Civilizations

What draws us back, again and again, to ancient Greece and Rome? Why do marble ruins, faded scrolls, and ancient ideas continue to captivate modern minds? In Civilizations, Mary Beard explores the living power of the classical past—not as a distant relic of history, but as a mirror through which we see our own lives, politics, and culture more clearly. Together with John Henderson, she asks us to look at the world of antiquity not as something fixed, complete, or purely beautiful, but as a complex interaction between 'us and them'—a continuous dialogue that defines what we call the classical tradition.

At the heart of her exploration stands the Temple of Apollo at Bassae in Greece. Its ruined form, rediscovered, transported, and reinterpreted over centuries, becomes a living metaphor for the whole field of classics—its promise of beauty, its history of appropriation, and its power to provoke modern debates about identity, empire, and knowledge. From ancient temples and epic poetry to Victorian schoolrooms and twentieth-century scholarship, Beard shows that our encounters with the classical world are never neutral. They express who we believe we are—and who we wish to be.

The Museum and the Mountain

The book opens not in ancient Greece, but in the British Museum. Beard describes an imaginary visit through galleries filled with Greek antiquities until we reach the Bassae Room, where friezes from the ancient temple form a continuous band of sculptures around the walls. The scene captures a tension: this setting is both an act of preservation and an act of distortion. The frieze—once spiritual, now aestheticized—stands as a symbol of how we moderns mediate the ancient world through our own cultural frameworks. The questions flow naturally: what did these works mean to those who built or worshipped within them? How did we become their new guardians? And what, exactly, do we see when we gaze at them today?

The journey to Bassae itself, which Beard and Henderson trace through exploration accounts and modern tourism, reveals that the study of antiquity is inseparable from adventure, imperial ambition, and interpretation. Early nineteenth-century explorers treating Ancient Greece as a field of treasure-hunting merged scholarship with empire-building. Their rediscoveries reshaped not only museums but also the global imagination—linking Greece to Western civilization and its supposedly shared origins.

Classics as a Relationship, Not an Object

For Beard, classics is not the mere study of ancient artifacts or languages. It is a vibrant relationship—a negotiation between past and present that depends on what we notice, ignore, revere, or reconstruct. Ancient temples inspire modern architecture; Greek democracy haunts our governments; Roman law and Greek philosophy still underpin moral and political debates. Yet this relationship is never static. Each generation redefines its distance from the ancient world. Victorian scholars prized purity, order, and linguistic mastery; contemporary classicists ask harder questions about slavery, gender, and empire. To explore the past is also to reveal the modern values shaping our curiosity.

As Beard explains, when we read Plato, we are not only hearing a fourth-century BCE philosopher but also engaging with two millennia of thinking about him—from medieval monks to Marxists. Every encounter becomes a layered conversation across centuries. Thus, the field of classics resists closure; it is an open dialogue sustained by reinterpretation.

Reconstructing and Questioning Civilization

Through chapters that move fluidly between archaeology, literature, philosophy, art, and film, Beard redefines what counts as classical. She examines how tomb inscriptions, slave collars, and traveler’s diaries can tell as much about the ancient world—and about us—as Homer’s epics or the Parthenon. The Bassae temple’s fragments invite reflection on intellectual reconstruction itself: how do we rebuild meaning from ruins without simply remaking the past in our own image? In exploring these questions, Beard not only challenges academic authority but also makes classics democratic, accessible, and morally urgent.

At its core, the book contends that the classical world survives precisely because it is incomplete. Each encounter—whether with a statue, a poem, or a dusty grammar book—is an act of re-creation. To learn from the ancients is to learn about interpretation itself. It is to understand that civilization, far from being inherited intact, is something we continually construct through our choices, curiosities, and acts of remembrance.

Beard’s central lesson: classics lives in the tension between reverence and reinvention. The past is not behind us—it is inside us, awaiting discovery.

At the center of Mary Beard’s book stands the Temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassae—a paradoxical site both remote and intimate, both sacred and academic. The temple’s story weaves together everything the book means by 'classics': discovery, loss, imagination, and cultural exchange. Beard begins with the modern museum display but quickly leads us into the forgotten mountain temple from which those sculptured slabs once came.

