The cult of Mary Beard, by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian (January 2018)

The cult of Mary Beard, by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian (January 2018)

"Beard’s view, in other words, is that it is fruitless to make ancient sources into a kind of window through which, if you try hard enough, you will be able to discern a clear picture of the classical world – which has been the traditional means of doing classics. The sources themselves – the original texts and artefacts, as well as the accretions of later scholarship – combine to create our view of the past, and they can be unpicked so that they offer up clues about the anxieties and worldview that formed them. When she, with her co-writer John Henderson, first put such ideas forward in A Very Short Introduction to Classics (1995), it was surprising and fresh to read not that classics was about discovering what Greece and Rome were “really like”. Instead, they wrote, “classics exists in that gap between us and the world of the Greeks and the Romans”.