Opera Chic

Mary Beard on Meet the Romans' Fallout

In a battle between a TV critic and a classicist, guess whose going to win? It's weak sauce, like if Chris Brown took a swipe at Jay-Z.
 
British classicist Mary Beard's OC's go-to source for Italy's ancient civilizations and she'll f**k up Cicero and Homer like you're back in high school Latin class in a lunch coma, falling asleep at your desk as your teacher sings the mnemonic rhyme declensions "O-S-T-MUS-TIS-NT" and "BO-BIS-BIT-BIMUS-BITUS-BUNT" and you're sweating as he calls your name to stand up and translate Book X of Virgil's Aeneid since you had your nose buried in a contraband Non-no swiped from your older (and painfully cooler) cousin for the past 40 minutes. 

We've been longtime worshippers of Saint Mary (we dutifully keep her slender Intro to Classics tucked in our Prada purse on short trips), the Cambridge professor of classics and the coolest living classicist who can make us lol with her cheeky British wit at even the bone-driest classics, and we're behind her counterargument aimed at a nasty misogynist who took a swipe at her looks during a new TV series that recently aired -- Meet the Romans, a three-part BBC2 TV series.

As Beard told Stuart Jeffries in a Guardian interview over the weekend: "Actually, that's what a 57-year-old woman looks like."

Battle of the looks? Ha ha let's just stop AA Gill there. If he really wants to start a sh*tstorm about physical appearances, that's a battle that he will fail.

Here's Beard's rebuttal on the Daily Mail.

It's A Don's Life: The Blog, The Book

Kudoronies to Mary Beard, The Woman Who Knows Everything, who just published her new book, "It's A Don's Life", inspired by her monstrously successful blog.

A Don's Life: Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, "Britain Got Talent" Voter

Mary Beard, possibly the smartest person in Britain, watches "Britain Got Talent", aka, The "We'll Abuse Small Children For Your Amusement & We'll Mix You A Martini With Their Tears" Show, possibly the dumbest TV show in Britain -- and reports back:

I had a pretty clear view of the whole process, Not so very different from the display of 'cripples', 'freaks' or 'exotic foreigners' in nineteenth-century spectacles (or from gladiatorial shows, for that matter), this was another version of mass-market exploitation of the disadvantaged. How could people -- or a parent -- subject a 10 year old child to that?

So it was with the intention of enjoying some righteous indignation that I switched on.

By the end of the show, I decided I would vote.

Still, ταυρομαχία sounds more fun than that -- Opera Chic would have voted for Mithras.

Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins: What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Classics

Unless you went to Boston Latin or -- like Opera Chic -- you went to some other unfashionable nerdy school where they made a point of drilling six years of Latin and Greek into your reluctant teenage cranium, if you're a red-white-blue blooded American you might have very well been led to believe that the Greeks were a bunch of pagan child molesters who invented the Olympics, and the Romans, well, they used to get their butts kicked by Russell Crowe at the Coliseum and chase Charlton Heston around on chariots as they waited to be finally converted to Christianity, eventually to jumpstart the glorious Middle Ages. (Which, interestingly, is almost all quite true but the whole picture might even be more stimulating).

The Internet, in its wisdom, comes to the rescue even if, like Opera Chic, back in school you were paying more attention to your bootlegged copy of Vogue Italia than to those weird-looking letters in your Iliad, like tracks left by a strange bird who dunked its legs in  an inkwell then stepped all over your textbook for some reason.

Two scholars/bloggers of extraordinary talent -- Mary Beard of A Don's Life from The Times (of London) and Charlotte Higgins of the eponymous Charlotte Higgins On Culture from The Guardian -- neither, strangely, an American -- can help explain to you everything you ever wanted to know about the Greeks and Romans and forgot to ask your teachers: Beard's "Classics: A Very Short Introduction" (US link here) is the (really) very short manual you might want to keep in your Hermes (the French luxury brand not the Greek god) bag whenever going out to a dinner party where people are probably smarter than you are (a frighteningly frequent occurrence if, like Opera Chic, you tend to bluff -- and nod -- a lot).
Opera Chic is also reading just now a slightly more challenging text by Professor Beard, a satisfying, bricklike tome -- "Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A History" (US link here) that among other things explains how -- and why -- such an intellectually advanced civilization could believe in such kooky, horny deities (Opera Chic's synthesis, not Prof. Beard's obvs -- better yet, Opera Chic's σύνθεσις). 

Charlotte Higgins wrote -- among other books -- "It's All Greek To Me" (US link here) that beautifully explains the Greek mind with wit and grace -- unlike those awful late-19th century Germans Opera Chic remembers from school who took 39 heavily footnoted pages to make the same point that Higgins makes in a paragraph -- in a much more lively manner. She also has a lot of anecdotes that you can recycle with people who haven't read her and pretend they all come from your high school reminiscences.