Classics Quotes

“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.”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction

“Classics is a subject that exists in that gap between us and the word of the Greeks and Romans. The questions raised by Classics are the questions raised by our distance from 'their' world, and at the same time by our closeness to it, and its familiarity to us. In our museums, in our literature, languages, culture, and ways of thinking. The aim of Classics is not only to discover or uncover the ancient world (though that is part of it, as the rediscovery of Bassae, or the excavation of the furthest outposts of the Roman empire on the Scottish borders, shows). Its aim is to also define and debate our relationship to that world.”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction

“And in the stories and fantasies of the ancient world we come across all kinds of varieties in the relations between the sexes”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction

“In part we may want to think of this as a display of male power and control over women: men wore belts to sheath swords”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction

“In Latin the word ‘museum’ once indicated ‘a temple of the Muses’; in what respects is the modern museum the right place to preserve treasures from a classical temple? Does it only look the part?

The issues raised by Bassae provide a model for understanding Classics in its widest sense. Of course, Classics is about more than the physical remains, the architecture, sculpture, pottery, and painting, of ancient Greece and Rome. It is also (to select just a few things) about the poetry, drama, philosophy, science, and history written in the ancient world, and still read and debated as part of our culture. But here too, essentially similar issues are at stake, questions about how we are to read literature which has a history of more than 2,000 years, written in a society very distant and different from our own.”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction

“Classics is full of such lucky survivals”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction

“Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit. ‘Fierce Rome’, that is, ‘had been captured by captive Greece.”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction

“received a classical education,”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction