You don't overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation.
— Mary Beard
The history of art is not just the history of artists; it is also the history of the people who viewed art. And that wider perspective can help us see some of the reasons why the art of the ancient world should still matter to us.
Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.
In general, I never think it is a good idea to try to recreate past successes. You have to strike out on your own, for better or worse.
Thinking through how you look to your enemies is helpful. That doesn't mean that your ideology is wrong and theirs is right, but maybe you have to recognise that they have one - and that it may be logically coherent. Which may be uncomfortable.
It's a bit naff, but there is something exciting about pulling a bit of pottery out of the ground that's 2,000 years old.
I'm an academic. I argue; I engage with people.
We lived in the schoolhouse of the village school in Church Preen, in deepest Shropshire, and my mum was the schoolmistress. She taught the juniors, and one other teacher taught the infants. I went there from the age of three, no doubt as a form of childcare.
I was 11 when I started Latin - not like boys, who start early at prep school. At 14, you had to choose whether to start Greek and drop German, but my mum made a fuss, and I took Latin, Greek, French, and German at O-level, which meant I didn't do much science.
You always regret upsetting people needlessly.
I think that what will help women get into positions of power - well, day nurseries, equal pay, family-friendly working hours. And I think all that's important. I used to think it was the solution. I now think it's enabling, and it's important, but still we have got head work to do about this.
I'm exploring the long history of women, first of all, being silenced and, secondly, not being taken seriously in the political and public sphere. It's a call to action through understanding and through looking at ourselves again and trying to reformulate the whole question of women and power.
Greek myths, early Roman history, is configured around violence against women. And I think we need to get in there, get our hands dirty, face it, and see why and how it was.
I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud.
The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.
If you ask me what is civilisation, it's little more than an act of faith.
All religions throughout history have been concerned about - and have sometimes fought over - what it means to represent God, and they have found elegant, intriguing, and awkward ways to confront that dilemma.
There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us.
I think, when I was 25, nobody in the world knew who I was.
I knew that Trump was ghastly. I knew I'd vote for Hillary if I had a vote.
There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.
There is no argument that I won't take seriously.
In 1984, I returned to Newnham College at Cambridge University to teach after completing my Ph.D. there a couple of years earlier. Almost all of my colleagues in the university's classics department were men, and my office at the all-women's college was in the dorm.
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?
I was into Black Power, and my practice Oxbridge essay was a rant. The headmistress said I'd never get in with that, but she was probably wrong. I was the ideal combination: a swot who was also a bad girl.
I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece.
We are sold the idea of a refugee as a tiny child sitting crying, as a way of raising money, but elderly ladies and kids largely can't move. The demographic is mostly young men.
My mom was born before women had the vote in general elections in England.
If you say to a group of women professors, 'Close your eyes and think of a professor,' what they will see is a guy. I will. And I'll stop myself and think, 'Hey, hang on, what am I doing here?'
When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.
Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn't care about their appearance.
When you look at me on the telly and say, 'She should be on 'The Undateables,'' you are looking at a 59-year-old woman. That is what 59-year-old women who have not had work done look like. Get it?
One of its most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be un-civilised, with those who do not - or cannot be trusted to - share our values.
The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don't think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive.
There's a basic rule of thumb that the more a culture oppresses women, or oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that.
It's great fun being an academic because you have a certain licence to be a bit of a joker.
You can hardly be a classicist and not be interested in theatre.
Grey is my hair colour. I really can't see why I should change it.
I do not think that the lives of women of my generation, as a class, were blighted by the way the power differentials between men and women operated. We wanted to change those power differentials; we also had a good time.
Fate has it in for me to be an exhibit: that funny old lady from the telly.
You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
At 16, I got into local-education archaeology classes - you got to go to summer digs. It allowed me to be both intellectual and a bad girl with a wicked social life every evening!
However judicious academics may be - not like me - they are all taught to see through crap.
My fantasy is going into a men's loo. And listening to what they say.
I don't think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go - just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance - what you will find is that women's voices are not taken seriously.
You have to do what you feel comfortable with.
My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history.
We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.
One person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.
Wherever possible, I try to see things from the other side of the dividing line and to read civilisation 'against the grain.'
