Top 160 Mary Beard Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Roman emperors and their advisors never solved the problem of succession. They were defeated in part by biology, in part by lingering uncertainties and disagreements about how inheritance should best operate. Succession always came down to some combination of luck, improvisation, plotting, violence and secret deals. The moment when Roman power was handed on was always the moment when it was most vulnerable.”

— Mary Beard

102. “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

103. “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

104. “SPQR takes its title from another famous Roman catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, ‘The Senate and People of Rome’.”

— Mary Beard

105. “The Spanish silver mines, for example, once part of Hannibal’s domain, were soon producing so much more ore that the environmental pollution from its processing can still be detected in datable samples extracted from deep in the Greenland ice cap.”

— Mary Beard

106. “It was not all quite so simple, that real equality between women and men was still a thing of the future, and that there were causes for anger as well as for celebration.”

— Mary Beard

107. “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

108. “Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organisation, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than fifty-three years, something previously unparalleled?’ Who indeed?”

— Mary Beard

109. “Two hundred years later there was little to patrician privilege beyond the right to hold a few ancient priesthoods and to wear a particular form of fancy footwear.”

— Mary Beard

110. “As young Scipio Nasica found to his cost, the success of the rich was a gift bestowed by the poor. The rich had to learn the lesson that they depended on the people as a whole. An.”

— Mary Beard

111. “The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were, like Gaius, demonised. Those who died in their beds, succeeded by a son and heir, natural or adopted, were praised as generous and avuncular characters, devoted to the success of Rome, who did not take themselves too seriously.”

— Mary Beard

112. “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

113. “There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies.”

— Mary Beard

114. “4. This silver coin was minted in 63 BCE, its design showing one of the Roman people voting on a piece of legislation, casting a voting tablet into a jar for counting. The differences in detail between the two versions well illustrate the differences in the die stamps. The name of the official in charge of the mint.”

— Mary Beard

115. “The first qualification for most political offices was wealth on a substantial scale. No one could stand for election without passing a financial test that excluded most citizens; the exact amount needed to qualify is not known, but the implications are that it was set at the very top level of the census hierarchy, the so-called cavalry or equestrian rating. When the people came together to vote, the system of voting was stacked in favour of the wealthy.”

— Mary Beard

116. “Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say.”

— Mary Beard

117. “One unfortunate Greek ambassador at about the same time is known to have fallen into an open Roman sewer and broken his leg – and made the most of his convalescence by giving introductory lectures on literary theory to a curious audience.”

— Mary Beard

118. “The vast majority of all the ancient Greek literature that has survived comes from this period of imperial rule. To give a sense of scale, the work of just one of these writers – Plutarch, the second-century CE biographer, philosopher, essayist and priest of the famous Greek oracle at Delphi – extends to as many modern pages as all the surviving work of the fifth century BCE put together, from the tragedies of Aeschylus to the history of Thucydides.”

— Mary Beard

119. “In Rome there was no doctrine as such, no holy book and hardly even what we would call a belief system. Romans knew the gods existed; they did not believe in them in the internalised sense familiar from most modern world religions.”

— Mary Beard

120. “Many would have resented the arrogance and disdain, the double standards and the lifestyle of their rich neighbours; lack of zoning in Roman cities may have had its equitable side, but it also meant that the poor constantly had their noses rubbed in the privilege of others. What.”

— Mary Beard

121. “The most important upshot of this,’ Polybius concludes, ’is that the younger generation is inspired to endure all suffering for the common good, in the hope of winning the glory that belongs to the brave.”

— Mary Beard

122. “For more than a decade from the mid 160s CE, much of the Roman Empire suffered a pandemic, very likely smallpox apparently brought back by soldiers serving in the East. Galen, the most acute and prolific medical writer of the ancient world, discussed individual cases and gave detailed eyewitness descriptions of the symptoms, including a blistering skin rash and diarrhoea.”

— Mary Beard

123. “At a very rough guess there might have been between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy in the middle of the first century BCE, making up perhaps 20 per cent of the total population. They.”

— Mary Beard

124. “The Latin word for ‘rams’, rostra, became the name of the platform and gave modern English its word ‘rostrum’.”

— Mary Beard

125. “Edgy in a different way was the idea of the asylum, and the welcome, that Romulus gave to all comers – foreigners, criminals and runaways – in finding citizens for his new town. There were positive aspects to this. In particular, it reflected Roman political culture’s extraordinary openness and willingness to incorporate outsiders, which set it apart from every other ancient Western society that we know.”

