Mary Beard (1) (1955–)

Mary Beard is a professor of Classics at Cambridge and the author of SPQR, the popular, critically-acclaimed and highly readable history of ancient Rome. So, what might she bring to the discussion of women and power, you might ask?

This small, powerful book contains two essays, rewrites from two lectures Beard gave. "The Public Voice of Women" discusses the ancient cultural underpinnings of how we see women & public speaking. She references classical literature, Shakespeare, even a bit of show more Henry James. And she begins with the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to "shut up."

The second essay/lecture "Women in Power" takes a look at women at just that, referencing everything from [Herland] by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the ancient Greek idioms still used to represent "the idea of women in, and out of, power." She discusses Margaret Thatcher handbag and Teresa May's "shoe thing" and how those things work to defy being packaged into a male template of power.

Beard suggests that rather than the fitting into the status quo that "...if women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?" Chew on that.

This book was a holiday gift from the hubby, an excellent choice. I've read a fair number of feminist manifestos of one kind or another, and I found this small entry into the canon—Beard's perspective—to be powerful and enlightening, and an excellent read. show less

Mary Beard is a writer of popular history in the best sense. She’s a genuine academic who has delved into her subject through years of lectures, seminars, and research, as well as indefatigable travel, yet retains the ability to convey her knowledge to us non-specialists in an accessible and entertaining way.

The title of this book is telling: rather than a set of potted biographies of individual Caesars, she looks at the generic picture they collectively form; “emperor” as category. show more Not that they are interchangeable (other than the standard torsos of their statuary depiction). Some were better, some were worse, yet Beard suggests that the monsters (Caligula, Nero) weren’t as evil as their reputation, while there may have been more to Claudius than the dotty uncle of legend. She notes that the manner of succession appears to be a variable that affects posthumous reputation. If the new emperor was the adopted (or, on rare occasion, the biological) son of his predecessor, then the recently deceased emperor was praised; if, instead, the overturn was violent (assassination, civil war), then the worst things imaginable—and the Romans had vivid imaginations—were ascribed to the deceased.

The most chilling sentence comes early in the book: Beard’s observation that the empire created the emperor, not the other way around. Much of Rome’s territorial expansion came when it was still nominally a republic. And the forms of republic (senate, consuls) continued under Augustus and his successors, albeit attenuated. This forced me to stop and reconsider the history of the U.S., which, for more than two centuries, has been an experiment—now threatened—in democratic republicanism. Yet, beginning with the Louisiana Purchase and continuing through the Mexican War, the concept of manifest destiny, and the purchase of Alaska, the United States rapidly expanded. Through involvement in two world wars, it then became the dominant world power. Eighty years after reaching this apex, we see the farcical yet deadly serious repetition of many of the steps by which Octavian reinvented himself as Augustus and officially made Rome the empire that it already was.

Many scholars are in thrall to the field they’ve devoted their lives to. Yet, Beard finds that the longer she studies, the more she has come to detest autocracy—the “terror of power with no limits”—which, she writes, “upturns the ‘natural’ order of things and replaces reality with sham, undermining your trust in what you think you see.” She dissents from Gibbon, who saw the time from Nerva’s accession (98 CE) to the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (180 CE) as the time in all of history when “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.” “For whom?” she pointedly asks.

This is the first of Beard’s many books that I’ve read, but I’ve watched two of the BBC documentary series she has presented. Her writing style here is indistinguishable from the scripts she narrates. It’s uncanny to be able to hear an author’s voice so clearly while reading. show less

This took me two months to read on and off. Loved it. Not traditionally structured and it makes it that much fun and engaging to read. Relevant in our times of chaos. Beard makes it about the people, the institutions and the historian's accounts of the time. With context and a healthy dose of rationality. Makes you want to reach out to your local library and take out Cicero's letters or Suetonius's writings. It's a good feeling to have.

SPQR is one of those big books you see at the library or bookstore (who are we kidding?) and kind of just marvel at. Maybe I'm the only one. Who actually reads those, other than the retired? These felt insurmountable as a young teen, even as I kept impulsively thrift-store buying and storing them. When was I going to read them? Who knows. I guess when I was retired.

It makes some sense though. In our current nonfiction historical tastes, it seems that the Doctoral thesis-cum-book deal or show more even the bloated Medium-article microhistory is winning out more and more. These tombs seem stodgy as best, potentially dangerous at worst. My University library, of which it carries books for 60,000+ people, had only one complete copy of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—and it was in storage. I'm not saying I'm reading it either—I'm just saying it says a lot, no?

This is not that: Beard charts the early, mythic history of Rome to the end of the Roman millennium, around 248 AD. Each chapter (until the last third of the book) is roughly chronological, with welcome revisionist asides that place this book in a refreshingly modern context without being trendy. I've noticed in my constant book-perusing that the field of Classical study has been in a bit of uncomfortable reckoning: no matter how you spin it, there's really nothing less institutional and "ism-y" than the study itself, and a slew of (frankly weird) publications attempting to pretend that isn't the case have come out in recent years. SPQR is far from that—It explores the role of free-women, slaves, and non-citizens without making excuses for the lack of evidence about them, while also constantly reminding the reader of the yarns ancient authors spun for a good story and acknowledging that much of the juiciest bits of these histories are most likely false. Overall, it's a wonderful tone that looks at the Roman ruling elite not as gods or villains, but as political realities tangible to criticisms and praise. To everyone else, it is a wonderfully human look at their lives without being maudlin.

My only real gripe with the book is the lack of structure and depth in anything post-Augustus. Beard structures a 50-page chapter to summarize the next 200 years of Roman political rule and organizes it by Emperors and their rule and then the Senate—which was an understandable distinction given the change of the role of both but nevertheless a bit off after the relative chronology of the previous 400 pages. The weakest point is generally this last third: it's a changing, declining, expanding (whatever you want to call it) state that is obviously difficult to summarize but I still felt rushed through those years to get to the end. Beard fluffs out the ending with chapters regarding a general overview of class, gender, and evidence of expansion/colonial efforts, which I truly appreciated but wish was interspersed with a stronger chronological backbone. I love social history, don't get me wrong, but the great value of big books like these tend to (for me at least) be it's grounding and (perhaps too optimistically) ubiquity of the timeframe it reports of.

Despite all that bitching, this is an almost-addictingly readable history of Rome and I absolutely recommend it. I had a few horribly taught Roman history classes in undergrad while I was studying Classics that turned me off to learning more and this book has somehow given me a better starting point than anything those teachers could muster. Perhaps I should blame myself: I exclusively studied Greek and so tended to stay with their history classes, but for the first time ever I'm actually a bit jealous of the Latin kids of my past. Oh well. I'm sure I'll wake up tomorrow in a cold sweat and remember my poor friends' Livy lamentations of yore, haha. Anyways, I have a lifetime ahead of me so I thank this book for getting me back into this stodgy, dusty, wonderful world of Ancient Rome. show less