"The ancient past is utterly weird": Mary Beard on 50 years of studying the Romans

Mary Beard speaks to Charlotte Vosper about her new book exploring why we should study ancient worlds – and the questions we should really be asking about them

An older person with long grey hair sits smiling in a chair, surrounded by vases of colourful flowers.

Published: May 28, 2026 at 10:30 AM

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Charlotte Vosper: You’ve written more than 20 books on ancient history, mostly focusing on Rome and Greece. What’s different about your new book?

Mary Beard: It has given me an opportunity to reflect on my career. I’ve spent 50 years researching, teaching and studying what I’m really interested in, but how do I explain why I think that’s worthwhile? In this book, I’m looking back in an autobiographical way, but I’m also looking at the big questions. Why be interested in the ancient world? What do we get out of the Greeks and the Romans, who were alive more than 2,000 years ago?

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Often, those big questions get shelved. We take it for granted that a person buying a book about the classical past is interested in the topic, so we don’t explain why they should be interested in it. With Talking Classics, I tried to make myself stop and ask: what’s in it for my reader? Would it matter if nobody studied the ancient world anymore? Well, I think it would. Really, this book is my manifesto for what I have done.

The book is about your relationship with the classical past. Can you remember the moment when you first became interested in the ancient world?

I was five years old, and my mum thought that I should go to London for the first time. We lived quite close to the Welsh border, so we planned to make a trip of it and do all kinds of fun things, including visiting the British Museum. I was a fairly typical five-year-old, so I wanted to see the Egyptian mummies. My mum – being a sensible village school mistress – insisted that, if we’d seen how the ancient Egyptians died, we ought to see how they lived, too. So we went into an exhibition about ancient Egyptian everyday life, where my mum spotted a bit of ancient Egyptian bread.

A light‑coloured, triangular stone artifact with a textured, cracked surface. The number 40942 is printed at its centre, shown against a black background.

Bread baked in Egypt around 3,500 years ago. Seeing such an ancient staple inspired the five-year-old Mary Beard (Image by the trustees of The British Musem)

I wanted to see it but, in the 1960s, museums weren’t child-friendly, and the cases were high. My mum tried to lift me – a big, wriggly five-year-old – up to the glass, and a man asked if I was trying to see anything in particular. Feeling a bit cross, I said yes. He must have been a curator, because he produced a bunch of keys, opened the case, and brought out the Egyptian bread for me to look at.

I think that was the most moving experience I’d ever had up to that point in my life: I was eyeball to eyeball with a 4,000-year-old piece of bread. It was the closest thing to time travel I could possibly imagine, and it lit the spark: I wanted to know what life was like a very long time ago.

I didn’t go on to become an Egyptologist, sadly, but I did study Greek and Latin, which was the next best thing. Throughout my career, that bread-roll spark was always there, as was the lesson that the curator taught me about sharing. He opened up the case and shared his knowledge with me. It’s a metaphor for what we can do with history: we can open the cases for lots of people – either literally, in his case, or metaphorically, in mine.

That ancient bread highlights ordinary aspects of the classical past, but elsewhere in the book you suggest that we should see antiquity as quite alien from us. Can you expand on that contradiction?

The ancient past is both very familiar to us and utterly weird at the same time, and it’s that paradox that keeps the classical world fascinating for me. It’s impossible to resolve. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of visiting Pompeii, looking at the ancient lavatories and visiting the ancient bars, and thinking: “Oh, they were just like us.” In some ways, they were just like us: they got sick, they had headaches, they made love. But if they were exactly like us, why would we bother to study them? The ancients were just like us – and also completely different.

Ancient people didn’t know how the sun or the stars worked. They didn’t have medicines like we do, and they didn’t have maps of the world. But even more striking for me are the mundane differences between us and them.

A fresco depicts a figure seated on a bull while three other figures stand nearby, all wearing classical draped clothing. The painted surface is cracked and aged.

