Maureen Corrigan

Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye.

That's a line from a Yeats poem, appropriately entitled A Drinking Song.

Love did indeed come in at the eye for the distinguished classic scholar Mary Beard.

In her new book, called Talking Classics, Beard, who grew up middle class in an English village, recalls being taken as a child by her mother for her first visit to London in 1960.

They wandered through the British Museum and stopped to see the mummies.

Beard, however, became curious about a display case featuring everyday objects –

including a 4,000-year-old piece of bread.

Beard's mother tried to lift her up for a closer look, but as Beard confesses, in the droll way that has endeared her to millions of readers and television audiences, the attempt failed because, "...I was a heavy and wiggly child."

Along came a kindly curator who drew keys out of his pocket, unlocked the case, and held the ancient piece of bread in front of little Mary Beard's eyes.

As Beard says, that experience was what the ancient Greeks would have called a moment of thauma, meaning wonder or wonderment.

I don't think it's fanciful to say that Mary Beard has spent her life unlocking the deep past and encouraging Thauma in the rest of us.

Most of Talking Classics is drawn from four lectures Beard gave at the University of Chicago in 2023.

If the word lectures makes you want to head for an exit door, you don't know Mary Beard's style.

This is a public intellectual who uses terms like slimebag to describe Medea's husband and who advises everyone to dial down the pious reverence when considering the ancient world.

Beard also has little love for the exclusionary side of studying the classics, or for those conservative traditionalists she dubs the column crowd, who want to erect classical architecture in contemporary cities because of the authority it appears to exude.

One of the many hard questions Beard considers in this book is whether classical architecture and statuary are irredeemably tainted by the uses to which they've been put by, say, Mussolini or today's far-right racist groups.

Beard reminds us that there's also radical disruptive power in the classics.

Among the revolutionaries she names with more than a foothold in classics are Karl Marx, Nelson Mandela, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale.

The overarching question about the ancient world that structures Beard's slim little book and her life's work is one that she says was very nearly drummed out of me when I was a student.

What on earth was it like to be there?