Posted on 10/27/2018 4:54:10 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
It does not matter if Pompeii is damaged by visiting tourists, Professor Mary Beard has said, as she argues it would be "ghastly" to keep the public away from ancient ruins.
Prof Beard, a Cambridge classicist and leading authority on Roman history, said she was "culpably laid back" about the crumbling of houses and walls, insisting they must not be restricted to academics.
Arguing it is more important the ancient world engages the imagination of tourists, keeping them interested in history, she said: "The world isnt going to stop if Pompeii loses a house."
"It's had a good innings," she said. "And it wasn't very well-built in the first place."
Pompeii has been plagued with difficulties in recent years, with environmental issues and huge numbers of visitors impacting on its preservation.
But Prof Beard, who won the 2008 Wolfson History Prize for her book Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, said tourists could and should not be blamed for disrupting the 2000-year-old site...
"On cultural tourism, I'm terribly and perhaps culpably laid back. "Pompeii's job, actually, is to interest us in the ancient world. That's what it's there for.
"And the very idea that somehow it should be so carefully preserved that only a load of academics, rich people and television cameras are allowed actually there, while 10km down the road we build a little mock-up for the plebs, is ghastly.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Our Roku doesn’t keep playing the next video anymore - it stopped earlier this year after an upgrade. Is there an option to choose that? We have one of the older boxes.
I enjoy Mary Beard’s work and videos. I even sprung for a pricey hard cover edition of her excellent book “SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome” (https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History-Ancient-Mary-Beard-dp-0871404230/dp/0871404230/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1540746493
However, she really pissed me off with her comments shortly after the 9-11 attack where she said that America deserved it because of our oppressive foreign policies. While she’s a brilliant classical historian and authority on ancient Rome, she’s also a typical arrogant British leftist/socialist, with all that entails. I just detach and separate those aspects, and enjoy her Roman history work.
I think there's a user setting, that's one way (I'm running one of the first gen Roku sticks, and a Roku 1); maybe the updates ships with that set to "off" by default? I don't like auto-repeat, but when I visit a user, such as "Unbox Therapy", it starts with the most recent and starts playing them in reverse chrono order.
She should be reminded of that at any public appearance, because she's wrong and stupid for saying that.
Probably started out either as pirate strongholds, or as people totally lacking in acrophobia fled piracy. :^)
They’re very good a growing lemons, these days ;-)
If she'd been dead for 1939 years, she wouldn't care any more than the Pompeiians do now.
I have been listening to Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Herculaneum documentary) talk about what those Romans "et", and he specifically mentioned that the lemons Naples is now known for weren't known to the Romans (neither were oranges), but figs were, and still are. :^)
My feeling about art is, it *may* be possible to study the *intent* of the artist, although that usually means studying the interpretation of the intent by relying on the purported ESP of some academic, but art is only art to those experiencing it if it moves ya. If I wind up ever going overseas in my even older old age, I want to visit the Tate Gallery in the UK, and the Uffizi (for Michelangelo's Doni Tondo) and Sistine Chapel.
Thanks!
Looking at those villas . . . I guess it’s always been good to be rich.
The interesting conclusions being drawn most recently is that there was not only the upward mobility that had been understood for a long while (people buying their freedom and rising to the status of citizen), but there was a very large middle class, which isn't surprising, most if not all societies have one. But the rich of Roman times were, relatively speaking, richer than the rich of most societies, historically. By the time the so-called republic fell, bout three dozen families pretty much owned Italy.
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