Mary Beard

“Classics isn't about the ancient world. It's partly about the ancient world, but it's about our conversation. It's how we try to talk to antiquity.”

“One of the downsides of working in antiquity is that you don't have many female voices, but you certainly have a lot of male terror about the potential of women's power. It shows you very clearly that the most oppressive cultures tend to be afraid of those whom they oppress.”

“I receive something we might euphemistically call an 'inappropriately hostile' response - that is to say, more than fair criticism or even fair anger - every time I speak on radio or television.”

“If you ask me what is civilisation, it's little more than an act of faith.”

“We lived in the schoolhouse of the village school in Church Preen, in deepest Shropshire, and my mum was the schoolmistress. She taught the juniors, and one other teacher taught the infants. I went there from the age of three, no doubt as a form of childcare.”

“Greek myths, early Roman history, is configured around violence against women. And I think we need to get in there, get our hands dirty, face it, and see why and how it was.”

“The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don't think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive.”

“There is no argument that I won't take seriously.”

“I don't think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go - just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance - what you will find is that women's voices are not taken seriously.”

“I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece.”

“We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.”

“There's a basic rule of thumb that the more a culture oppresses women, or oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that.”

“It would have been nice if the people who were criticising 'Civilizations' had actually watched it. But the popular response has been tremendous, and in the end, that's what really matters.”

“I have always thought the women's movement traded too much on outrage and not enough on ridicule.”

“It's a bit naff, but there is something exciting about pulling a bit of pottery out of the ground that's 2,000 years old.”

“When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.”

“I've chosen to be this way because that's how I feel comfortable with myself. That's how I am. It's about joining up the dots between how you look and how you feel inside, and I think that's what I've done, and I think people do it differently.”

“A lot of sexism is just very silly... and the best response is laughter and ridicule.”

“What I find very interesting is, we're not enthralled by the ancient world, and we've escaped all kinds of ancient preconceptions and assumptions and prejudices. But, nevertheless, we still make that connection between authoritative speech and male speech.”

“English country towns are often seen as a cultural wasteland, but the more cut off you are, the more the need to create things, to make your own culture.”