Photograph: Caterina Turroni/BBC/Lion Television Mary Beard on Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit. The role of the academic is to make everything less simple.” If you’re going to remove the sexual violence, you cannot tell the story of Rome.” She is resolute on her purpose in public life, and has no qualms about the distinction of scholarship: “What is the role of an academic, no matter what they’re teaching, within political debate? It has to be that they make issues more complicated. You think you’ve got one, and then, oh no. “It’s very hard to get positive female role models in the history of the Roman empire. She is a feminist to her bones, and gives no quarter to the kind of historical relativism that ringfences the brutality of the past as something natural and unremarkable, like eating songbirds. “Isn’t the point of politics that a citizen can talk about it? Aren’t we always complaining that politics has become a specialist enclave? Politics is something that we can all understand, that is the fucking definition of it.” All the clever ones had the same idea, which was to go round the back.” She thinks critically about contemporary politics, and also swears. “Roman military tactics were much over-rated. She is a woman with a searching mind she looks at accepted truths and challenges them.
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