Top 160 Mary Beard Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, for example, who more than two millennia later gave his name to the American city of Cincinnati, is supposed to have returned from semi-exile in the 450s BCE to become dictator and lead Roman armies to victory against their enemies before nobly retiring straight back to his farm without seeking further political glory.”

— Mary Beard

52. “Unlike all earlier Roman reformers, Gaius sponsored not just a single initiative but a dozen or so. He was the first politician in the city, leaving aside the mythical founding fathers, to have an extensive and coherent programme, with measures that covered such things as the right of appeal against the death penalty, the outlawing of bribery and a much more ambitious scheme of land distribution than Tiberius had ever proposed.”

— Mary Beard

53. “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

54. “Mine ends with a culminating moment in 212 CE, when the emperor Caracalla took the step of making every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered and completing a process of expanding the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship that had started almost a thousand years earlier. SPQR.”

— Mary Beard

55. “Rome was the only place in the ancient Mediterranean where the state took responsibility for the regular basic food supplies of its citizens.”

— Mary Beard

56. “Cato, once it was clear that Caesar was the inevitable victor, killed himself at the town of Utica on the coast of what is now Tunisia in the most gory way imaginable. According to his biographer, writing 150 years later, he stabbed himself with his sword but survived the gash. Despite attempts by friends and family to save him, he pushed away the doctor they had summoned and pulled out his own bowels through the still open wound.”

— Mary Beard

57. “It is not just that it is more difficult for women to succeed; they get treated much more harshly if ever they mess up.”

— Mary Beard

58. “Two central tenets of Republican government were that office holding should always be temporary and that, except in emergencies when one man might need to take control for a short while, power should always be shared.”

— Mary Beard

59. “Black Lives Matter, was founded by three women;.”

— Mary Beard

60. “What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually. It is power in that sense that many women feel they don’t have – and that they want.”

— Mary Beard

61. “Whichever side won, as Cicero again observed, the result was set to be much the same: slavery for Rome. What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one-man rule was really a war to choose between rival emperors.”

— Mary Beard

62. “Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state.”

— Mary Beard

63. “In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city. In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome.”

— Mary Beard

64. “But all tactics of that type tend to leave women still feeling on the outside, impersonators of rhetorical roles that they don’t feel they own. 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

65. “I do wonder if, in some places, the presence of large numbers of women in parliament means that parliament is where the power is not.”

— Mary Beard

66. “The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners.”

— Mary Beard

67. “Then as now, the easiest tactic for a government trying to reduce the pension bill was to raise the pension age. At.”

— Mary Beard

68. “This historical scepticism is healthy. But it misses the bigger point: that whatever the view of Suetonius and other ancient writers, the qualities and characters of the individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history and its major developments.”

— Mary Beard

69. “Cicero reflects exactly that when he sums up Servius Tullius’ political objectives in approving tones: ‘He divided the people in this way to ensure that voting power was under the control not of the rabble but of the wealthy, and he saw to it that the greatest number did not have the greatest power – a principle that we should always stand by in politics.”

— Mary Beard

70. “The modern idea that the female nude implies the existence of a predatory male gaze was not first thought up, as is often imagined, in the feminism of the 1960s. As Part One will explain, what is believed to be the very first life-sized statue of a female nude in classical Greece – a fourth-century BCE image of the goddess Aphrodite – provoked exactly the same kind of debate.”

— Mary Beard

71. “For several Roman observers, senatorial weakness for bribery was one major factor lying behind their failure: ‘Rome’s a city for sale and bound to fall as soon as it finds a buyer’, as Jugurtha was supposed to have quipped when he left the city. The general incompetence of the governing class was another.”

— Mary Beard

72. “The Greek city-states were as keen on winning battles as the Romans were, and most had little to do with the brief Athenian democratic experiment.”

— Mary Beard

73. “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

74. “Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, ‘they have lived’ – that is, ‘they’re dead’.”

— Mary Beard

75. “To put this the other way round, we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.”

— Mary Beard

76. “The simple reason that, in the 60s CE, Saint Peter was crucified while Saint Paul enjoyed the privilege of being beheaded was that Paul was a Roman citizen.”

— Mary Beard

77. “That is partly because of the new ways of looking at the old evidence, and the different questions we choose to put to it. It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not. But we come to Roman history with different priorities.”

— Mary Beard

78. “All too often, even the most glamorous rebels are just as unappealing, under the surface, as the imperialist tyrants themselves.”

