Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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She goes behind the scenes of the Great Pompeii Project, where restoration teams have gradually removed the layers of time and deterioration from the frescoes and mosaics of houses closed to the public for decades. And with the help of point-cloud scanning technology, Pompeii is seen and explained like never before.

Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed (2016) - IMDb Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed (2016) - IMDb

Celebrities' open letter to Scotland – full text and list of signatories". The Guardian. 7 August 2014 . Retrieved 29 January 2017. Pompeiians worked hard but they also had fun. They liked to gamble, socialise in bars, drink their wine (and we tried the Neapolitan wine that is supposedly the closest to what the Romans drank, the Lacrimae Christi – very nice but the expert on wines was my friend), go to brothels and baths. The baths, again against popular thought (also shown convincingly in the BBC production) would not be at all attractive to us now. The large public pools did not have circulating water. Beard also tells us that sexuality was not more pronounced in their society than it is in ours. Beard thinks that rather than sex itself, what was at stake was power, male power, and this was expressed through the proliferating penises. Pompeiians were also believers. Their eating habits were somewhat different from ours; it seems that the wealthy ate at home (reclining as seen in the Hollywood recreations) but the great majority, that is, the less wealthy, ate out in sort of 'fast-food' outlets. Their religion was a mixture of the Roman (no text, no tenets, communal, open system, more based upon acts such as animal sacrifice than ritual) and the Oscan (the previous population) which means greater elements with an Oriental origin. Career 1984 Appointed fellow of Newnham College; 1985 Rome in the Late Republic; 1992 Appointed classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement; 2000 The Invention of Jane Harrison; 2004 Appointed professor of classics at Cambridge; 2007 The Roman Triumph; 2008 Sather Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Out and about, she is regularly flagged down by fans, often, but not always, young women. (One admirer, Megan Beech, published a poem called When I Grow Up I Want to Be Mary Beard – a phrase that now adorns T-shirts worn by her fans. Characteristically, Beard befriended Beech after they connected on social media, and Beech is now studying for a PhD at Newnham.) Caterina Turroni, a television producer who has worked with Beard since the Pompeii documentary, recalled filming with her in Tiberius’s villa on Capri in 2013, when a party of English schoolgirls spotted the cameras. “You could hear them saying, ‘What if it’s her?’ ‘Do you think it’s really her?’ and then they saw her and they went insane – it was like they’d seen a boyband.” Whether she’s poring over graffiti about gladiatorial machismo in Pompeii or writing about a ‘wistful nostalgia for the erotic dimension of classical pedagogy,’ Britain’s most outspoken classicist is hilarious, staggeringly knowledgeable and utterly brilliant. ” — Vogue UKIn August 2014, Beard was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue. [102] She was a member of the Labour Party until Tony Blair became leader. [103] In July 2015, Beard endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election. She said: "If I were a member of the Labour Party, I would vote for Corbyn. He actually seems to have some ideological commitment, which could get the Labour Party to think about what it actually stands for." [104] For the 12 December 2019 general election, she was a proposer for the successful Cambridge Labour candidate Daniel Zeichner. [105] Books [ edit ] I whole-hardheartedly recommend choosing this book if you are curious about ancient Roman life. The book is not about the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E. which destroyed the town. It is instead about life in the town before the event. It is about life in a "typical Roman town". It is based on an immense amount of archaeological research carried out over the last two centuries. The book distinguishes between what is conclusively known and what we can reasonably conjecture, supplying detailed supporting evidence. The minutia of details does not become overwhelming in that the chapters are clearly organized by topic. Topics are summarized and conclusions drawn. This is helpful particularly when there is no common consensus. You don't have to be an expert to read this; terms are simply defined. People have been obsessed with the lives of the emperors almost since the end of the Roman empire – what is it that appeals so much? The Ancient World and Us: From Fear and Loathing to Enlightenment and Ethics". The Gifford Lectures. 15 April 2019 . Retrieved 20 May 2019.

Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town - Mary Beard - Google Books Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town - Mary Beard - Google Books

a b Mead, Rebecca (25 August 2014). "The Troll Slayer". The New Yorker . Retrieved 3 December 2017.

As time has passed, her writing style, compared with the early, careful academic articles, has become more like her spoken voice. The Beard of the first Vestals article of 1980 would never have used, as an epigraph, a quote from a Procol Harum lyric – as did the Beard of the later Vestals paper repudiating her earlier ideas. “I saw eventually that you could write ‘scholarly articles’ in a style that felt right for you and didn’t feel significantly different from the way you wrote a review,” she told me. A mark of her leap into the celebrity stratosphere is the avalanche of daily requests she receives. These have included, aside from several politely declined offers of a makeover from the Daily Mail, invitations (also politely declined) to appear on the diving show Splash!, on the celebrity version of The Great British Bake Off and on Celebrity Mastermind. Of the last she said: “God, just imagine it. Either you’d look like a complete nerd or everyone would be saying, ‘She doesn’t know a thing.’” Pompeii: one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history. We know how its victims died, but this film sets out to answer another question - how did they live? Gleaning evidence from an extraordinary find, Cambridge professor and Pompeii expert Mary Beard provides new insight into the lives of the people who lived in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius before its cataclysmic eruption. Part of the problem is that the city's population was not, as Doctor Who suggested, wiped out in a single day amid a wholly unanticipated cataclysm. On the contrary: all but the brave or foolhardy had already fled their homes before the climactic pyroclastic surge descended from Vesuvius to entomb the remaining Pompeiians for good. The implications of this for archaeologists and historians, as Beard makes clear in a typically invigorating chapter, are profound: for what we have frozen in Pompeii is not a scene from everyday life, but rather a place that was already well on its way to becoming a ghost town. The denuded character of the houses bears witness less to a taste for minimalism, than to wholesale evacuation.