I Love Mary Beard

 I first ran across her a quarter-century ago in the Times Literary Supplement. Today, I got sidetracked by a long piece from The Guardian, The cult of Mary Beard. It is over six years old, but it is new to me. I was in prison in 2018. It is a delight and might give you a lesson or two.

Her career stands, in a way, as a corrective to the notion that life runs a smooth, logical path. “It’s a lesson to all of those guys – some of whom are my mates,” she said, remembering the colleagues who once whispered that she had squandered her talent. “I now think: ‘Up yours. Up yours, actually.’ Because people’s careers go in very different trajectories and at very different speeds. Some people get lapped after an early sprint.” She added softly, with a wicked grin: “I know who you are, boys.”

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Beard’s view, in other words, is that it is fruitless to make ancient sources into a kind of window through which, if you try hard enough, you will be able to discern a clear picture of the classical world – which has been the traditional means of doing classics. The sources themselves – the original texts and artefacts, as well as the accretions of later scholarship – combine to create our view of the past, and they can be unpicked so that they offer up clues about the anxieties and worldview that formed them. When she, with her co-writer John Henderson, first put such ideas forward in A Very Short Introduction to Classics (1995), it was surprising and fresh to read not that classics was about discovering what Greece and Rome were “really like”. Instead, they wrote, “classics exists in that gap between us and the world of the Greeks and the Romans”.

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