The Cult of Mary Beard

January 30, 2018 5:23 AM

How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual by Charlotte Higgins examines how Mary Beard went from being a Cambridge professor of classics to being the kind of celebrity who has poems written about her and is depicted in Lego. Twice.
posted by Kattullus (33 comments total)

I am a total Mary Beard fan, and all I need to hear that might distract from the authoritarian train wreck that is US democracy right now would be for someone to say 'Metafilter's own Mary Beard'
I can dream, can't I?
posted by Wilder at 5:26 AM on January 30, 2018 [12 favorites]

Just here to fangirl on Mary Beard. I am a willing cult member if she's founding a cult. Her takedown of Boris on his sloppy scholarship in a debate on Greeks vs. Romans was something I will always cherish.
posted by EinAtlanta at 5:35 AM on January 30, 2018 [12 favorites]

Her recent book Women & Power is a must read for 2018. It's a must read for any time, but especially now. I urge everyone to find a copy. A series of essays about women & power.

The Millennia of #MeToo in Mary Beard’s “Women & Power” [The New Yorker]

“But Beard’s formidable intellect is in no danger of being eclipsed, as the essays in “Women & Power” demonstrate. In the first, she contends with the history, ancient and modern, of women’s voices in the public sphere. How are women’s words heard, and in what ways does their reception differ from that granted to the speech of men? Beard begins her nimbly marshalled argument by going back to what she calls “the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’ ”—in Book 1 of the Odyssey, when Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, dismisses Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, from the great hall of the palace. (“Go in and do your work. / Stick to the loom and the distaff. . . . It is for men to talk,” is how Emily Wilson renders Telemachus’ slight to his mother.)

Beard writes that Homer’s words imply that “an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to take control of public utterance and to silence the female of the species.” She goes on to show how, in the classical world and beyond, women have been silenced, drawing parallels between the changes wrought upon disruptive women in Ovid’s Metamorphoses—Io being turned into a cow; Echo being consigned only to repeat the words of others—and the contemporary verbal violence dealt out to women on social media.”

posted by Fizz at 5:40 AM on January 30, 2018 [15 favorites]

I just read Women & Power a few days ago (it's only around 100 very small pages) and it is excellent. Does she turn up on TV in the UK often? I only know her because I was browsing books a few years back and "Laughter in Ancient Rome" was too irresistible a title not to read. And it is great!
posted by lefty lucky cat at 6:34 AM on January 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

In Britain I think she fits into the ‘clever but eccentric’ tradition of Magnus Pyke and David Bellamy.
posted by Segundus at 6:47 AM on January 30, 2018

Mary Beard is The Best. That is all.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:57 AM on January 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

Her essays for the LRB are magisterial. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n08/mary-beard/it-was-satire
posted by PinkMoose at 7:03 AM on January 30, 2018 [7 favorites]

I read SPQR last year and I happily recommend it. I noticed she was very careful to delineate known facts from assumptions and speculation. She's not shy of pointing at great gaps in the record and going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Which is great, ancient Roman culture often has contemporary biases glued onto it by historians.

Which is why I believe her when she points out how cosmopolitan Rome was. It was truly a city of immigrants from diverse cultures, and that's arguably what made it such a power.
posted by adept256 at 7:05 AM on January 30, 2018 [13 favorites]

I didn't much care for the Classics: A Very Short Introduction, which she co-authored: I found it to be chatty and patronizing in tone, in that it seemed to assume that the reader would only find the ancient world of interest in relation to ours.
posted by thelonius at 7:12 AM on January 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Fantastic read.

Thanks for the link to her article about Caligula, PinkMoose. A kicker with contemporary resonance at the end:

Most senators during most reigns were collaborators (as most people are under most systems of power, however brutal); and when regimes changed they made every effort to reposition themselves, usually by excoriating in speech and writing, in ever more gory detail, the emperor who had been their friend.
posted by rory at 7:16 AM on January 30, 2018 [6 favorites]

I’m mostly familiar with her via podcast appearances (often In Our Time) and she is a very skilled public intellectual, intelligent and erudite, willing to explain to the public but with an edge of “there’s work here for you, too.” She meets her listeners halfway, but she clearly expects them to be there to meet her as well.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:30 AM on January 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

except that in real life, she swears magnificently and often. (“She’s always spoken fluent Anglo-Saxon,” said Woolf.)
LOL.
posted by TwoStride at 7:51 AM on January 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

All hail the Beardmeister and in fact all the current crop of female BBC history presenters like Janina Ramirez, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley and so on. All are enthusiastic and knowledgeable without descending to the showboating that their male counterparts seem prone to at the moment.

(aside: is there a female equivalent of 'meister'?)
posted by GallonOfAlan at 7:56 AM on January 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

In 2005, at the behest of Mount’s successor at the TLS, Peter Stothard, she gamely agreed to try another new form, the blog. She took to it with ease, and her vivid, informal journal, A Don’s Life, has flourished ever since – unlike so many similar projects that have quietly faded away. Recent topics have included the future of #MeToo, her views on book blurbs, and the museums she enjoyed on a recent trip to Bologna.

I've never added anything to my RSS feed so fast. Pompeii and SPQR were absolutely eye-opening, and I'll read anything she cares to write at this point. I wish there were more academics writing rigorous yet accessible books like hers.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:57 AM on January 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

aside: is there a female equivalent of 'meister'?

