I read Mary Beard’s Talking Classics (2026) and Confronting Classics (2013). “One big question drives this book. What is the point of the ancient classics? To put it another way, why should we bother about. what people did 2,000 years ago or more…” (p. 1)

“Nor should we imagine that classics can hand us ready-made answers to contemporary problems on a grader scale, or neat comparisons with modern politics. The fall of the Roman Empire in the west (not likely to have been caused by anything as simple as mass immigrations or lead in the water pipes) does not help very much to examine the decline of modern empires…. The historian Tacitus, for example, seems almost to anticipate George Orwell in exposing how language itself is polluted by autocracy, how in a regime of dissembling and flattery words no long meant what they one did. But Tacitus doesn’t have a solution ready for us.” (p. 71-72)

Beard waffles around a bit while discussing “the Classics.” Are they still relevant? Can we discern the world and culture of 2000 years ago? I should have stopped here, but I went on to read Beard’s earlier book, Confronting the Classics.

I found reading Mary Beard’s Confronting the Classics a frustrating experience. Clearly, Beard is very knowledgeable, but she clearly doesn’t understand the Common Reader. For example, in “Which Thucydides Can You Trust?” Beard criticizes several translations of Thucydides. Far enough. Beard’s criticisms seem valid. But then Beard leaves the reader hanging. What is a good translation of Thucydides? Beard never says. The second frustration with Confronting the Classics is more of a marketing quibble. When I picked up Confronting the Classics I thought I was going to read about which classics should be read and how to read them most productively. Instead, the reader discovers Confronting the Classics is a collection of Mary Beard’s book reviews. True, the books she reviews all have something to do with the Classics. But reading over 30 book reviews, some of them fairly technical, isn’t what I thought this book would be when I started reading it. GRADE: B
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: Do Classics have a Future?

SECTION ONE: ANCIENT GREECE
1. Bulder of Ruins
2. Sappho Speaks
3. Which Thucydides Can You Trust?
4. Alexander: How Great?
5. What Made the Greeks Laugh?

SECTION TWO: HEROES & VILLAINS OF EARLY ROME
6. Who Wanted Remus Dead?
7. Hannibal at Bay
8. Quousque Tandem…?
9. Roman Art Thieves
10. Spinning Caesar’s Murder

SECTION THREE: IMPERIAL ROME–EMPERORS, EMPRESSES & ENEMIES
11. Looking for the Emperor
12. Cleopatra: The Myth
13. Married to the Empire
14. Caligula’s Satire
15. Nero’s Colosseum?
16. British Queen
17. Bit-part Emperors
18. Hadrian and his Villa

SECTION FOUR: ROME FROM THE BOTTOM UP
19. Ex-slaves and Snobbery
20. Fortune-telling, Bad Breath and Stress
21. Keeping the Armies out of Rome
22. Life and Death in Roman Britain
23. South Shields Aramaic

SECTION FIVE: ARTS & CULTURE; TOURISTS & SCHOLARS
24. Only Aeschylus Will Do?
25. Arms and the Man
26. Don’t Forget you Pith Helmet
27. Pompeii for the Tourists
28. The Golden Bough
29. Philosophy meets Archaeology
39. What Gets Left Out
31. Asterix and the Romans

Afterward: Reviewing Classics
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Sources
List of Figures
Index

TABLE OF CONTENTS (TALKING CLASSICS)

INTRODUCTION — 1

1. A Sense of Wonder — 13
2. How to Be Modern? –51
3. Rights and Wrongs — 91
4. The Case for Classics — 137
Epilogue: The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass in the British Museum — 171
Further Reading and Some Explanatory Notes — 175
Acknowledgements — 187
List of Illustrations — 189
Index — 193