— Mary Beard

79. “They create desolation and call it peace’ is a slogan that has often summed up the consequences.”

— Mary Beard

80. “The woman who can whisper in her husband’s ear wields more power de facto, or rather is often alleged to, than the colleagues who can only send official requests and memos.”

— Mary Beard

81. “An act of senseless Discord produces a Temple of Concord’.”

— Mary Beard

82. “The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed.”

— Mary Beard

83. “If I have played my part well, then give me applause.”

— Mary Beard

84. “Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment. If Caesar really did advocate life imprisonment in 63 BCE, then it was probably the first time in Western history that this was mooted as an alternative to the death penalty, without success.”

— Mary Beard

85. “Those who have punished others without a hearing,’ they insisted, ’ought not to have the right to be heard themselves.”

— Mary Beard

86. “Trials for extortion and malpractice in the provinces continued, which may equally well be a sign of the persistent flouting of the law as of its proper enforcement. Many kinds of day-to-day exploitation of the provincials were simply taken for granted. The emperor Tiberius summed up the basic ethics of Roman rule rather well when he said, in reaction to some excessive profits turned in from the provinces, ‘I want my sheep shorn, not shaven’.”

— Mary Beard

87. “All those stories of Roman valour, heroism and self-sacrifice that he must have heard – told and retold around military campfires or at dinner tables – were not simply for amusement, he concluded. Their function was to encourage the young to imitate the gallant deeds of their ancestors; they were one aspect of the spirit of emulation, ambition and competition that he saw running right through Roman elite society.”

— Mary Beard

88. “It turned out to be a lesson for the patricians – learned the hard way – that the gods communicated with plebeians too.”

— Mary Beard

89. “It was then that he gained the nickname adulescentulus carnifex: ‘kid butcher’ rather than enfant terrible.”

— Mary Beard

90. “To ignore the Romans is not just to turn a blind eye to the distant past. Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy. After 2,000 years, it continues to underpin Western culture and politics, what we write and how we see the world, and our place in it. The.”

— Mary Beard

91. “By the mid second century BCE, the profits of warfare had made the Roman people by far the richest of any in their known world. Thousands upon thousands of captives became the slave labour that worked the Roman fields, mines and mills, that exploited resources on a much more intensive scale than ever before and fuelled Roman production and Roman economic growth.”

— Mary Beard

92. “And soon, as Tacitus put it, the Britons were dressing up in togas and taking their first steps on the path to vice, thanks to porticoes, baths and banquets. He sums this up in a pithy sentence: ‘They called it, in their ignorance, “civilisation”, but it was really part of their enslavement.”

— Mary Beard

93. “Caesar had a shrewd eye for his public image, and the Commentaries is a carefully contrived justification of his conduct and parade of his military skills. But it is also an early example of what we might call imperial ethnography.”

— Mary Beard

94. “Very few towns or cities are founded at a stroke, by a single individual. They are usually the product of gradual changes in population, in patterns of settlement, social organisation and sense of identity. Most ‘foundations’ are retrospective constructions, projecting back into the distant past a microcosm, or imagined primitive version, of the later city.”

— Mary Beard

95. “Although we read of occasional Romans, usually the ‘bad’ ones in these stories, complaining that foreigners or the low-born are taking away their birthright, the overall message is unmistakeable: even at the very pinnacle of the Roman political order, ‘Romans’ could come from elsewhere; and those born low, even ex-slaves, could rise to the top.”

— Mary Beard

96. “Cicero may even have convinced himself, whatever the evidence, that Catiline was a serious threat to the safety of Rome. That, as we know from many more recent examples, is how political paranoia and self-interest often work.”

— Mary Beard

97. “Rome was no more conservative than nineteenth-century Britain. In both places, radical innovation thrived in dialogue with all kinds of ostensibly conservative traditions and rhetoric.”

— Mary Beard

98. “Custodial sentences were not the penalties of choice in the ancient world, prisons being little more than places where criminals were held before execution. Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment.”

— Mary Beard

99. “No one did me wrong whom I did not pay back in full.”

— Mary Beard

100. “The history of art is about how we look. It is not only about the men and women who – with their paints and pencils, their clays and chisels – created the images that fill our world, from cheap trinkets to ‘priceless masterpieces’. It is even more about the generations of humankind who have used, interpreted, argued over and given meaning to those images.”

— Mary Beard