A fresco painted in Pompeii c20–45 AD. Visitors may feel an affinity with its ancient inhabitants – but in many ways they were very different, says Mary Beard (Image by Getty Images)

Take, for example, the fact that people in ancient Rome and Greece didn’t really know what they looked like. If you were very upmarket you might have a very shiny bit of polished metal to look into, but polished metal distorts reflections in a way that modern mirrors don’t. Recognising ourselves is something that we take for granted, but in the ancient world you wouldn’t be able to recognise your own image. I can’t imagine what that would be like because, in a way, what we look like is an embodiment of our identity. Such things highlight the fissure between utter familiarity and complete difference that underscores our understanding of antiquity.

What role should study of the classics play in the modern day?

We are the direct geopolitical inheritors of the Roman empire. The road system of Britain is essentially a Roman road system, and London is placed where it is because it was the Roman capital. But I don’t think this inheritance means that we can glean any ready-made lessons from antiquity. If we need a solution to a modern problem, I don’t think that we can go to the supermarket of Roman ideas, pick one up and say: “Right, that’s what we should do!” The Greeks and Romans can help us address our contemporary problems, but not because they’ve got the answers.

Instead, the classics can help us to look at things differently, by seeing them through ancient people’s eyes. When we do so, we recognise that we are not the first people on the block. In modern cultural debate, I think there’s a terribly presentist tendency to assume that we are the first people who’ve ever experienced a particular problem. Well, no, sunshine, we’re not.

A round, aged metal hand mirror with a tarnished surface. The handle is decorated with an ornate sculpted figure where it meets the mirror.

A bronze mirror from Egypt’s New Kingdom period, c1550–1070 BC. Such polished metal mirrors provided only distorted reflections of faces, so ancients often didn’t know what they looked like (Image by the trustees of The British Museum)

One example is Euripides’ play Medea, written in the mid-fifth century BC. In it, a mother kills her children, which is absolutely shocking – but the play showcases struggle and difficulty, both of which we continue to grapple with now.

History is about more than just finding out what happened or wondering what it was like to live in the past – it is a conversation that asks us to think about difference. How do we understand modern politics? Well, if you think about Roman autocracy, you might view it differently. How do we understand topical debates on issues such as gender politics? The ancient world can open our eyes to the depth of that question. It’s about using the classics to constructively rethink the way the world works, rather than asking the ancients for direct answers to our questions.

Are there myths about antiquity perpetuated today that you’d like to challenge?

There’s a wide range of myths about antiquity. On a small scale, if I could stop people saying that a vomitorium was a place where ancient Romans went to be sick, I would die happy. It was actually an exit passage from the amphitheatre!

The big myth is that the ancients were admirable – that their world was a wellspring of western civilisation and that, accordingly, we should respect the ancient world and feel grateful for it. Leaving aside the notion of western civilisation, I think that the ancients are much more interesting if we knock them off their pedestals. The classical world could be horrible and violent. In my understanding of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans are shocking, difficult, surprising and not very nice – which makes them more fascinating.

How has our understanding of the classical past changed over the course of your career?

One way of tracing changes is by looking at what I learned as a student [in the 1970s] and what I ended up teaching. I attended a women-only college in Cambridge. Despite this, we largely learned posh blokes’ history, and only very occasionally – in the summer term, when it really didn’t matter – would we write an essay about women.

I did see the beginnings of change when I was taught by Moses Finley, who’d come to Cambridge from the US [after being interviewed by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy-era anti-communist witch-hunts] and was expanding the discipline with courses on slavery, which had never been taught before. But those changes were only at the radical fringe of the study of the classics.

In my understanding of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans are shocking, surprising and not very nice – which makes them more fascinating

Over my career, that has changed dramatically. Ancient women, slaves, the poor and the disadvantaged are no longer at the margins – they are central to how we understand the ancient world. I think many people would say that there’s also been a move away from the study of the Greek and Roman heartlands, and a broadening of the terrain that we consider the ancient world to occupy.

Today, the ancient world of Egypt and the near east are being studied. When I was a student, Egypt didn’t come into the classics, and nor did Christianity; even though it was a religion of the Roman empire, we never touched on it.

This doesn’t mean that we’ve got rid of the Roman emperors, but now there’s a much more nuanced and richer idea of how we can understand antiquity.

Carved stone funerary relief showing two figures in Roman clothing, each with one hand raised to the chest. A Latin inscription appears below the busts.

