Top 160 Mary Beard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?”

— Mary Beard

2. “Action without study is fatal...”

— Mary Beard

3. “When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.”

— Mary Beard

4. “If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine. I’ll call it human.”

— Mary Beard

5. “Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.”

— Mary Beard

6. “Fame is fickle. If the media turn against me, I will just have more time in the library. Not bad as a fate.”

— Mary Beard

7. “Just as the ambition of Roman slaves was usually to gain freedom for themselves, not to abolish slavery as an institution, so the ambitions of the poor were not radically to reconfigure the social order but to find a place for themselves nearer the top of the hierarchy of wealth.”

— Mary Beard

8. “Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.”

— Mary Beard

9. “Cicero once said of Cato, ‘he talks as if he were in the Republic of Plato, when in fact he is in the crap of Romulus’.”

— Mary Beard

10. “When we look, for example, at the Parthenon for the first time, we look at it already knowing that generations of architects chose precisely that style of building for the museums, town-halls, and banks of most of our major cities.”

— Mary Beard

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

— Mary Beard

12. “According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen.”

— Mary Beard

13. “SPQR is still plastered over the city of Rome, on everything from manhole covers to rubbish bins. It can be traced back to the lifetime of Cicero, making it one of the most enduring acronyms in history. It has predictably prompted parody. ‘Sono Pazzi Questi Romani’ is an Italian favourite: ‘These Romans are mad’.”

— Mary Beard

14. “We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, 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?”

— Mary Beard

15. “If the assassination of Julius Caesar became a model for the effective removal of a tyrant, it was also a powerful reminder that getting rid of a tyrant did not necessarily dispose of tyranny.”

— Mary Beard

16. “Trump and Clinton, Perseus and Medusa, and rest my case.”

— Mary Beard

17. “As Carthage went up in flames in 146 BCE, one eyewitness spotted him shedding a tear and heard him quoting from memory an apposite line on the fall of Troy from Homer’s Iliad. He was reflecting that one day the same fate might afflict Rome. Crocodile tears or not, they made their point.”

— Mary Beard

18. “But in every way, the shared metaphors we use of female access to power – ‘knocking on the door’, ‘storming the citadel’, ‘smashing the glass ceiling’, or just giving them a ‘leg up’ – underline female exteriority. Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.”

— Mary Beard

19. “Caesar quoted in Greek two words from the Athenian comic playwright Menander: literally, in a phrase borrowed from gambling, ‘Let the dice be thrown.’ Despite the usual English translation – ‘The die is cast’, which again appears to hint at the irrevocable step being taken – Caesar’s Greek was much more an expression of uncertainty, a sense that everything now was in the lap of the gods. Let’s throw the dice in the air and see where they will fall! Who knows what will happen next?”

— Mary Beard

20. “In Sallust’s view, the moral fibre of Roman culture had been destroyed by the city’s success and by the wealth, greed and lust for power that had followed its conquest of the Mediterranean and the crushing of all its serious rivals. The crucial moment came eighty-three years before the war against Catiline, when in 146 BCE Roman armies finally destroyed Carthage, Hannibal’s home base on the north coast of Africa.”

— Mary Beard

21. “Just keep mum and “block” them’ you’re told.”

— Mary Beard

22. “Aemilius Paullus may have had this in mind when he remarked: ‘A man who knows how to conquer in battle also knows how to give a banquet and organise games.’ He is usually taken to have been referring to the connection between military victory and spectacle; but he may have also been hinting that the talents of a successful general did not go far beyond basic organisational expertise.”

— Mary Beard

23. “But my basic premise is that our mental, cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male. If we close our eyes and try to conjure up the image of a president or – to move into the knowledge economy – a professor, what most of us see is not a woman.”

— Mary Beard

24. “Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness. Or, to quote a well-known Roman slogan, the elite male citizen could be summed up as vir bonus dicendi peritus, ‘a good man, skilled in speaking.’ A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.”

— Mary Beard

25. “What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender.”

— Mary Beard

26. “Nonetheless, whatever mystery surrounds them, the Olmec have left us a powerful in-your-face reminder that across the world, when people first made art they made it about themselves. From the very beginning art has been about us.”

— Mary Beard

27. “It doesn’t much matter what line of argument you take as a woman. If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it – it’s the fact that you are saying it.”

