Mary Beard is widely regarded as one of the most recognisable and authoritative voices on ancient history. A celebrated classicist, broadcaster, and bestselling author, her works, including SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, have transformed the way ancient history is perceived, making it accessible and engaging. Recently, Beard has shared her personal selection of five noteworthy books related to ancient history, reports BritPanorama.
The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus
“In the early second century CE, Tacitus set the standard for the analysis of political corruption and the effects of dictatorship, and he’s worth paying attention to even now. In telling the story of the rule of the Roman emperors from Tiberius to Nero, almost like an ancient George Orwell, he brilliantly shows how autocrats corrupt the way we all speak and think.”
Many modern translations are available: from the slightly stolid but reliable version by Michael Grant in the Penguin Classics series to A J Woodman’s translation for Hackett Classics (a more difficult read, but closer to the difficult language of Tacitus).
Penguin Classics, £10.99
Surviving Rome by Kim Bowes
“Here is an up-to-the-minute study of what life was really like if you were below the rank of the richest in Roman imperial society – Tacitus didn’t pay much attention to them. There is some hardcore economic analysis here, be warned, but Bowes paints a clear and bleak picture of how the vast majority of the population of the empire lived.”
“It is true that few people among the conquered did very well out of the Roman empire and made it big. But the more carefully you look, the more you find that the basic message of the empire was quite different: the vast majority ended up working harder for less.”
Princeton University Press, £35
The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others by Paul Cartledge
“If you want to understand how Classical Greeks thought about their place in the world, a great starting place is still Paul Cartledge’s book. He shows just how Greek ideas and identity were framed around a series of oppositions. They invested in freedom, but that depended on having a whole class of people who were not free – the vast numbers of the enslaved.”
“The male heroic ideal was built on an assumption of women’s inferiority. The idea of the foreigner, even more than in the worst examples of modern xenophobia, presented outsiders as if they broke all Greek norms of sex, gender and ‘civility’. It is a revealing exploration of the yin and yang of ancient Greek culture.”
Oxford University Press, £18.99
1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline
“Eric Cline’s book takes us back into Greek prehistory, asking how it was that the Bronze Age cultures of Greece, best known from Crete and Mycenae, ‘collapsed’ in the 12th century BCE. There is no right answer here, and there are plenty of scholars who would not agree with Cline’s theories. But he has a gift of painting a big picture and a big theory from disparate archaeological traces.”
“It has been so compelling that there is now even a graphic version of the book. It’s a good starting place for diving into the deepest past of the Greek world.”
Princeton University Press, £15.99
Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body by Caroline Vout
“How did ancient Greeks and Romans understand their bodies? Caroline Vout, in this fascinating book, takes us far beyond the white marble ‘perfection’ of the sculptures that line modern museum walls.”
“She looks at the strange, the ungainly and the sick, reflecting also on race in antiquity, and on such tricky questions as how the bodies of gods differ from the bodies of mere mortals. It’s an eye-opener if you have always been a bit put off by all those hunky Greek male athletes and line-ups of divine Venuses. The Greek body is more diverse than we tend to think.”
Welcome Collection, £18.99
Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard is published by Profile Books, £16.99
