Mary Beard (classicist) in the context of Ancient literature

Fellowship of the British Academy (post-nominal letters FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are:

1. Fellows – scholars resident in the United Kingdom
2. Corresponding Fellows – scholars resident overseas
3. Honorary Fellows – an honorary academic title (whereby the post-nominal letters "Hon FBA" are used)
4. Deceased Fellows – Past Fellows of the British Academy

The award of fellowship is based on published work and fellows may use the post-nominal letters FBA. Examples of Fellows are Edward Rand; Mary Beard; Roy Porter; Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford; Michael Lobban; M. R. James; Friedrich Hayek; John Maynard Keynes; Lionel Robbins; Rowan Williams; and Margaret Boden.

The Catilinarian conspiracy, sometimes Second Catilinarian conspiracy, was an attempted coup d'état by Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline) to overthrow the Roman consuls of 63 BC – Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida – and forcibly assume control of the state in their stead.

The conspiracy was formed after Catiline's defeat in the consular elections for 62, held in early autumn 63. He assembled a coalition of malcontents – aristocrats who had been denied political advancement by the voters, dispossessed farmers, and indebted veterans of Sulla – and planned to seize the consulship from Cicero and Antonius by force. In November 63, Cicero exposed the conspiracy, causing Catiline to flee from Rome and eventually to his army in Etruria. In December, Cicero uncovered nine more conspirators organising for Catiline in the city and, on advice of the senate, had them executed without trial. In early January 62 BC, Antonius defeated Catiline in battle, putting an end to the plot.

Jane Ellen Harrison (9 September 1850 – 15 April 1928) was a British classical scholar and linguist. With Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, Harrison is one of the founders of modern studies in Ancient Greek religion and mythology. She applied 19th-century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has also been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a 'career academic'. Harrison argued for women's suffrage but thought she would never want to vote herself. Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, was Jane Harrison's best friend from her student days at Newnham, and during the period from 1898 to Ellen's death in 1903. The depth and influence of Harrison’s friendship with Eugénie Sellers Strong—ended by a dramatic breech in the 1890s—is explored in a monograph by Mary Beard: after their breakup Sellers became an influential authority on the material culture of Imperial Rome, while Harrison’s work dug deeper and deeper into the primitive ritual origins of Greek drama. Though moving in different directions chronologically, in terms of their focus, the women appear otherwise as doppelgängers of one another in their concerns, style and characteristic forms of argument deriving from an approach that became known as classical anthropology. Harrison’s Prolegomena to Greek Religion had a compelling and inspirational impact on the later artworks of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle and her scholarly legerdemain was formative to the group of classicists known as the Cambridge ritualists.