From Sacred Space to Museum Showcase

Originally, the Bassae temple stood as a fifth-century BCE dedication to Apollo the 'Helper,' who, according to ancient writers like Pausanias, protected neighboring communities from plague. Its frieze depicted mythic battles—Greeks against Amazons and Centaurs—symbolizing the conflict between civilization and chaos, order and instinct. Yet, when its fragments were excavated and reassembled in the British Museum in the early 1800s, those meanings transformed. What had once been a living space of ritual became an aesthetic artifact. Visitors admired its chiseling but rarely thought about its ritual smoke, songs, or worshippers. Beard forces you to notice this shift: our museums preserve antiquity by uprooting it, turning a sanctuary into spectacle.

Rediscovery and Imperial Adventure

Beard retraces the rediscovery of Bassae by C. R. Cockerell and his European companions—architects, painters, and scholars who traversed brigand-infested Greek hills in 1811. Their expedition reveals how classics has long been entangled with travel, empire, and privilege. These “explorers” were effectively cultural entrepreneurs who excavated, exported, and auctioned the ancient world for fame and national pride. Britain’s purchase of the Bassae marbles mirrored the politics behind the Elgin Marbles. Beard doesn’t condemn or romanticize them; instead, she asks what their story tells us about Europeans imagining Greece as the cradle of “Western civilization.” In many ways, the classical world they sought was as much an invention as a discovery.

From Pilgrimage to Tourism

Beard also contrasts early 'heroic' exploration with our modern tourism. Where Cockerell risked disease and robbery, we now drive up on asphalt roads, buy postcards, and pose beside a temple wrapped protectively in a giant tent to prevent erosion. The tent itself, she argues, is a potent symbol: a reminder that the sacred ruin has been repackaged for cultural consumption. The transformation from danger to guided experience parallels the transformation of classics itself—from aristocratic adventure to mass visitation, from private discovery to global heritage.

Yet something persists across centuries: the human thrill of standing before ruins, of sensing a distant civilization and wondering what connects us. Beard notes that even when modern visitors feel disappointed—by crowds, fences, or the loss of romance—they are still participating in the same act of imaginative reconstruction that fueled nineteenth-century travelers. Tourism, she suggests, is not the death of classics but its latest reincarnation.

To visit Bassae, whether by mule or by minivan, is to cross the same invisible frontier: between what remains and what we make of it.

In one of the book’s most compelling chapters, Beard focuses on Pausanias, the Greek traveler and writer of the second century CE whose Guidebook to Greece preserved the only written reference to the Bassae temple. His few sentences rescued an entire monument from oblivion. Through him, Beard draws a larger point about how classics depends on extraordinary accidents of survival and on generations of interpreters who kept copying, translating, and valuing certain texts while letting others vanish.

A Tourist Before Tourism

Pausanias was himself a kind of ancient tourist. Wandering under Roman rule, he mapped Greece’s landmarks, temples, and myths for Greek-speaking readers nostalgic for their independent past. His writing—half guidebook, half cultural memory—is an exercise in selective remembering. Where Rome’s power dominated politically, Pausanias sought to preserve Greek identity through storytelling. Beard notes that when modern archaeologists use his text to locate ruins, they’re reenacting the same mix of curiosity and loss that motivated him.

Chance, Copyists, and Continuity

The survival of Pausanias’s work, and of nearly all ancient literature, was precarious. Beard reminds you that entire civilizations endure in fragile manuscripts, rescued from oblivion by medieval monks who copied them by hand. Much of Greek literature was lost; whole histories, poems, and plays vanished when scribes stopped transcribing them. Sometimes, as with the Roman poet Catullus or the philosopher Lucretius, a single surviving manuscript stands between extinction and posterity. Beard likens this to archaeology: both depend on luck, human labor, and historical bias. What survives tells us as much about the preservers as about the ancient authors themselves.

