It has taken Mary Beard two years to write her new history of ancient Rome, SPQR. Well, two years going on four decades. "I've taught Roman history for getting on 40 years and at that point I thought there was something to say," she tells me. "I hope it's the optimal moment. I certainly couldn't have written it 20 years ago. It's the fruit of thinking."
"You get to 58 and you think 'oh, I might write the history from the beginning to end.' By my age you do it now. You don't put it off, do you? Otherwise you might never finish it."
I take her point but then I do wonder how she has time to start anything never mind finish it. After all, she has a day job as a Cambridge scholar, she makes hugely popular BBC history documentaries, there are 16 books other than SPQR on her Amazon page, and she writes newspaper articles and a blog (A Don's Life).
And that's not counting the time spent fending off Twitter haters and obnoxious male TV critics, or correcting the faulty classical knowledge of the government's culture secretary (at the start of the year she pointed out that Sajid Javid's claim in an article that Socrates was forced to drink hemlock because Greeks hate what he wrote wasn't strictly accurate since Socrates didn't actually write anything. "That's the point of Plato," she added).
In a very short time Beard has become the nation's favourite classicist (although, to be far, the main competition is probably Boris Johnson) and that's why she's here in Edinburgh this Sunday evening. We are sitting backstage at the Assembly Rooms. In an hour and a half she'll be talking to a large and eager audience about the ancient Romans and signing copies of her book.
She arrived in Edinburgh at the back of three this Sunday afternoon, to allow her to spend time with her son Raphael who is doing a postgraduate in Arabic literature here. Later she will jump on the sleeper south. But now, an hour and a half before she goes onstage, she is sitting down, still wearing her yellow overcoat, talking to me about the Romans (naturally), her "wild child" past and the perils of being what she calls a "D list" celebrity.
Personally I've always thought of Beard as an English character actor in search of a Sunday afternoon movie to appear in. She's that charming mix of radical and traditionalist with a slightly eccentric edge all rolled into one. She's the Cambridge don who is fascinated with Roman sex and sewers, a woman with a towering intellect who still expresses herself in the slang of her postwar upbringing (nb, you will hear her say the word "blimey" at a later point in this article) and sometimes refers to herself in the third person.
Anyway, the book. SPQR. It stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus or the Senate and the People of Rome (but you all know your Latin. I didn't need to tell you that). Beard's hardly the first to write a complete history of ancient Rome obviously. "People do tend to say 'do we need another one?'" she admits. "But what you're doing is you're doing one for now and one for now is always different than one that was written 20 years ago, never mind 200 years ago."
Well, indeed. Even in her academic life she can remember a time when the history of Rome was simply a "history of blokes". That said, there aren't that many women to be found in SPQR either. They're largely invisible, Mary.
"What is not invisible is gender," she points out. "And in some ways that's the trade-off you have to make. There is a simple fact that women, with the tiniest of exceptions, didn't write anything. But if you are sensitised to that … We do have all kinds of stories about how the relationship between men and women operated back to the rape of the Sabines. That was the first Roman marriage. Blimey.
"When I was doing Roman history as a student we just passed over that. We didn't remark upon it. Whereas now I'm encouraging students to say 'what on Earth is going on here? The foundation of Rome is the first marriage and it's rape?'
"The brutal truth is if you really wanted to work on a society through the perspective of its women Rome would be a damn silly choice. And so would ancient Greece. If you don't have women's voices you're hamstrung. But you can see gender, the construction of sexuality and how the men thought about women, how women were represented in what must be tendentious ways. All those poisoning empresses."

You can also find echoes of the present in the past if you so require (seems the Romans were as unsure of what to do with migrants as today's politicians are), though Beard says we shouldn't be seeking solutions to our problems in the pages of Tacitus or Virgil. "There is no lesson to learn," she says. "But there is a way of using the ancient world to see our own issues differently."
Or at least to recognise that there is nothing new about the problem of collective security set against individual liberties." Beard, it should be recalled, became a public figure in the wake of 9/11 when she had the audacity to write in the London Review of Books that America "had it coming".
Her interest in ancient Rome stretches back to school and Latin lessons. Beard's history starts in post-war rural Shropshire "which is about as rural as you can get in England," she says.
Beard was "sort of an only child", she says. "I have a half brother." Her father was an architect who hadn't done a degree (in the past she's suggested he liked a drink, too), her mother was a village headmistress who, Beard thinks, resented that she hadn't gone to university. "Resented may be putting it a bit strong."
Beard was looked after by the farmer's daughter up the road. She would collect milk from the farm, pick up eggs from underneath the chickens. "It was a rural idyll. We didn't have an inside loo but it was idyllic in all kinds of ways."
Eventually the family moved to Shrewsbury and Beard went to a girls' school that was very academic. "And I was a clever little thing. I was a funny combination of horrible little swot and somebody who wanted to be a bit of a wild thing, a bit of a rebel. It was the sixties. Even in Shropshire that made some difference. Not much but it was there."
What were you rebelling against, Mary? "The power structure. Capitalism. Everything that I still slightly rebel against but I've learnt to make an accommodation with. I was just beginning to see feminist issues. Vietnam. I was only about 15, 16.
"You start to think, well, who am I? And you start to go out in the street without shoes on and you feel kind of cool."
And yet at the same time she was still the little girl sitting in the library doing her Latin and Greek translations.
