Reading List
Mary Beard
Classicist and Author
Mary Beard is Professor Emerita of Classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Newnham College. Her SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome took the story from the city’s founding myths to the extension of citizenship across the empire, and sold in numbers rarely seen for ancient history. Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town won the Wolfson History Prize, and Women & Power: A Manifesto traced the silencing of women’s public speech back to Homer.
She has been classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement for decades and writes the blog A Don’s Life. Her BBC series, among them Meet the Romans and Civilisations, brought the same argumentative style to television: that the ancient world is not a settled inheritance to be admired but a set of problems still worth fighting over.
Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology
by Moses Finley
“Slavery is a classic case for thinking about those connections. Greece and Rome were one of the few mass slave-owning societies that there have ever been. What Finley was interested in doing was looking hard at ancient slavery and thinking about how it was the same or different from modern slavery. One key difference that comes out is that modern slavery is tinged by racism, whereas ancient slavery wasn’t.” — via Interview, October 2009
The Greeks and the Irrational
by E. R. Dodds
“Dodds was at an exhibition of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and he got talking to a schoolboy. The boy told him: ‘I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t really like this stuff – it’s all so rational.’ Well, that got Dodds thinking about this common idea that the ancient Greeks were all very cerebral, gliding about in white gowns. But was Greek culture so fantastically rational?” — via Interview, October 2009
Purity and Danger
An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
by Mary Douglas
“She said, look at these carefully and you will see there’s a logic to them. What’s being prohibited in terms of eating is very often those animals or foodstuffs which don’t fit into a set category. For example, pigs don’t fall into any particular category because of their feet. In order to make sense of society, cultures like to group things. When objects fall outside those groups they are either reviled or revered.” — Source
The Last Days of Pompeii
by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
“When he went to Pompeii it was a ruin. These days they’ve done a lot of work on it. What Lytton did was build it up layer by layer. And what you get is a fantastic reconstruction of the ancient world. Christians who are going to escape, the nasty priest of Isis, the sacrifices and the gladiators. The cultural backwash that came out of it was extraordinary. The characters, statues, movies.” — Source
The Annals
The Annals of Imperial Rome
by Tacitus
“What he does is seduce you with an extraordinary tale, but there is also a cynical, hard-hitting analysis of corruption. Reading Tacitus in Latin is like reading James Joyce. It’s language which is really at the margins of comprehensibility as well as being very exciting. But, actually, he wants to talk about the corruption of autocracy. It’s about one-man rule going bad.” — Source