Few followers of Mary Beard’s colourful career will be surprised to hear that she was first drawn to antiquities by the sight of an ancient Egyptian bread roll. That triangular piece of old dough impassioned her five-year-old soul, illuminating the road to a study of classics, the “next best thing” to Egyptology, and then to becoming Britain’s best-known classicist.
Her more traditional academic colleagues have sometimes been irritated by her perennial sense of wonder (thauma in Greek) – creating a conflict that she discreetly acknowledges in this “apologia”. In her student days, tutors tried to drum out of her a question she repeatedly raised, “what on earth was it like to be there?”. But in her professorial days, she reversed the process. “Happily, I have managed to drum the question back in again.” In this quest, she emulated two Irish academics – an unlikely professor of Greek at Oxford, the socialist and Irish nationalist E R Dodds from Co Down, and his friend, the poet and classicist Louis MacNeice.
Early in the book, she acts like a tour guide, bringing us to one of her regular haunts in Pompeii, the bar of Salvius. Pottery containers for wine still lean against the wall, and its restored pictures show the locals “getting off with one another, fighting, bantering and sometimes being extremely rude”.
Much of what follows sounds like eavesdropping from a good nox Saturni (Saturday night) there, propping up the counter and eating its in-house delicacy of snail stew. So we hear of the analyses of Thucydides which can seem “not unlike a Latin equivalent of ... Finnegans Wake”; the practical difficulties of using the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as a guide to life; Vergil’s cheekiness in competing with Homer; and the mice dwelling inside the Elgin Marbles.
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In the lulls between anecdota, Beard sometimes dons her academic cap to add a dash of profundity. “Classics changes your mind about the distant past. Not only that: it prompts you to rethink the present.” Now that our politicians are quoting Thucydides again, the book emits a sparky timelessness – even if Beard leaves it to them to explain why the collapse of an empire, Athenian or otherwise, poses such dangers for the neighbours.
Neasa MacErlean is author of Telling the Truth is Dangerous – How Robert Dudley Edwards changed Irish History forever