Meisterin, technically, though I guess it isn't brought up in English...
posted by TwoStride at 8:02 AM on January 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

I noticed she was very careful to delineate known facts from assumptions and speculation. She's not shy of pointing at great gaps in the record and going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Agreed. I just read her book "Confronting the Classics", a compilation of her reviews of other people's work, and she often brings this lens to bear--and it really highlighted how often assumptions & speculation end up the whole basis of some people's arguments. I really appreciate her keeping a sharp eye on that sort of thing.
posted by theatro at 8:23 AM on January 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

You guys will like The Roman Triumph, too. It's half about triumphs per se, and half about how we know (or think we know because someone made a wild guess 100 years ago, or rely on Roman antiquarians who pulled things out of their asses) what we know about Roman triumphs.
posted by sukeban at 9:06 AM on January 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

For anyone else looking for Mary Beard's own works, here's a list of her books and her TV appearances.
posted by Nelson at 9:44 AM on January 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

As I am sadly and terrifically ignorant, I'd never heard of her (although I distantly remember SQPR making a splash a few years back) but I'd like to read her work. Which of the books mentioned previously would you folks suggest as a good entry point?
posted by alleycat01 at 10:38 AM on January 30, 2018

SPQR or Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town are good IMO. The first one is entry-level general history, the second one is common life in the 70s AD.
posted by sukeban at 10:54 AM on January 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

(The Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit series of 4 hour-long documentaries touches some of the points in SPQR in video form, with less history and more sociology, if you would like a more visual approach)
posted by sukeban at 10:57 AM on January 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

“I now think: ‘Up yours. Up yours, actually.’”

I don’t know exactly why this—the combination of “up yours” and “, actually”—is so delightful, but it really is. She’s great, my ideal of what a don should be.
posted by Aravis76 at 2:32 PM on January 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

I come by liking of her honestly, years ago, having started to read one of her pieces in TLS without noting who the author was, and three quarters of the way through realizing that "My heavens, this person is absolutely brilliant. I must make a note to read whatever else he or she has written." Turns out, it was someone I'd never heard of called Mary Beard, and she's written quite a lot -- giving me a lot to look forward to.
posted by Modest House at 3:29 PM on January 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

Beard was on the CBC's Sunday Edition recently.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:01 PM on January 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

Which of the books mentioned previously would you folks suggest as a good entry point?

Start with Pompeii, I think. It is a very easy read despite being a masterful work of scholarship. Since, as sukeban says, it's more slice of life than political history, so it's very relateable. It really clarifies the types of things we know about the ancient Romans and how we have come to know them, as well as the types of things we may never know.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:00 AM on January 31, 2018

I'm not gonna link it because fuck them, but it's telling that the discussion of this article on Hacker News is devoted to tearing down Mary Beard. "Surely one of these men is Britain's most beloved intellectual, not her." "Here's a link to some man who doesn't like Mary Beard." Blah blah blah.

But I made it out of the orange site alive and brought back some useful links. Specifically links to her essays on The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.
posted by Nelson at 8:55 AM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

As I am sadly and terrifically ignorant, I'd never heard of her (although I distantly remember SQPR making a splash a few years back) but I'd like to read her work. Which of the books mentioned previously would you folks suggest as a good entry point?

I've only read SPQR, but it was fantastic. So....entry point? I've also been pretty impressed with her essays when I've come across them.
posted by breakin' the law at 3:03 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was very tempted to post the conversation between Beard and Hillary Clinton facilitated by the Guardian this past December but since I didn't get around to it then, I'll just recommend it now. I really liked listening to two middle-aged women who clearly respect each other a great deal have a conversation while the rest of us listen in.
posted by librarylis at 5:51 PM on January 31, 2018 [5 favorites]

Thanks you guys! Added SPQR to my reading list.
posted by alleycat01 at 7:00 AM on February 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

Just to let people know before this thread closes, because it hasn't been mentioned yet: Mary Beard, Simon Schama, and David Olusaga are presenting a modern update of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation next month, called Civilisations. It's a nine-part marquee BBC production, and starts on the 1st of March. Can't wait!
posted by rollick at 7:33 AM on February 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

Just to let people know before this thread closes, because it hasn't been mentioned yet: Mary Beard, Simon Schama, and David Olusaga are presenting a modern update of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation next month, called Civilisations.

That's really exciting to hear. I enjoyed Clark's Civilization, it was the basis of my first Art History class, even as the perspective was obviously far too biased to hold the kind of definition Clark intended and had long hoped for others to take up the idea and improve on it. Now not only do I get my wish, but it's with Simon Schama and Mary Beard? That's outstanding! (I'm not familiar with Olusaga, but since he's in good company I'm sure I'll enjoy his perspective as well.)
posted by gusottertrout at 7:54 AM on February 8, 2018

Now I just have to hope I can find an easy way to access the show without having cable tv...
posted by gusottertrout at 7:57 AM on February 8, 2018

Recent MB controversy about her Oxfam tweet: How the fallout from Mary Beard's Oxfam tweet shines a light on genteel racism.
posted by paduasoy at 5:36 PM on February 19, 2018 [2 favorites]