If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?
People who exploit others come to spend an enormous amount of energy wondering about and justifying that exploitation.
Greek myths, early Roman history, is configured around violence against women. And I think we need to get in there, get our hands dirty, face it, and see why and how it was.
I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe.
You don't overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation.
Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl.
It would have been nice if the people who were criticising 'Civilizations' had actually watched it. But the popular response has been tremendous, and in the end, that's what really matters.
I've chosen to be this way because that's how I feel comfortable with myself. That's how I am. It's about joining up the dots between how you look and how you feel inside, and I think that's what I've done, and I think people do it differently.
If talking about arts means being pretentious, a bit like being a wine critic, then I don't feel comfy with that. You can get a lot from paintings without getting mystical about brush strokes.
Fate has it in for me to be an exhibit: that funny old lady from the telly.
There's a basic rule of thumb that the more a culture oppresses women, or oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that.
Classics isn't about the ancient world. It's partly about the ancient world, but it's about our conversation. It's how we try to talk to antiquity.
In 1984, I returned to Newnham College at Cambridge University to teach after completing my Ph.D. there a couple of years earlier. Almost all of my colleagues in the university's classics department were men, and my office at the all-women's college was in the dorm.
We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.
I think you have to realize that most ancient warfare is really kind of hit and run, honestly. You go and you bash down the walls of some enemy 50 miles away and you take some slaves, you take some cattle, probably a bit of cash too, and then you say goodbye and go home and you probably do the same thing next year - or try to, or they do it to you.
My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history.
There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us.
I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it, I got more interested and got better at it.
I remember plastering the kitchen with Black Power pictures of Angela Davis.
I don't want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard.