A funerary relief of freed slaves from around AD 1–20. Slavery in the ancient world was among various topics rarely taught when Mary Beard was an undergraduate (Image by Topfoto)

What factors have contributed to this opening-up of the discipline?

I think there are two things. First, despite its image, classics is a very critical discipline: it’s always evaluating itself. How do we understand the ancient world? Did we get it right? Could we understand it in a different way? I think that attitude, in part, accounts for the fact that the classics have never stood still.

Second, there are political reasons for the changing geographical definition of the classical world. There has been a push to diversify the classics by encouraging people who are not of white European heritage to study and teach the subject.

In doing so, there has been a move away from studying solely ancient Greece and Rome to give more people a stake in this history. I see the force of this argument – in fact, I’m sure that I’ve made it from time to time – but I am slightly suspicious of it. That’s because I don’t think any of us can find ourselves in the ancient world.

There has long been a tendency for elite men to see themselves as Romans. For example, you can go to the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. and look at the statues of the governors and generals, and you’ll see that they’re dressed in Roman togas and battle dresses. I think that association comes from a rather conservative tradition, and it’s a notion I’ve learned to want to fight during my career.

We are not Romans. We are not Greeks. And this problem – the temptation to identify yourself as an ancient – is only worsened if we suggest that even more people can identify themselves in the ancient past. I’m not trying to say that Egyptian students shouldn’t study the ancient Egyptian world, but I’d like to stop the idea that the history is somehow part of those who study it. In fact, the real benefit of studying the classics is that the ancient world is not about us. Antiquity is so removed and unfamiliar to us that the subject puts us on a level playing field and offers us a safe space for discussion.

Two detailed marble statues stand in carved niches. The left figure wears 18th‑century military clothing with a long coat and sword, while the right figure is dressed in classical armour with a cloak, holding a sword and a laurel branch.

A statue of 18th-century general and diplomat Charles Cornwallis (right) at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, dressed in Roman garb (Image by Getty Images)

What’s been your experience as a woman working in this field for more than 50 years?

I need to preface this by saying that I was a student – later a fellow – at an all-women’s college, with a power structure that I could relate to and rely on. So when, for a couple of years, I was the only woman working in the faculty alongside 26 or 27 blokes, I handled that situation much more productively than I otherwise might have. I was also warmly supported by my male colleagues. I know that not everybody is as lucky in that regard, but I never felt that they weren’t on my side.

That said, there was a sense that, in order to be a successful classicist, you had to either be a man or pretend to be one. At the beginning of my lecturing career, for maybe 10 years, I really did pretend to be one. I aped a very masculine version of what it was to be authoritative in classics in order to make people listen to what I had to say. I never felt very comfortable doing that, though, and my rhetorical style and what I said in my lectures never sounded very convincing in my own ears.

It took me some time, but eventually I saw that I had to sound like me. It’s a bit of a romantic view but, instead of getting up and saying to a group of undergraduates that “I want to start with a difficult question that has been much debated in the past 50 years,” I told them: “Look, I think there are some questions in ancient history that really aren’t worth asking."

In this, I’m not claiming correctness – I have sometimes said some very stupid things – but it has been me talking. It’s not about the little anecdotes, like answering the phone in the office and people assuming that you’re the secretary because you’re a woman – in the end, that’s trivial. The biggest hurdle for me was whether or not there was space in the classics for a woman who was not pretending to be a man.

The classics are not the only show in town: there are all kinds of deep pasts that will inspire people in the same way that antiquity has inspired me

What do you hope readers will take from your relationship with the classics?

I’m not asking my readers to share my experience entirely. In fact, in the book I try to get across very clearly that the classics are not the only show in town: there are all kinds of deep pasts that will inspire people in the same way that antiquity has inspired me.

I wouldn’t like to live in a world where everybody studied classics – that would be just awful. But I would like to live in a world where everybody thought it was complete rubbish when some government minister stood up and claimed that we don’t need to study ancient Rome or Greece. I’d like everybody to know enough to realise that that wouldn’t be true. Classics helps us see through the bullshit.

Mary Beard is a classicist, author and trustee of the British Museum. Her previous books include Emperor of Rome (Profile Books, 2023) and SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Profile Books, 2015)

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This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Charlotte VosperContent producer

Charlotte Vosper is a content producer at HistoryExtra

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