"I'm trending on Twitter," says the professor of classics at Cambridge as we walk to the departure lounge at Heathrow's terminal five. But it's not all good news. One reason Mary Beard's trending is that some viewers have been unpleasant about what she looks like on Meet the Romans, her three-part BBC2 TV series that started on Tuesday.
"I've been getting tweets like 'Can't she brush her hair?', 'Shouldn't she be sexing herself up a bit?', 'Did she try to look so haggard?' Lucky I've got a thick skin. Sometimes you think they're writing this after half a bottle of wine, and I feel like writing back after more than half a bottle: 'Actually, that's what a 57-year-old woman looks like.'"
Don't do that, I counsel. "Well, I have a different approach to tweets addressed to me personally than those where I'm the hashtag." But what if someone tweets you personally criticising your appearance? "Then I'll write back saying 'What do you mean, actually?'" She's got to work on her comeback tweets.
In any case, Beard has written more unflinchingly about her appearance than her detractors. In the Guardian's What I See When I Look in the Mirror column last month, she wrote that sometimes "it's my old mum who winks back, with her big tombstone teeth just like mine and her uncompromising double chin … wrinkles, her crow's feet, her hunched shoulders (from all those misspent years poring over a library desk) … I used to be scared of looking like this, but now I couldn't wish to be any different."
Beard is easy to spot amid Heathrow's crowds. She's the bespectacled woman texting while sporting undyed, untied grey hair, unstructured red jacket and sensible grey-and-black dress. She rocked that look, phone and glasses notwithstanding, on telly this week.
"The only sartorial advice I was given was to wear something that would make me stand out in the crowd – hence the red coat." But the camera loves her: not because she burnishes her command of her subject with hotsy-totsiness as do other telegeneic academics (physicists Brian Cox and Helen Czerski, or Beard's friend, fellow classicist Bettany Hughes), but because of something more unusual. She's an anti-autocutie, refreshingly ungussied when rummaging among broken pots on Monte Testaccio, ancient Rome's rubbish dump.
I know what you're thinking – hashtags, trending, viewer-friendly TV dress codes? What would Epictetus say? Shouldn't Professor Beard be examining amphorae or poring over fragments of Cicero rather than making telly and strategising social media? "I'm actually in a tradition of classicists with a big public face who like sounding off," she retorts.
She cites as an example suffragist classicist Jane Harrison (1850-1928), who taught at her all-woman Newnham College, and whom Beard describes in her biography as "in a way … [Britain's] first female professional 'career academic'". "She would have been on Twitter all the time. She once gave a lecture on Greek tombstones in Glasgow in front of 2,000 people." It's unfair, Beard says, to think of her professional predecessors as decrepit life forms. "We think of their lives as terribly slow, but they probably weren't. They had five postal deliveries a day – so you'd have a reply to a morning letter by lunchtime."
This is Beard's great theme: to confound the Whig notion of history whereby we've become faster, healthier, and have more sophisticated communication technologies than our loser forebears. "We think of our lives as natural, unconstructed, while Romans' lives were unnatural and based in myths. Not true on either count."
She learned to doubt our society's vision of the past when very young. "My mother took me to the British Museum aged five," she says. "I had thought people from the past weren't as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated." She also visited the Egyptian galleries, where a staff member took a parcel from a case and unwrapped it. "It was carbonised bread from 2,800 years ago. It gave me a thrill … Even today, when I hold a ring that somebody wore 2,000 years ago, I get excited." Why did she become a classicist? "I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it I got more interested and got better at it. When I was 12 it was very satisfying to be in control."
One virtue of studying ancient history, for Beard, is to learn about who we are as much as about what our predecessors were. For example, during the series, she examines a Roman gynaecological speculum. "The questions for me are: 'What did the woman on the receiving end of that think about the body she had? Did she know how conception takes place? Did she have any sense of medical technology?' Thinking along those lines reflects back on us. History reflects back if it's worthwhile. Are today's women different from her? If so, how?" Her final programme will consider ancient Roman marriage. "Some girls were 12 or 13 when they married. We call it paedophilia; they called it marriage. That's one of the exciting things about Roman culture. It's different from ours."
To clinch the point, Beard tells me a Roman joke. "A guy meets another in the street and says: 'I thought you were dead.' The bloke says: 'Can't you see I'm alive?' The first replies: 'But the person who told me you were dead is more reliable than you.'" It slayed them in 4BC Rome. Beard takes the joke to have a serious point: "You realise that in Roman society, where there were no ID cards or passports, proving your existence required different criteria. The evidence of a reliable person was perhaps the strongest you had. It was very different from our society, but who's to say it was worse?"
Throughout the series her focus is not on emperors, politicians or generals, but those whom she calls "slaves, women and other undesirables". That said, she's not pious about how Rome figures in recent popular culture. She won't denounce Russell Crowe's butchly pecced Maximus Decimus Meridius or Kenneth Williams's last words as Julius Caesar in Carry on Cleo ("Infamy, infamy – they've all got it in for me"). She even refrains from attacking Boris Johnson. "To be fair to Boris, he's doing a lot for Latin. It might be a high price to pay ... " People tweet him about not brushing his hair, too. What is it with classicists?
