Tracing the roots of misogyny to ancient Greece and Rome with Mary Beard 26/02/2018, 16)15

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JAC K E T CO PY B O O KS L A T I M ES

Tracing the roots of misogyny to ancient Greece and

Rome with Mary Beard
By KATE TUTT LE D EC 28 , 2 017 | 10 : 1 5 A M | NEW YORK ! " # $

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Mary Beard (Alastair Grant / AP)

! "

The classicist Mary Beard opens her book "Women & Power" with a
scene out of the Odyssey. Penelope leaves her room to approach the
assorted suitors who more or less occupy her mansion, waiting for her
to give up on long-lost Odysseus and marry one of them. When she
requests they stop singing such songs, she is met with resistance from
the youngest male there: Her adolescent son, Telemachus, chastises
her. Return to your room, he tells her; public speaking is for men.

"I read the Odyssey for 20 or 30 years before I noticed the line," Beard
LATEST JACKET COPY
says. "At a certain moment you just say, blimey, that is a founding
moment in Western civilization! And I'd read it however many times
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Tracing the roots of misogyny to ancient Greece and Rome with Mary Beard 26/02/2018, 16)15

moment in Western civilization! And I'd read it however many times

JAC K E T CO PY
and not recognized it. And here we are in the first book of the poem
and we have this moment: saying speech is male, and silencing a A painful coming-of-age
debut novel of a gay teen
woman." whose family is sundered by
suicide
Adapted from a pair of lectures Beard delivered for the London FEB 16, 2018

Review of Books Winter Lecture series in 2014 and 2017, the twinned
essays in "Women & Power" (Liveright) take on what Beard calls, in REVIEW

the book's introduction, "the culturally awkward relationship between Zadie Smith's brilliance is
on display in 'Feel Free'
the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate
FEB 7, 2018
and comment: politics in its widest sense." Speech and power are
inextricably linked, and male silencing of women is present at the very
JAC K E T CO PY
core of our cultural DNA.
British publishers call for
banning American authors
Beard's voice, in person, is lively and warm; she sounds at once like from Man Booker Prize
the best possible coffee date and the extremely acclaimed academic FEB 5, 2018

she is (a longtime professor of classics at Cambridge University, Beard

was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2013, one of JAC K E T CO PY

the markers on a path to knighthood). She's a relatable genius: Words Say goodnight, Jacket Copy
FEB 2, 2018
like "bloke" and "blimey" pepper her speech.

∠ JAC K E T CO PY

A heartfelt lament on
patrolling the border:
It's this likability, in part, that led to such a strong backlash against Francisco Cantu's 'The Line
A.A. Gill, a television critic who in 2012 wrote in the Daily Telegraph Becomes a River'

that Beard, then hosting a BBC program on ancient Rome, was "too FEB 2, 2018

ugly for television." His attack seems to have been prompted by

Beard's audacity to be a woman, then in her mid-50s, who chose not
to dye her hair or have plastic surgery.

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Tracing the roots of misogyny to ancient Greece and Rome with Mary Beard 26/02/2018, 16)15

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The ancient temple of Parthenon in Athens, Greece (ARIS MESSINIS / AFP/Getty

Images) ! "

Curled in an armchair in her New York hotel room, Beard, who turns
63 on New Year's Day, is naturally elegant and quite lovely. She wears
her thick, silver-blond hair long and parted in the middle, and accents
her dark tunic and leggings with golden high-tops. Her face, complete
with the normal amount of laugh lines, is animated, intelligent and
attractive.

Gill's insults backfired. "He got a lot of flack," Beard says. "In terms of
British public opinion, he got it wrong."
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Beard's spirited response to Gill's insults — and to sexist attacks found

in internet comment sections and Twitter — have made her, as the
New York Times noted in 2016, a kind of folk hero for feminists of all
ages (a 2014 New Yorker profile called her "Troll Slayer").

