187 Quotes by Mary Beard

But in every way, the shared metaphors we use of female access to power – ‘knocking on the door’, ‘storming the citadel’, ‘smashing the glass ceiling’, or just giving them a ‘leg up’ – underline female exteriority. Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.

What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender.

According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen.

When we look, for example, at the Parthenon for the first time, we look at it already knowing that generations of architects chose precisely that style of building for the museums, town-halls, and banks of most of our major cities.

For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you’re saying it. And that matches the detail of the threats themselves.

Trump and Clinton, Perseus and Medusa, and rest my case.

Nuestro modelo cultural y mental de persona poderosa sigue siendo irrevocablemente masculino.

There is little point in asking how ‘democratic’ the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.

Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state.