrating Jupiter, Apollo, Venus and the Roman emperor, who was to all intents and purposes a god himself. But alongside this, happily co-existing so far as we can tell, were all kinds of other religions. One of the most impressive sights at Pompeii is the little temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis, once tended by its white-clad, shaven-headed priests. We have evidence, too, for Jews and worshippers of Cybele, known as the Great Mother. There is no clear sign of any Christians, but in one house an ivory statuette of the Indian goddess Lakshmi has turned up. Souvenir, curiosity or object of devotion? Nobody knows.

To be in with a chance of winning a copy of Emma Dabiri’s new book along with this stunning pastel nail polish giftset from Télle Moi, simply… a b Mead, Rebecca (25 August 2014). "The Troll Slayer". The New Yorker . Retrieved 3 December 2017. Now, in a new book, the inventor of that test, the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, has provided her own reconstruction of Pompeii. As her concern with dormice suggests, she is a historian who has always been fascinated by the stereotypes we have of ancient Rome: both how they came into being, and how valid they are likely to be. Indeed, such is the relish with which she goes about her myth-busting that it seems to reflect not scorn, but rather a wry affection for the myths themselves. What better theme for her, then, than Pompeii? After all, ever since excavations of the buried city began in the mid-18th century, it has provided us with the nearest thing we are ever likely to have to a freeze-frame from the ancient past - and yet many of our presumptions about what it can teach us turn out, on closer inspection, to crumble to dust. Hence what Beard, coining another catchy formula, terms the "Pompeii paradox": "that we simultaneously know a huge amount and very little about ancient life there". The book explores different facets of life in the old city of Pompeii. The chapters are divided into different sections, each one dealing with a different topic. So from politics to entertainment, from social lives of the people to their family lives, Mary Beard takes us through each aspect of life in Pompeii. She brings out the flavour of the city as it was with ease but also manages to help you prepare for the city as it is now. Lego model of Cambridge classicist Prof Mary Beard created". BBC News. 27 January 2018 . Retrieved 2 December 2020.