Mary Beard

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge and a fellow of Newnham College.  She is the author of SPQR, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town and Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up. Her LRB Winter Lectures on ‘Women in Power’ and ‘The Public Voice of Women’ were published as a book in 2018.

From Swindon to Swindon

Mary Beard, 17 February 2011

In February 1863, the newly founded Roman Bath Company opened its first premises in Jesus Lane, Cambridge. Behind an impressively classical façade, designed by Matthew Digby Wyatt, was a labyrinth of hot and cold rooms, and swimming pools, vaguely reflecting the layout and practice of an ancient Roman bath. Local worthies had invested considerable sums of money in the venture, in...

In February 1938, R. G. Collingwood, then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and aged only 48, suffered a small stroke. It was the first of a series, each one more serious than the last, that would kill him within five years. The usual treatment in the 1930s was less effective than modern medical intervention but rather more enjoyable. His doctors recommended a prolonged...

When McLynn chooses (as many have before him) to scour the Meditations for signs of Marcus’ inner conflicts, he might as well be looking for the evidence of psychic turmoil in the essay of a modern philosophy undergraduate.

In 1934, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Red Menace and the creeping influence of Moscow – for the Daily Mail at least – was a public school magazine called Out of Bounds. Written and produced by a group of wealthy, disaffected teenagers, it was a mixture of political polemic, reviews of left-wing books and adolescent anxiety. There were articles on the arms race and on...

Diary: set in Tunisia

Mary Beard, 14 December 2006

The practical mechanics of crucifixion have had a lurid hold on the popular imagination for at least two millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of...

So Much for Caligula: Caesarishness

Julian Bell, 24 March 2022

The life of a first-century Roman emperor seems typically to have been a sorry business. The vast polity looked to a single authority for stability; but for those who either pushed themselves or were pushed...

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They were all foreigners: ‘SPQR’

Michael Kulikowski, 7 January 2016

Neil Tennant​ described his run of hits between ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘Heart’ as the Pet Shop Boys’ imperial phase, when they owned the charts and charmed the...

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Laugh as long as you can: Roman Jokes

James Davidson, 16 July 2015

The oldest​ joke I know, the oldest joke that a real person quite probably told on a quite probably actual occasion, is one ascribed to Sophocles. Ion of Chios, a lesser poet, claimed he...

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Mr Big & Co: Roman Victory!

Denis Feeney, 21 February 2008

The triumph is a key element of the modern image of the Romans, embodying the characteristics we love to imagine as quintessentially Roman: militarism, arrogance, cruelty, spectacle. Because the...

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The Wives of Herr Bear: Jane Harrison

Julia Briggs, 21 September 2000

In Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, a group of clever, fastidious preppies in a small liberal arts college on the East Coast reinvent the cult of Dionysus. They brew a concoction of...

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