E.r. dodds

Mary Beard opens this book with a recollection of her first meaningful encounter with the ancient world. It was 1960, and she was five years old, visiting the British Museum with her mother. Peering into one of the glass cases, she spotted an unassuming, oddly triangular loaf of bread from ancient Egypt. Seeing her struggle to obtain a better view, a curator lifted the object out. ‘Never under-estimate how powerful the simple act of unlocking a museum case can be,’ Beard reflects 66 years on. She describes Talking Classics as ‘more a memoir than a thesis’, but it is also a thought-provoking meditation on wonder. It was thauma, she reflects, that Aristotle held responsible for sparking philosophical thought to begin with.

Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford friend Harold Acton, immortalised as Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, once bumped into the wife of John Beazley, a lecturer in ancient Greek pottery, while she was exercising their pet goose in Christ Church’s Tom Quad. Hopping over the bird, Acton intuitively doffed his hat. Here, Marie Beazley declared, was ‘a true gentleman’. Mrs Beazley was famous in academic circles for her unpredictable remarks. Over dinner with undergraduates she once announced: ‘My husband can make sparks fly from my loins.