The Saturday interview: Professor Mary Beard

With his new TV series on the lives of ordinary Romans, Professor Mary Beard wants to deal with the story differently. Favorite classics of the nation further negotiations to Stuart Jeffries

"I tend Twitter," says professor of classics at Cambridge as we walk to the departure lounge at Heathrow airport terminal five. But that's not all good news. One reason for the beard Mary is a trend that some viewers were uncomfortable about what appears on Meet the Romans, the daughter of three-part BBC2 television series that began Tuesday.

"I received tweets like" Can not brush her hair? "" Should not be itself a bit of sex determination? '' Does it look so haggard? Fortunately, I have a thick skin Sometimes you think you write this after half a bottle of wine, and I want to write again, after more than half a bottle. "Actually, that's what a woman 57 years of age appears."

not do that, I advise you. "Well, I have a different approach to the tweets to me personally, this is where I am the hashtag". But what if someone tweets personally criticize your appearance? "Then I will write back saying," What do you mean, really? "It must work on his tweets returned.

In all cases, Beard wrote more strongly on their appearance than their detractors. In the Guardian what I see when I look in the mirror column last month, wrote that sometimes, "my mother is old, who winked back, with the teeth of tombstones big as mine and Gill's uncompromising ... wrinkles, his legs of birds, hunched shoulders (all these wasted years hunched over a desk in the library) ... I used to fear looking like that, but now they might desire to be different. "

Beard

is easily detected by the crowds at Heathrow. She is the woman with glasses texting while sporting untied unbleached gray hair, red jacket and dress significantly structured gray and black. She rocked the look, the phone and glasses, however, on television this week.

"dress The only advice I received was to use something that would make me think of the crowd -. Therefore, the red cape" But the camera loves him, not because that it polishes his command of his subject with Hotsy totsiness-like other university physical telegeneic (Brian Cox and Helen Czerski, or friend of Beard, Bettany Hughes classic colleague), but for something more unusual. It is an anti-autocutie, ungussied refreshing when looking through the mess on the Monte Testaccio, garbage dump in ancient Rome.

know what you think - hashtags, trends, dress codes spectator friendly television? What is Epictetus? Should not the review of Professor Beard amphorae examined fragments of Cicero instead of television strategies and research for social media? "I'm really in a classical tradition with a great public figure who like to pontificate," she replies.

She cites as a classic example suffragist Jane Harrison (1850-1928), who taught at the college all-female Newnham, and Barba describes in his autobiography as "a means ... [of England] first "career woman" academic career. "It would have been on Twitter all the time. Once I gave a lecture on Greek tombstones in Glasgow in front of 2,000 people. "It's unfair, says Beard, to reflect on their professional predecessors as obsolete forms of life." We believe that their lives as glacially slow, but probably have not been given five items a day .. It would be a response to a letter noon tomorrow "

This is the great theme of Beard: to confuse the liberal notion of history that we have become faster, healthier and communication technologies are more sophisticated than our ancestors loser. "We think of our lives as something natural, not built, while the life of the Romans were not natural and is based on myths. This is not true in any number."

She learned to doubt the vision of our society in the past when I was very young. "My mother took me to the British Museum for five years," she says. "I thought people in the past were not as good as us, and then I saw the Elgin Marbles. Suddenly the world seemed more complicated. " He also visited the Egyptian galleries, where a staff member took a package and if unpackaged. "The bread charred 2800 years. He gave me a thrill ... Even today, when I have a ring that was 2000 years ago someone, I get excited. "Why is it a classic?" I was very good in Latin in school, and because I was good at it I have more and better than ever interested in it. When I was 12 was very satisfying to be in control. "

under study ancient history, bearded, is to learn who we are as they were our ancestors. For example, during the series, which examines a gynecological speculum Roman. "The questions are for me," What is the woman on the receiving end of those who think about the body that had Do you know how conception occurs there an idea of ??medical technology? Thinking in this sense is reflected in us. History is reflected if it is worth. Women today differs from it and if so, how? "The final program will consider the marriage of ancient Rome. "Some girls were 12 or 13 when they married what we call pedophilia. They called it the marriage is one of the interesting things about the Roman culture is different from ours ... "

round off the edge, my beard Roman tells a joke. "A man meets another on the street and said." I thought you were dead "?" Do not you see I'm alive "The guy said, The first replies". But the person who told me you were dead is more reliable than you "I killed in Rome 4BC. Barbara takes the joke to have a serious point: "You realize that in Roman society, where identity cards or passports, not to demonstrate their existence requires different criteria demonstrated a reliable person was perhaps the more stronger than I had .. was very different from our society, but who can tell what was worse? "

• throughout the series in its emphasis is not on the emperors, politicians or generals, but what it called "slaves, women and other undesirables." That said, it is not pious about how the figures of Rome in recent popular culture. It will not denounce butchly pecced Russell Crowe Maximus Decimus Meridius or the last words of Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar in Carry on Cleo ("the Infamy, infamy - they all have what I have in my place "). She actually refrains from attacking Boris Johnson. "In fairness to Boris, who does a lot for America. It could be a high price to pay ... "People do not tweet brushing hair, too. What about the classics?
• "emperors fixed in the minds of people a version of Roman culture," says Barba. "They were more cruel and more luxurious than we do. Thus, a function is that Rome must be larger than life. " Now he wants to take things in a different direction. Only 600 Roman senators, but Rome had a population of one million. "Can we take a look at others?" He asks.
• In the first episode that sees slavery. The Greeks thought that the Romans were strangers to the release of many slaves, but that the policy made the city a multicultural melting pot, a company that, for all its social ills, was perhaps less than the sclerotic ours. It argues that slavery, although brutal, was for many foreigners a rite of passage. "We mostly see slavery in terms of what happened in the southern United States, where he was distinguished race, but Rome was not -. Greeks, Jews and others were slaves and at least a finite freedom to become the Romans .. "However, it suggests there was a marked difference between the multicultural society and ours. "Rome would not allow the different cultures that separately."

Approximately 1.8 million viewers watched the first episode. The critics were enthusiastic, too. Lucy Mangan guard was hit so more she broke the first rule of television criticism - not to fall into the subject. "I deeply love the beard of the professor," Mangan wrote, adding that his beard was like a father bird "regurgitating the work of a lifetime in pellets soft and digestible for the public high chirping."

regurgitate pellets

not mean dumbing down? "No, when I talk to the camera is not very different from giving a lecture to 150 freshmen who have a little Latin in school. They are great kids, smart, but for the interest in 1BC policy that you have to realize that they are a captive audience and could be Twitter, in the back row, unless you get their attention. not make much distinction between the public. "

that historians of television bitten the proverbial couch? "I do not support programs David Starkey," said Beard. You can see why: Starkey rarely worthwhile to examine ponceathon junk outside the court of the Tudors. "I am glad we live in a world where Starkey and beard. Although I did not see it. "

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