Mary Beard

"A Barnes & Noble Best History Book of the Year" "A Waterstones Best History Book of 2021" "A CapX Book of the Year" "One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Nonfiction Books of the Year" "One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Biographies of the Year" "A Library Journal Fall 2021 Nonfiction Must" Mary Beard is one of the world's leading classicists and cultural commentators, and the author of bestselling and award-winning books, including SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome...

Oscar Wilde compared it to a white goddess, Evelyn Waugh to Stilton cheese. In observers from Lord Byron to Sigmund Freud to Virginia Woolf it met with astonishment, rapture, poetry, even tears-and, always, recognition. Twenty-five hundred years after it first rose above Athens, the Parthenon remains one of the wonders of the world, its beginnings and strange turns of fortune over millennia a perpetual source of curiosity, controversy, and intrigue. At...

What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of laughter was a force to fear-a world of wit, irony, and knowing smiles? How did Romans make sense of laughter? What role did it play in the world of the law courts, the imperial palace, or the spectacles of the arena? Laughter in Ancient Rome explores one of the most...

Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a "mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war" that served as the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria. Yet how did all this emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? Classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of...

From prehistoric Mexico to modern Istanbul, Mary Beard looks beyond the familiar canon of Western imagery to explore the history of art, religion, and humanity. Conceived as a gorgeously illustrated accompaniment to "How Do We Look" and "The Eye of Faith," the famed Civilisations shows on PBS, renowned classicist Mary Beard has created this elegant volume on how we have looked at art. Focusing in Part I on the Olmec heads of early Mesoamerica, the...

It followed every major military victory in ancient Rome: the successful general drove through the streets to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill; behind him streamed his raucous soldiers; in front were his prisoners, as well as the booty he'd captured, from enemy ships and precious statues to plants and animals from the conquered territory. Occasionally there was so much on display that the show lasted two or three days. A radical reexamination...

The author of The Fires of Vesuvius presents a comprehensive history of the social and political world of the Roman emperors including Julius Caesar, Nero, Alexander Severus, Caligula, and Marcus Aurelius.

Mary Beard is one of the world's best-known classicists, an academic with a rare gift for communicating with a wide audience. Here, she draws on thirty years of teaching about Greek and Roman history to provide a panoramic portrait of the classical world that draws surprising parallels with contemporary society. We are taken on a guided tour of antiquity, encountering some of the most famous (and infamous) characters of classical history, among them...