University of Chicago classicist Clifford Ando described Beard's scholarship as having two key aspects in its approach to sources. So it was, for instance, during the most recent season that the Doctor, fresh from having prevented a Titanic-shaped spaceship from crash-landing on London, arrived in the Roman town of Pompeii.

Pompeii - the Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard | Goodreads Pompeii - the Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard | Goodreads

She has written about the Romans’ sense of humour, the Triumph (a ritual victory parade undertaken by Roman generals), and the Parthenon. 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.

They are mostly small, dark, and equipped with just a hearth and a cauldrons to mousse-moulds and industrial-scale sieves. It wasn't until I got to Cambridge,' she says acidly, 'that I discovered active discrimination against women. When the family moved to Shrewsbury, which she remembers both as 'extremely exciting and slightly dull, especially if you were a sparky female teenager', young Mary found 'friends from many different age groups, and a slightly dangerous load of older men, most of whom,' she adds wickedly, 'are now safely dead'.

What Was Everyday Life Like In Pompeii? | Pompeii with Mary

She had plenty of models for provincial trangression, notably her sixth-form English master, Frank McEarchan, from Shrewsbury school, who took some of the clever local direct grant girls under his wing in the run up to the now defunct Oxbridge exam. Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE , FSA , FBA , FRSL (born 1 January 1955) [1] is an English scholar of Ancient Rome. To keep these relationships secret, he made use of tradecraft that he had learned as a spy: code names and cover stories, cut outs, safe houses and dead letter boxes. She was elected Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature for 2008–2009 at the University of California, Berkeley, where she delivered a series of lectures on "Roman Laughter".You would have said: ‘Pity about Mary, she looked so promising,’” she told me at her house in Cambridge, a cosy clutter of books and oriental rugs.