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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. The theme takes her from the New Kingdom loaf to the streets of Pompeii, where many another bread roll is preserved after being carbonised in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. The buried city, which Beard has studied in detail, fascinates as one of the places where the ancients can be seen ‘sometimes literally with their pants down’. 

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In her love of the seedier, seamier, more mundane side of the past, Beard cites a number of unexpected allies. On the one hand she is with Arthur Hunt, the papyrologist immortalised in Tony Harrison’s play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, for seeking traces of the day-to-day while his colleague Bernard Grenfell lusted after lofty works of literature. On the other, she is with E.R.........

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