Rewriting the Ancient World

Beard argues that modern scholarship continuously rewrites what antiquity is by questioning earlier interpretations. For example, Pausanias’s claim that the Bassae temple was designed by Iktinos (architect of the Parthenon) might simply be wrong—a patriotic guess to link a remote shrine with Athens’s glory. Modern archaeologists now challenge such statements with scientific dating and stylistic analysis. The result isn’t merely correction but dialogue: Pausanias teaches us how each generation constructs its own Greece. He turned the Roman-ruled landscape into a map of memory; we, in turn, make it a field of science, art, or conservation.

In Beard’s view, Pausanias reminds us that every act of reading, excavation, or restoration continues the work of ancient storytellers: rescuing meaning from time’s erosion.

Beard takes the reader beneath the marble to reveal the human labor and exploitation behind classical beauty. She challenges the romantic image of Greece as harmonious and enlightened by exposing its dependence on slavery, inequality, and toil. The Temple of Apollo, she reminds us, did not build itself—it rose from the sweat of workers, many likely enslaved.

Unearthing the Invisible Workforce

Ancient inscriptions found near Bassae reveal faint traces of masons’ marks—Greek letters scratched by builders organizing stone placement. These marks, Beard notes, are among the few surviving voices of those who physically shaped Greek art. We don’t know their names or whether they were free, but historical evidence suggests that large numbers of slaves drove the classical economy. In Athens, as many as forty percent of residents were enslaved. The gleaming monuments of democracy relied on those who had no rights or civic identity.

Rethinking “Civilization”

By highlighting this contradiction, Beard echoes modern classical historians like Moses Finley and Paul Cartledge: to admire Athens is also to reckon with its exclusions. How democratic is a democracy founded on slavery? How enlightened a culture that defined freedom by contrast with captivity? Beard doesn’t moralize; she contextualizes. She shows that moral discomfort is itself part of studying classics. To confront the “underside” of the classical world—its slaves, women, and foreign laborers—is to glimpse our own economic and social hierarchies reflected back at us.

A New Kind of Archaeology

Archaeology, too, has evolved. Where early explorers sought statues, modern field surveys map whole landscapes—villages, farms, and garbage pits—to reconstruct everyday life. Beard highlights how environmental and microscopic analyses reveal what farmers ate or what animals they herded. The result is a fuller, messier picture of antiquity: classics as lived experience, not marble perfection. The Bassae region, once thought isolated, now seems integrated into trade and ritual networks linking even remote mountain communities to the wider Greek world.

For Beard, the classical world is not a pedestal of ideals—it is a construction site of humanity, moral contradiction, and survival.

Beard turns from temples and texts to the long history of how the modern world has studied, translated, and taught antiquity. She explores the making of 'classics' itself: the chain of scholars, scribes, and editors who defined what counted as canonical and what was lost. The story stretches from the Renaissance humanists who copied Greek manuscripts to twentieth-century editors refining Latin grammar books for schoolboys.

Scribes, Scholars, and Schoolmasters

In her lively narrative, Beard introduces figures like Sir James Frazer, who linked classical religion to global myth in The Golden Bough; Friedrich Nietzsche, who reimagined Greek tragedy as a mirror of human passion; and Benjamin Kennedy, whose Latin grammar drilled generations of British students. These scholars show how classical learning became entwined with theology, empire, and modern education. Learning Latin or Greek was less about communication than about discipline—proof of intellect and social rank. Yet the same tradition also nurtured poets like Keats and MacNeice, who, even with 'little Latin and less Greek,' made classics new through imagination.

Editing the Ancient World

Beard explains that the editing of ancient texts—deciphering manuscripts, correcting copyist errors, and deciding which readings to canonize—is itself a creative act. Every edition changes the text’s meaning. Even small choices, like whether Tacitus described Britain as shaped like a 'diamond' or a 'shoulder blade,' affect how empires imagine themselves. Thus, scholarly labor is inseparable from ideology. As in restoration of temples, fixing a text always means interpreting it anew.

