Top 160 Mary Beard Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Mary Beard

106. “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

107. “Juvenal is not the only one to write off the priorities of the Roman people as ‘bread and circuses’. Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, makes exactly the same point when he writes of the emperor Trajan that ‘he understood that the Roman people are kept in line by two things beyond all else: the corn dole and entertainments’.”

— 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. “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

110. “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

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

— Mary Beard

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Mary Beard

116. “In short, as the last part of this chapter reveals, the empire created the emperors – not the other way round. Governors.”

— Mary Beard

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “Fear of the enemy, so this argument went, had been good for Rome; without any significant external threat, ’the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption.”

— Mary Beard

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

— Mary Beard

134. “I produced offspring. I sought to equal the deeds of my father. I won the praise of my ancestors so that they are glad that I was born to them.”

— Mary Beard

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “Is it legitimate to eliminate ‘terrorists’ outside the due processes of law? How far should civil rights be sacrificed in the interests of homeland security? The Romans never ceased.”

— Mary Beard

142. “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

143. “That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government? This was the first time, so far as we know, that this question had been explicitly raised in Rome, and it was no more easily answered then than it is now.”

— Mary Beard

144. “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

145. “Unchecked competition eventually did more to destroy than to uphold the Republic.”

— Mary Beard

146. “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

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

— Mary Beard

148. “For me, as much as for anyone else, the Romans are a subject not just of history and inquiry but also of imagination and fantasy, horror and fun.”

— Mary Beard

149. “Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder. There.”

— Mary Beard

150. “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