Mary Beard: Talking Classics — The Shock of the Old
Classicist Mary Beard explores why the ancient world still grips our imaginations, arguing that its strangeness is its greatest gift to modern thought.
Why we picked this
Beard is one of the rare scholars who can make you feel the strangeness of the ancient world rather than its familiarity. Her argument that antiquity's real value is its foreignness — not its relevance — is worth two hours of anyone's evening.
Mary Beard has spent a career refusing to make the ancient world comfortable. Her bestselling books on Rome, her television work, and her constant public engagement with classics are all driven by a single argument: the value of antiquity is precisely its strangeness, not the ways it maps neatly onto the present. When she encounters ancient bread preserved in the ruins of Pompeii, she sees not a reassuring human continuity but an unsettling rupture — objects from lives genuinely different from our own.
Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old is her latest exploration of why we remain fascinated by Greece and Rome despite — or because of — how alien they actually were. Beard is a Professor Emerita of Classics at Cambridge, a Fellow of Newnham College, and one of the most widely-read scholars writing in English. She brings the same irreverence to lectures that she brings to her books: challenging received ideas about what classical culture was actually like, who participated in it, and what it can honestly tell us.
At $35, this is among the more accessible evenings 92NY offers for the caliber of scholar. Beard is reliably among the most engaging lecturers in the world of ancient history.