Mary Beard: maverick don or book club historian?

Sex, food and bodily functions are the familiar topics on the table in Mary Beard’s bracing new book about ancient Rome. But the fun, chatty and argumentative classics scholar proves both cheering and frustrating in ‘Emperor of Rome’, writes Robert McCrum

Chatty, fun, argumentative, fearless, and ferociously well-informed, Beard’s history presents the Roman world and ours as contiguous, but separate (BBC)

I first met Mary Beard in 2008 when she’d begun to attract labels like “maverick”, “dangerous” and “subversive”. A classical scholar and fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, she was making waves with her blog “A Don’s Life”, and was about to publish a book about Pompeii. When we met to discuss this “life of a Roman town”, it was obvious that Professor Beard was not really dangerous, nor your regular academic, being more than slightly obsessed by the nitty-gritty of the ancient world in ways that made her an ideal pedagogue.

Classical scholarship runs in my family, but I have never encountered a don who so readily confessed to a fascination with Roman sex, and what she declared to be “the sheer puzzlement of it all: where did they go to the loo in the amphitheatre?” Beard – as she called herself – did not stop there. Her life of a Roman town would also introduce its readers to the bawdy graffito scrawled on the walls of a Pompeii bar boasting, “I f***ed the landlady”.

Since 2008, Mary Beard has travelled a long way, becoming both a Dame and a Marmite figure as public intellectual and telly don, merrily landing herself in all kinds of trouble, but never losing her inextinguishable passion for an empire that’s like no other.