"Emperors fix in people's minds a version of Roman culture," says Beard. "They were crueller and more lusty than us. So one role Rome has is to be larger than life." Now she wants to take the subject in a different direction. Only 600 Romans were senators, but Rome had a population of one million. "Might we take a look at the others?" she asks.
In the first episode she considers slavery. The Greeks thought the Romans were weird for freeing so many slaves, but that policy made the city a multi-cultural melting pot, a society that, for all its social ills, was perhaps less sclerotic than ours. She argues that slavery, though brutal, was for many foreigners a rite of passage. "We mostly see slavery in terms of what happened in the American south, where it was racially distinctive. But in Rome it wasn't – Greeks, Jews and others were slaves. And for some at least it ended in them becoming free Romans." But, she suggests, there was a sharp difference between that multicultural society and ours. "Rome wouldn't allow its different cultures to remain separate."
Some 1.8 million viewers watched the first episode. Critics were enthusiastic, too. The Guardian's Lucy Mangan was so bowled over that she broke the first rule of TV criticism – not to fall for your subject. "I love Professor Beard deeply," Mangan wrote, and added that Beard was like a parent bird "regurgitating a lifetime's work in soft, digestible pellets for the loudly cheeping audience".
Doesn't regurgitating pellets mean dumbing down? "No. When I'm talking to camera it's not so different from lecturing 150 first-year students who have a bit of Latin from school. They're lovely, clever kids, but to make them interested in 1BC politics you've got to realise they're not a captive audience and might be tweeting in the back row unless you get their attention. I don't draw much of a distinction between audiences."
Which TV historians make you bite the proverbial sofa? "I can't stand David Starkey's programmes," Beard says. One can see why: Starkey rarely deigns to examine the undesirables outside the ponceathon of the Tudor court. "I'm happy we live in a world in which there is Starkey and Beard. As long as I don't have to watch him."
She's enjoying being the elder stateswoman of brainiac telly. "I'm over 50 and a woman, which is what they seem to want. The climate is changing. It's the time for me." That's probably not how Miriam O'Reilly or Selina Scott see it. Maybe it's different being an academic moonlighting on TV from being a woman who depends on it for her livelihood.
Why does she make TV programmes? "Not for the money. I'm sure there are people getting millions, but they're not people like me. It must be partly vanity. I could try to deny it, but it wouldn't be convincing. I'm also on a mission. I want people to study ancient history and Latin." That's why, she says, she went on Jamie's Dream School last year where, along with the likes of Jazzie B, Robert Winston and Simon Callow, she shared airtime with her TV nemesis, Starkey. She taught Latin to underachieving kids, while Starkey taught them history. "One of the reasons I went on was that if you go and talk about Latin you're getting to children who may not otherwise know it exists. Now I think the mission is going to be to get people and their children who would never consider reading a book about ancient Rome to watch a programme about it."
She has little compunction about using new media such as Twitter to realise that mission. "I did worry about how you could say something worthwhile in 140 characters rather than going on about buying Prada handbags or learning where Stephen Fry is having coffee." But she's overcome that, not least because "you can put in hyperlinks to much longer texts". She's also a blogger and has published a book of blogs called A Don's Life. The blog gives her a chance to seethe about topical affairs such as Michael Gove's A-level reforms, what kind of dinner guests David Cameron should have and how disgraceful it is that we've forgotten the Olympic torch ceremony was invented by Hitler.
It's time for Beard to catch her flight. She's going to New York to visit her son, and to attend a conference on whether the study of ancient history has a future. Does it? "You don't get hairdressers meeting at conferences to ask if they've got a future. We're so self-absorbed." Which, you'll notice, is no answer.
One last question. Beard will lecture next month on the ancient and modern Olympics. Tell me this, then. Shouldn't London 2012 – tarnished as it will be by fast-food sponsors, execrable architecture, wasted public money and, probably, doped competitors – be cancelled? Beard fixes me almost crossly. "We make two mistakes about the ancient world," she says. "One is to assume they were better than us – that for instance, the ancient Olympics didn't involve money-making. The opposite mistake, and just as common, is to think our Olympics are much more civilised than ancient sporting competitions. Neither is true.
"We're more brutal than they were in many respects. Gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum was more like modern wrestling than boxing – all show and not much pain. And there wasn't sponsorship. Competitors in the ancient Olympics were often shamateurs. They would get a wreath for winning, but when they got home they'd have free meals on the state for life. To romanticise the past is a mistake." That's told me. Lecture over, the professor gathers her bags and hurries off, still working the ungroomed look that piqued the Twitterverse.
Meet the Romans with Mary Beard is on BBC2 on Tuesday at 9pm.