— Mary Beard

126. “Roman lawyers were expressly forbidden to receive fees for their service, and it is often rightly said that what Cicero gained by pleading in high-profile cases was public prominence.”

— Mary Beard

127. “The text of his speech, including some of the heckling that apparently even an emperor had to endure, was inscribed on bronze and put on display in the province, in what is now the city of Lyon, where it still survives. Claudius, it seems, did not get the chance that Cicero had to make adjustments for publication.”

— Mary Beard

128. “It was such a breeding ground of disease that a later Roman doctor wrote that you didn’t need to read textbooks to research malaria – it was all around you in the city of Rome. The.”

— Mary Beard

129. “In 63 BCE that was around a million men spread across the capital and throughout Italy, as well as a few beyond. In practice, it usually comprised the few thousand or the few hundred who, on any particular occasion, chose to turn up to elections, votes or meetings in the city of Rome.”

— Mary Beard

130. “Traditional restraints and conventions broke down, one by one, until swords, clubs and rioting more or less replaced the ballot box.”

— Mary Beard

131. “Caesar instantly convened an assembly to elect one of his friends, Caius Caninius Rebilus, to the vacant post for just half a day. This prompted a flood of jokes from Cicero: Caninius was such an extraordinarily vigilant consul that ‘he never once went to sleep in his whole term of office’; ’in.”

— Mary Beard

132. “Not far under the surface of these stories lie some of the most important themes of later Roman history, as well as some of the deepest Roman cultural anxieties. They have a lot to tell us about Roman values and preoccupations, or at least about the preoccupations of those Romans with time, money and freedom to spare; cultural anxieties are often a privilege of the rich.”

— Mary Beard

133. “Rome had been under the rule of a mad sadist somewhere between a clinical psychopath and a Stalin.”

— Mary Beard

134. “In 58 BCE Cicero’s enemies argued that, whatever authority he had claimed under the senate’s prevention of terrorism decree, his executions of Catiline’s followers had flouted the fundamental right of any Roman citizen to a proper trial.”

— Mary Beard

135. “In fact, the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’ and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters.”

— Mary Beard

136. “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.”

— Mary Beard

137. “The first qualification for most political offices was wealth on a substantial scale. No one could stand for election without passing a financial test that excluded most citizens;.”

— Mary Beard

138. “In reality, the whole process must have been more gradual than that story suggests, and messier. The ‘Republic’ was born slowly, over a period of decades, if not centuries. It was reinvented many times over.”

— Mary Beard

139. “There was the enormous disparity of wealth between rich and poor, the squalid living conditions for most of the population, and probably for much of the time, even if not starvation, then persistent hunger.”

— Mary Beard

140. “Autocracy represented, in a sense, an end of history.”

— Mary Beard

141. “This time the senators met in the temple of the goddess Concord, or Harmony, a sure sign that affairs of state were anything but harmonious.”

— Mary Beard

142. “It was, Polybius argued, such balances across the political system that produced the internal stability on which Roman external success was built.”

— Mary Beard

143. “It is hardly surprising that working class movements in many countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a memorable precedent, and some winning rhetoric, in the ancient story of how the concerted action of the Roman people wrung concessions from the hereditary patrician aristocracy and secured full political rights for the plebeians. Nor is it surprising that early trades unions could look to the plebeian walkouts as a model for a successful strike.”

— Mary Beard

144. “My guest was not the sort to whom you would say, “Please drop by again when you are next around”. Once is enough.”

— Mary Beard

145. “To put it another way, the individual rich voter had far greater voting power than his poorer fellow citizens.”

— Mary Beard

146. “Cicero himself had large amounts of money invested in low-grade property and once joked, more out of superiority than embarrassment, that even the rats had packed up and left one of his crumbling rental blocks.”

— Mary Beard

147. “I no longer think, as I once naively did, that we have much to learn directly from the Romans – or, for that matter, from the ancient Greeks, or from any other ancient civilisation.”

— Mary Beard

148. “By comparison, one controversial consul in 59 BCE got off lightly: he was merely pelted with excrement and spent the rest of his year of office barricaded at home.”

— Mary Beard

149. “Livy tells how in 214 BCE individual Romans were called upon to pay directly to man the fleet: a nice indication of the patriotism that surrounded the war effort, of the emptiness of the public treasury, but also of the cash that there still was in private hands, despite the crisis.”

— Mary Beard

150. “They called it, in their ignorance, “civilisation”, but it was really part of their enslavement.”

— Mary Beard