Mythological

Thursday, 27th September 2007

One site I mean to add to the blogroll asap is Mary Beard's "A Don's Life". All right, I do wince at the way her site is advertised as "subversive" (now there's a piece of crit-speak that ought to be banned forever) yet her reflections on life as a classicist are full of wit and good sense. I say that as someone whose knowledge of Latin doesn't extend much further than Chelsea's motto (English translation: "Do you take American Express?") Recent highlights on the site include a trip to Mount Vesuvius and a list of facts about the Romans which aren't quite facts after all. Myth number five is that Roman men dressed in togas:

OK sometimes they did. But it was very formal wear – and it’s a bit like saying ‘Englishmen wear dinner jackets’. Actually you’d have seen all kinds of dress on the Roman street, from tunics to trousers -- and, just to confuse things, prostitutes in togas.

UPDATE: I'd completely forgotten about this... As James Forsyth points out in the comments, Mary Beard made a less than helpful contribution to the post-9/11 debate. Here's what she had to say about the World Trade Centre attack in the London Review of Books on October 4 2001:

The horror of the tragedy was enormously intensified by the ringside seats we were offered through telephone answering machines and text-messages. But when the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn’t just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.