Alas, Mrs. Beard's Pompeii had not the psychological depth of her Caesar video

And her characterization, as "masculine," of the Roman Empire, was silly and somewhat hysterical--in the too-familiar mode of over-wrought, insanely presumptuous white (Anglo-Saxon) ladies.  She got it right, however, about the fact (the very important fact) that there was as  yet, in the First Century A.D., in Magna Graecia, no malnourishment of the lower economic classes, and very little physical distance among people generally. Think Naples.  Somehow, being poor in Naples is not the hideous, inescapable stigma and affliction that it is elsewhere, and people seem not to be crushed by it. They stand quite up to you, look you engagingly but not threateningly in the eye--and they have pretty eyes.