Rethinking What Counts as 'Classical'

Beard shows that the academic boundaries separating classics from anthropology, politics, or literature are artificial. Marx’s economic theories grew from Greek philosophy; Freud’s psychoanalysis borrowed from Oedipus; Frazer’s anthropology from classical myth. The classical world, she argues, generated not merely monuments and epics but entire disciplines of modern thought. In that sense, every act of reading or theorizing—whether in philosophy, feminism, or art—is a new stage of the classical conversation.

We didn’t just inherit the classics—we built them, reshaping the ancient world to explain ourselves.

One of Beard’s most engaging discussions centers on how myths and art—like the Bassae frieze or the tragedies of Sophocles—encode the values and anxieties of classical civilization. For her, these works offer a lens into how societies imagine order, gender, and violence. The Temple’s carved battles between Greeks, Amazons, and Centaurs, for example, dramatize the eternal conflict between reason and chaos, culture and nature.

From Myth to Meaning

Beard teaches you to read these myths not literally but symbolically. Herakles fighting warrior women is more than macho glory—it is Greece defining itself against the 'other,' whether female, non-Greek, or barbarian. Likewise, the Centaurs—half-men, half-beasts—represent the thin line between civilization and instinct. Scenes like these weren’t just decoration; they were moral theater carved in stone. The Greeks used myth to stage the same social questions we ask now about power and identity.

Tragedy and the Human Condition

Beard then links the Bassae imagery to Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles’ plays, which explored how human reason coexists with irrational impulse. Tragedy, she writes, was both civic ritual and ethical workshop: Athenians gathered in the theater of Dionysus to watch plays about families torn by truth, fate, and moral choice. This collective confrontation with suffering made tragedy the first form of public philosophy. It helped citizens think through what democracy, justice, and humanity meant.

Myth, Violence, and Reflection

By weaving mythology into her argument, Beard shows how ancient creativity was never purely aesthetic—it was analytical. Art and myth were tools for thinking, as alive intellectually as Plato’s dialogues. They survive because they dramatize dilemmas that never end: gender equality, collective guilt, and the responsibilities of power. As Nietzsche later argued in his own reading of tragedy, Greece’s brilliance lay in its ability to stare into the abyss and still create beauty.

For Beard, the frieze at Bassae and the tragedies of Athens are not fragments of a dead world—they are mirrors of human endurance and imagination.

As the book approaches its conclusion, Beard revisits the idea of 'Arcadia'—the mythical landscape of peace, music, and memory that poets and artists have reinvented for centuries. From Virgil’s Eclogues to Renaissance pastoral poetry and modern art, Arcadia becomes shorthand for a lost harmony between humans and nature, civilization and innocence.

Virgil’s Dream of Arcadia

In Rome, Arcadia transformed from a Greek wilderness into a poetic heaven. Through Virgil’s shepherds singing under trees, the empire imagined a space of simplicity untouched by war. Yet, Beard emphasizes, even Virgil’s idyll contains pain. His shepherds mourn exile and lost land, their songs echoing political upheaval. Arcadia, then, is never pure paradise—it’s a memory of what civilization destroys.

Modern Arcadias

From Renaissance poetry to Joshua Reynolds’ paintings, Beard traces how Europe turned 'Arcadia' into an emblem for nostalgia. Artists like Poussin painted shepherds reading tomb inscriptions—'Et in Arcadia ego'—reminding viewers that even in paradise death is present. Beard explores how these images reveal our longing to inhabit the ancient world while knowing it’s irretrievably lost. Whether in Romantic ruins or tourist photographs, the Arcadian vision bridges life and mortality, desire and remembrance.

Living With Our Past

For Beard, the message of Arcadia is finally self-reflective. Every generation builds its own paradise out of the past, only to discover mortality inscribed within it. The phrase 'Et in Arcadia ego'—whether uttered by a shepherd, by Death, or by the viewer—summarizes the coexistence of loss and continuity that defines civilization itself. The classical world remains our model of beauty and order precisely because we project our own stories into it. By acknowledging that, Beard concludes, we can let the past live without embalming it.

The ancient world’s final gift is humility: even in our Arcadia, death, change, and reinterpretation never leave us.