Mary Beard: ‘The role of the academic is to make everything less simple’

As her latest Roman opus hits our screens, the classics scholar is as unapologetically thoughtful as ever – and much more likely to swear about British attitudes to Pompeii than she is about Twitter trolls

The problem with Roman history, says Mary Beard, is that “it’s just irredeemably blokeish. It’s conquests, and if it’s not conquests, then it’s engineering, and if it’s not engineering then it’s Roman military tactics. You don’t see the child miners or the slaves, and you don’t think: ‘How the hell would you get that column from Egypt to Rome?’”

Beard lives in Cambridge, where she is professor of classics, a fellow of Newnham College since 1984. Her house looks as if it is built of books, and her husband pops in periodically offering milky coffees. If it weren’t for her TV career, which began in this century, decades into her academic career, it is highly doubtful (to me) that she would have picked up the epithets she has – outspoken, subversive, controversial, dangerous.

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