The first person in her family to earn a university degree, Beard

attended a women's college at Cambridge, entering in 1973 just as
second-wave feminism took root in both the academy and the wider
world. Scholars in her field began looking for written evidence of
women's voices and found very little. "By the time I was finishing my
PhD," she says, "we were much more interested in thinking not so
much about trying to find the lost women, but to think how gender
mattered in the ancient world — to see that preoccupation with the
standoff between men and women absolutely, fundamentally lay the
wellsprings of the literature we were reading."

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Throughout "Women &

Power," Beard draws a direct
The more you line between the silencing and
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Tracing the roots of misogyny to ancient Greece and Rome with Mary Beard 26/02/2018, 16)15

The more you line between the silencing and

oppress, the more invisibility of women in the
cultures of ancient Greece and
you’re preoccupied Rome and our own current
by those you and continuing problems with
oppress. the patriarchy. Sometimes,
she admits, "it is depressing.
— MARY BEARD
But I think in a funny way
there's a message for us in
Share quote & link ! " terms of saying, look, we're a
million times more lucky than
any women in ancient Greece.
But it's really quite helpful to
start to see that [our current gender landscape] is not an accident —
this does actually have a long history."

In tracing the persistence of female disempowerment, Beard argues

that we inherited a deep cultural preoccupation. "There's a basic rule
of thumb," she said, "that the more a culture oppresses women, or
oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that."
Just as whites in apartheid South Africa were obsessed with racial
classification and separation, the ancient Greeks and Romans spent a
lot of time thinking about gender roles — and worrying about what
would happen if women were to gain power.

"The more you oppress, the more you're preoccupied by those you
oppress," Beard said. When asked whether she saw any modern day
parallels, say, to how often President Trump mentions Hillary Clinton,
she laughed. "She somehow, I'm happy to say, keeps getting in his
way!" Beard said. "She's gotten into his head."

American journalists, Beard says, ask her all the time which Roman
emperor Trump most reminds her of. "My gut feeling is that it's
actually an insult to most Roman emperors," she said. "Somehow I
tend to think that most ancient observers would be just as horrified as
us."

In her role as an academic, Beard says, "it's not your job to change the
world." Nevertheless, she hopes her works nudges it a bit toward
greater understanding and equality. That may be one reason she
speaks up so frequently, both as a public intellectual and as a woman
trying to be heard in an online world that is often hostile to female
voices.

"Every woman is always taught: Don't reply, don't give them the
opportunity. I think, you know, hang on, that's leaving the bullies in
charge of the playground," she said. When one man called her a "filthy
old slut" and worse, she called him out and he apologized. "Your

audience in that encounter is not the guy — who's no doubt a sad old
bloke with a bottle of cheap something with nothing better to do late
at night than abuse women on Twitter," she says. "Your resilience
against it is seen by other women."
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against it is seen by other women."

Beard hopes that the current atmosphere, in which sexual harassment

and assault are finally getting widespread attention, will lead to lasting
change. She's not yet certain, though. She worries the focus on the rich
and famous will overshadow the everyday oppressions: "I'm just as
interested as the woman by the photocopier in the office." And she'd
like to see more focus on the future than the past. "I'm not interested
in naming and shaming much," she said. "I'm interested in women not
having to put up with it."

"It's going to be hard to know right now whether the catharsis leads
somewhere," she says. "Or it could be that the catharsis is a kind of
alibi, and things go on much as they always have. I think we should
not lose sight of the fact of what the main aim is, which is for this not
to happen."

For Beard, who has spoken about her experience being raped on a
train in Italy, one lesson from studying classical literature is that the
stories we tell reveal and then shape how we think about sex, gender,
power and violence. "We have to unpick these narratives," she said,
untangling an invisible knot with her hands. In Greek mythology, Zeus
raped women all the time. "You've got academics who will look at
those stories of rape and say it's not rape, it's abduction. And when
you've got abduction you're not very far from seduction. And then it's
just a love story."

Despite the misogyny she sees in the text, Beard says "there is no way,
absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the
Odyssey. But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it
and then to think what it says about us."

Tuttle is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

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