Professor Mary Beard associates the restaurant Moro, in London’s Clerkenwell, with afternoons of flowing wine and pats on the back. It’s where her publisher takes her to celebrate when she has delivered a book manuscript. She’s nearing such a deadline when we meet there – just finalising the endnotes to her new title about Roman emperors, a companion volume to SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, her bestselling account of the empire’s rise and fall – so she carries a bit of that demob spirit with her. She orders a glass of her favourite Basque spritz wine, txiki blanco, and a plate of Iberian pork, and settles back on a cushioned window seat into the lunchtime clatter of conversation.
At 68, Beard has lately taken compulsory retirement from 40 years of teaching classics to undergraduates at her Cambridge college; now she is concentrating full time on illuminating the ancient world for the rest of us. In the days before we meet, I’ve been catching up on her required-reading blog, A Don’s Life. In it she uses the example of Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the despised super-rich of the first century BC, to examine Nadhim Zahawi’s shocking tax affairs; she has compared the response to a devastating earthquake on the Turkish/Syrian borders 2,000 years ago – the emperor Trajan ploughed central funds into improved rebuilding schemes – with the planning failures of the recent disaster; and she has examined the Scottish prisons controversy in light of Roman attitudes to incarceration. In a world defined by what she calls “presentism”, a blinkered obsession with the here and now, Beard offers a spirited, repeated reminder that there is nothing new under the sun.