— Mary Beard

28. “It is, however, with Hillary Clinton that we see the Medusa theme at its starkest and nastiest.”

— Mary Beard

29. “Roman culture was marked by a reluctance ever entirely to discard its past practices, tending instead to preserve all kinds of ‘fossils’ – in religious rituals or politics, or whatever – even when their original significance had been lost.”

— Mary Beard

30. “For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you’re saying it. And that matches the detail of the threats themselves.”

— Mary Beard

31. “It is also clear that the original performances, in public celebrations of all kinds, from religious festivals to the ‘after-party’ of triumphs, were unruly, raucous occasions, attracting a wide cross section of the population of the city, including women and slaves. This is in sharp contrast to classical Athens, where the theatre audience, though larger than at Rome, was probably restricted to male citizens, unruly or not.”

— Mary Beard

32. “In many ways, clementia was the political slogan of Caesar’s dictatorship. Yet it provoked as much opposition as gratitude, for the simple reason that, virtue though it may have been in some respects, it was an entirely monarchical one. Only those with the power to do otherwise can exercise mercy. Clementia, in other words, was the antithesis of Republican libertas. Cato was said to have killed himself to escape it. So it was not just.”

— Mary Beard

33. “Claudius knew a good deal about Etruscan history. Among his many learned researches he had written a twenty-volume study of the Etruscans, in Greek, as well as compiling an Etruscan dictionary.”

— Mary Beard

34. “Among all the things we fancy we have inherited from ancient Rome, from drains to place names, or the offices of the Catholic Church, the calendar is probably the most important and the most often overlooked.”

— Mary Beard

35. “Rome was not simply the thuggish younger sibling of classical Greece, committed to engineering, military efficiency and absolutism, whereas the Greeks preferred intellectual inquiry, theatre and democracy.”

— Mary Beard

36. “No one has ever framed a better critique of Roman imperial power than the words put into the mouths of rebels against Rome by Roman writers themselves.”

— Mary Beard

37. “It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not.”

— Mary Beard

38. “More interesting is another cultural connection this reveals: that unpopular, controversial or just plain different views when voiced by a woman are taken as indications of her stupidity. It is not that you disagree, it is that she is stupid.”

— Mary Beard

39. “Hadrian’s Pantheon was another. Finished in the 120s CE, the concrete span of its dome remained the widest in the world until 1958.”

— Mary Beard

40. “Cicero’s eloquence, even if only half understood, still informs the language of modern politics.”

— Mary Beard

41. “For the origin of literature at Rome was closely connected with Roman overseas expansion: ‘The Muse imposed herself in warlike fashion on the fierce inhabitants of Rome,’ as one second-century BCE author described it. The beginning of empire and the beginning of literature were two sides of the same coin.”

— Mary Beard

42. “Child labour was the norm. It is not a problem, or even a category, that most Romans would have understood. The invention of ‘childhood’ and the regulation of what work ‘children’ could do only came fifteen hundred years later and is still a peculiarly Western preoccupation.”

— Mary Beard

43. “Putting it bluntly, having women pretend to be men may be a quick fix, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem.”

— Mary Beard

44. “There is little point in asking how ‘democratic’ the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.”

— Mary Beard

45. “Nuestro modelo cultural y mental de persona poderosa sigue siendo irrevocablemente masculino.”

— Mary Beard

46. “They create desolation and call it peace There.”

— Mary Beard

47. “I found the city built of brick and left it built of marble,’ this.”

— Mary Beard

48. “But the last century of the Republic was more than a mere bloodbath. As the flowering of poetry, theory and art suggests, it was also a period when Romans grappled with the issues that were undermining their political process and came up with some of their greatest inventions, including the radical principle that the state had some responsibility for ensuring that its citizens had enough to eat.”

— Mary Beard

49. “Those reasons are much more basic: it is flagrantly unjust to keep women out, by whatever unconscious means we do so; and we simply cannot afford to do without women’s expertise, whether it is in technology, the economy or social care. If that means fewer men get into the legislature, as it must do – social change always has its losers as well as its winners – I am happy to look those men in the eye.”

— Mary Beard

50. “Caesar corrected the error and, for the future, established a year with 365 days, with an extra day inserted at the end of February every four years. This was a far more significant outcome of his visit to Egypt than any dalliance with Cleopatra.”

— Mary Beard