Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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The episode was to prove a witty and knowing manipulation of the gap between many of the favourite myths about life in Roman times, and what the evidence for them from Pompeii actually suggests. The plunge pools had limited water circulation, no chlorination and must have been full of the usual sort of human effluent. He counted off those he regarded as her predecessors: “Bertrand Russell, Kenneth Clark, Susan Sontag, Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, Stuart Hall, Simon Schama … ” Figures like these emerge only once in a generation, he said. Part of the problem is that the city's population was not, as Doctor Who suggested, wiped out in a single day amid a wholly unanticipated cataclysm. I watched a bit on TV last night – I own it in a box set, but there is something great about thinking you’re watching it at the sa

BBC One - Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard, The

Everyone who has met Beard seems to have a story about encountering her for the first time – usually involving her rigorous intellect, her total lack of formality, and her sense of mischief. She turned to the Vestal Virgins, she told me, because she realised that state religion in the Roman republic “wasn’t much of an opener at a party”. A wonderful series of paintings of scenes of life in the Forum seems to show exactly that happening – with one poor miscreant being given a nasty beating in front of his classmates.

One junior colleague still remembers Beard introducing herself, at a conference almost 25 years ago, with the overture, “Give us a fag, darlin’. Add to this the noise of all the guard dogs barking, the horses bellowing and the odd wakeful, honking pig: it was probably noisy as well as dark after hours in Pompeii. Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE , FSA , FBA , FRSL (born 1 January 1955) [1] is an English scholar of Ancient Rome. Dozens of trades and professions are found at Pompeii: carpenters, actors, surveyors, gem-workers, architects, inn keepers, perfume-sellers, laundry men.

Pompeii | The Folio Society Pompeii | The Folio Society

Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith (Profile Books, 2018 / Liveright Publishing, 2018, published in the U. Interestingly, the "big willies everywhere", as she put it, were not a sign of an orgiastic mindset but simply a reminder of who wore the togas around here 2,000 years ago. But it was her moment: at the time, the BBC was being sued for age discrimination by presenter Miriam O’Reilly and the paucity of older women on air was becoming painfully obvious. One of its richest families made its fortune in the trade – and advertised the fact by decorating their front hall with a design of garum jars in mosaic. It was 1989, and she was speaking at a joint open day for the Oxford and Cambridge classics faculties.There was something satisfyingly leisurely about Dirk Gently, adapted from a Douglas Adams novel about an old lady's missing cat, and starring Stephen Mangan as the one-man "holistic detective agency" hired to find it. The scepticism that defines Beard’s intellectual approach – so clearly on display in Pompeii – was drummed into her early, when she was a student.

Pompeii by Mary Beard | Waterstones Pompeii by Mary Beard | Waterstones

The source of the controversy was a BBC educational video depicting a senior Roman soldier as a black man, which Beard defended as entirely possible after the video received backlash. She is not afraid to take apart her own work: at that same conference in the early 1990s, she presented a paper that repudiated one of the scholarly articles that had helped make her name a decade earlier, an influential study of Rome’s Vestal Virgins.She decided to study classics for the simple reason that she was good at it, and therefore liked it. But eventually, not least because she was short of money, she decided to give it a go, realising she could use it at a place “to really get into Rome”. I thought that most of the readers’ comments would be negative,” she told me in December, “but many more of them were positive. There are periods when this seems particularly edgy, and I think there are people who are badly treated, especially in a social media culture, and ultimately end up losing their jobs when they ought to just be someone we disagree with.