Mary Beard

Reading the Ruins of Rome

Which Side of Roman Britain Are You On?

How Stoical Was Seneca?

There is something elusive, even a whiff of “spin,” about him

Britain Lurches

The anti-immigration, xenophobic United Kingdom Independence Party has just become the largest British party in the European Parliament. This does not mean that the UK has suddenly lurched to the right.

‘The Parthenon Enigma’—An Exchange

The Latest Scheme for the Parthenon

Joan Breton Connelly’s ‘The Parthenon Enigma’

What Was Greek to Them?

Margalit Fox’s ‘The Riddle of the Labyrinth’

Pinning Down Spartacus

If his uprising was not an early example of class warfare, then what was driving Spartacus?

Showing Hands in Ancient Athens

Election by Connection

Electoral advice from Quintus Tullius Cicero

Winning Without Super PACs

Roman elections were all a matter of personal connections, charisma, and favor, not of manifestos and paid-up party loyalty. No patron would have a houseful of clients if he only offered to help those whom he knew he really could. That’s a different claim from a modern political view that you promise anything you like to get elected. In fact, in other ways too, the twenty-first-century relationship between the political hopeful and his voters and “clients” is the mirror image of the ancient one. But the modern clients, in the shape of Super PACs and the like, call the political tune to an extent that most of the supporters of the ancient would-be consul could not.

Do the Classics Have a Future?

How do we make the ancient world make sense to us?

The Dragging of Hector

Alexander: How Great?

Cleopatra: The Myth

Stacy Schiff’s ‘Cleopatra: A Life’

Which Thucydides Can You Trust?

The Hero Pose

I am one of a team that has been redesigning the Greek and Roman Galleries in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. We’ve finished—and a couple of weeks ago the new display opened to the public.

Are Classics Classy? The Roman View

What is a “classic”? Is it simply (as Frank Kermode, I think, once put it) an old book that we still read? Or is there something a bit more sinister to the whole idea?

Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery

The Truth About Cleopatra