Mary Beard: Talking Classics
Cambridge classicist Mary Beard makes the case for ancient Greece and Rome as a 'neutral space' for arguing about the hardest questions we face today.
Why we picked this
Beard's argument that antiquity offers a rare neutral ground for live debate about contested issues is genuinely compelling — and she's one of the best at making that case out loud.
Mary Beard is professor emerita of classics at the University of Cambridge and one of the most publicly engaged scholars in the humanities. She has spent decades arguing that the ancient world is not merely a source of historical curiosity but an active resource for thinking through the present — that its distance from our moment is precisely what makes it useful for difficult conversations.
In Talking Classics, Beard makes the case through the intimate, messy evidence of daily life in antiquity: what people ate, how they argued, what they feared. She argues that classics can serve as a kind of neutral arena for engaging debates that feel too live and too partisan to hold anywhere else — bringing wonder and curiosity to the oldest ideas in the Western tradition.
Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Northwestern Day. Book pre-orders available at a discount through the festival. Tickets go on general sale March 19.