In her recent Anthony Hecht Lectures, delivered at Bard and New York’s Morgan Library, she used these to allow the ancient dead to speak engagingly in their own voices. Lately she has been focusing on tombstone inscriptions, the sole literary record the average Roman left behind. She explored jokes and humor, the most demotic of cultural forms, in her Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up, published in 2014.
The ruins of Pompeii, where the life of the common Roman man and woman is more recoverable than anywhere else, have always fascinated her they furnished the subject both of a celebrated 2008 book, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, and a subsequent BBC documentary. However, as Mary Beard boldly asserts in her new history of the era, SPQR, “The qualities and characters of individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history.” Beard’s sweeping historical survey rejects the “great man” approach that divides the story of ancient Rome into “emperor-sized” chunks, focusing instead on the Senatus Populus que Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome, with a distinct tilt toward the latter.īeard, who teaches classics at Cambridge, is a perennial champion of Rome’s underrepresented and oppressed, both in her scholarly writings and in her frequent contributions to critical journals and online media. These Caesars, to paraphrase Shakespeare, bestride recent depictions of Roman life like colossi. For the 1,900 years between Tacitus’s Annals and Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, accounts of Roman history have most often focused on its emperors and conquerors, and above all on Julius Caesar, founder of a line of autocrats who took his name and the title princeps civitatis, “first citizen” of Rome.
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