It was 1989, and she was speaking at a joint open day for the Oxford and Cambridge classics faculties.

Pompeii by Mary Beard | Waterstones Pompeii by Mary Beard | Waterstones

One ancient novel talks about a slave shelling peas on the front step, while doubling as hall porter. In 2020, Beard became the host of the newly developed topical arts series Lockdown Culture, which was later renamed Inside Culture and is broadcast on BBC Two. Surely a more obvious question would have been: "Hello girls, what have you done with all the patients?She remembers wandering up to Martin Amis and asking who he was – then being “crushingly embarrassed” that she hadn’t recognised him. Sure enough, some three-quarters of the way through Pompeii, we are shown the illustration of a "dormouse-jar": a curious pot in which the wretched rodents could be kept alive while being fattened up. Despite the occasional fortune made in the garum trade, land was the main source of wealth in Pompeii.

in ancient Pompeii? Mary Beard shares an A What was life like in ancient Pompeii? Mary Beard shares an A

I have read a book, Pompeii: The Life Of A Roman Town (Profile Books, September 2008), which focuses, as the title suggests, on its daily life. Four or five days after Zoe was born, I went and read the minutes, and after a few minutes of the paper I slipped away.When the family moved to Shrewsbury, which she remembers both as 'extremely exciting and slightly dull, especially if you were a sparky female teenager', young Mary found 'friends from many different age groups, and a slightly dangerous load of older men, most of whom,' she adds wickedly, 'are now safely dead'. Beard pulled him up on Twitter, suggesting he might like to read a bit more classical history – and then went out to lunch with him. Opening in 1963 New York, to Renaissance Florence, to the birth of theatre in fifth-century Athens, and the Sex Pistols shattering Thatcherite Britain - take your seat for the history of performance. As time has passed, her writing style, compared with the early, careful academic articles, has become more like her spoken voice.

The Fires of Vesuvius — Mary Beard | Harvard University Press The Fires of Vesuvius — Mary Beard | Harvard University Press

It's amazing they managed to pack everything in – including most of the show from the previous evening and a caterwauling display from the worst of the earlier rejects. It’s an issue that you have to keep looking at, and there has never been a moment in the history of the west when people didn’t argue about who did or did not have a right to speak about something – Socrates was killed for it! On Wednesday, she filmed with the author Robert Harris for a new BBC documentary about Julius Caesar. But when I look back at the late 1970s and early 80s, that’s not how my relationships with these guys felt.They included, in 1980, her pioneering work on the Vestal Virgins, which, fashionably, used techniques borrowed from anthropology to reshape thinking about the priestesses who served the Roman goddess of the hearth. It was a bit puzzling when Banquo, with Macbeth, encountered them in an empty ward and said: "What are these/ So wither'd and so wild in their attire/ That look not like th'inhabitants of the earth? Fan clubs supported particular artistes, proclaiming their enthusiasm on the walls of the town: “Come back soon, Anicetus”.