Archaeology digs were to be the place where she could bring both sides of herself together. "That was wonderful. It was hard work by day digging up this stuff in campsites in the middle of Gloucestershire or somewhere. But by night it was down the pub and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. It was wonderful."
Well, Mary, let's clarify. Can we say you were a wild child in your late teens? "Yes, but I think it was only up to a point."
And yet you've said previously you used to flirt with other women's husbands then. "Oh, yes, I did. Guilty as charged."
She went to Cambridge as an undergraduate, which was an enormous "intellectual privilege", she says.
"When I was an undergraduate I think about 12% of the undergraduates were women and now it's nearly 50. There's been a revolution over my lifetime. It wasn't much resisted, I think. We got the feeling that university authorities were deeply opposed to all this but actually we were pushing at an open door."
That said, she'll tell me later, students should be loud and noisy. They should be dissatisfied with the world. "That's their job."
Cambridge is a different world now. And not just because there are a few more women about. No one gets a grant any more for a start and students have to pay thousands of pounds in fees. "It's probably different in Scotland," she says. "I would think that's more to my taste." 
But academe itself has been transformed. Not totally to the good. It doesn't take much to get her ranting about the increasing bureaucratic control over universities.
"Being an academic is not badly paid but most people who choose to do it could learn a lot more money elsewhere. They're all desperately haunted masochists. They haven't gone into academia thinking 'well, this will be an easy doss'. And then they get pursued by governments who should know better about what gives you high quality education. It feels on the inside that you are constantly being policed when actually we are really good at policing ourselves.
"And this goes for all sides of the political spectrum. Oxbridge bashing always satisfies your back benches. 'Those people in Oxbridge drinking their port …' I haven't drunk port for at least 25 years.
I've never drunk it, Mary. "It's horrible actually."
And then there's our unfair attitudes towards the students. They're teenagers, she points out. Of course they're going to do the odd stupid thing. "There's always some picture in the Daily Mail of them wrestling with a pig … Sorry, that's Cameron, isn't it?"
Very good. "I think 'you come and watch these kids for the previous seven weeks and six days. They've been working 14 hours a day.'"
And don't get her started on league tables. "We don't trust anybody. We have a league table of hospitals. We have a league table of schools. And once you have these league tables all these highly intelligent people work out how to come out top of the league table and not do their jobs. It's mad." She pauses, smiles. "Penny in the slot there."
She loves the academic life. If she's spared she hopes she will still be rooting around the university library at the age of 80. But you don't become a public figure by lecturing at Cambridge. You get it by appearing in the media.
Beard's 9/11 piece caused, as you might imagine, something of a stir. Along with the flak it made her "hot" in the eyes of TV producers. Soon she was being asked to appear on Question Time and front BBC documentaries.
She embraced the possibility. One of the roles of the academic, she thinks, is to speak their mind. "Academics might say things you may or may not like, they may say things they may or may not regret. That's something that goes with the territory. You don't want classicists who are buried in the past. If you didn't think about the world around you and how what you did impacted on that world and how that world impacted on you you'd be a pretty lousy academic."
Anyway, she says, she is at best a D list celebrity and celebrity is so evanescent. "So even if you were tempted to think 'oh, maybe I'll do a bit more telly', just watch it. What you do, Beard, is you work and study and teach and lecture and disseminate the ancient world and everything else is an add-on."
Perhaps but some of those add-ons can't be particularly welcome. No sooner did Beard start appearing on television than critics started picking on her appearance. Most infamously AA Gill suggested "she should be kept away from cameras altogether". Rod Liddle said she was only invited onto TV because producers "think she looks like a loony" (one might invoke the aphorism concerning glass houses but we're better than that).
Such cack-handed misogyny was nothing, though, as compared to the abuse she got on her Twitter feed when she spoke up in favour of migrants on an episode of Question Time. The result was horrific, nasty and vile. All at once.
"There is no doubt that online abuse hits women more than men," Beard says. "There is no doubt that when women speak out they get a tougher time of it. That's not to say all men get an easy ride. But it's clear that there's a gendered response."
Was she shocked when it happened to her? "You don't have much time to think whether it shocks you. When you look at your phone and it says 'we're going to cut your head off and rape it' on your Twitter feed you'd be telling a lie to say 'Sorry, come again?'
"My response to it was obviously a conditioned response. This is about being an academic. If somebody says something I disagree with I say 'excuse me, I don't think that's right'
"Some of these internet abusers are really nasty people, really, really nasty. But I think the majority of the others are sad rather than nasty and quite a few of them are young, stupid, disinhibited and drunk. And actually if you stand up to them they apologise.
"I don't want them banged up. What's the point of that? I want them not to do it again. One particular lad who was very foolish – partly because he was so young – got outed. He came to Cambridge and apologised and he will never do it again.
"Like I was saying about students, sometimes 18 to 21 year olds do stupid things. Luckily I did my stupid things before it was all open to the world on Google in perpetuity."
She is no longer, "touch wood", bothered by internet trolls. Maybe there are people who still are but she thinks in general the direction of travel when it comes to social media is the right one.
Actually, she is something of a natural optimist in lots of areas. "When I was making my choices when I was 18 it was a world that was completely different, so all the time one has to remind oneself that while I'm capable of banging on about sexism and all the rest, you have to remember things are better."
There we have it from the scholar's mouth. And she has the knowledge of 2000 years of history to back that up with. Who'd argue with her?


SPQR by Mary Beard is published by Profile Books, priced £25.