| Here at New Yorker Classics, we love a well-aged piece of writing. You might say it’s our raison d’être. But even the most geriatric New Yorker article—from all the way back in 1925, the year of the magazine’s founding—is a mere infant compared to the texts normally scrutinized by Mary Beard. In this week’s issue, Beard, a scholar at Cambridge, revisits the last words of Roman emperors, and considers how some of those men became gods. In 2014, Beard was herself the subject of a New Yorker Profile, published by the staff writer Rebecca Mead. Beard had become a prolific media star in England, authoring a dozen books and appearing regularly on radio and TV. But her ubiquity triggered a sexist and ageist backlash, in which foes assailed the middle-aged professor for her appearance, and for what Mead describes as her “unapologetic braininess.” (Threats of violence also occurred.) Despite the demands of her academic work, which Mead engagingly explores, Beard had refused to withdraw, confronting her attackers on Twitter and becoming a feminist heroine in the process. Beard is hardly the first person to get trolled on social media—and, compared with most of us, she has better things to do than respond. But the resulting interactions sometimes proved fruitful; she even ended up writing letters of recommendation for one man who had insulted her. Beard’s knowledge of the past informs why she answers opponents, and what she says when she does. “Throughout Western history there have always been men,” she wrote following one incident, “who are frightened of smart women who speak their minds, and I guess, as a professor of Classics at Cambridge University, I’m one of them.” | 
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