Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek
and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world,
a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and Alexander the Great,
Julius Caesar and Hannibal, but also the common people--the millions of
inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the slaves, soldiers, and women. How
did they live? Where did they go if their marriage was in trouble or if
they were broke? Or, perhaps just as important, how did they clean their
teeth? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard forces
us along the way to reexamine so many of the assumptions we held as
gospel--not the least of them the perception that the Emperor Caligula
was bonkers or Nero a monster. With capacious wit and verve, Beard
demonstrates that, far from being carved in marble, the classical world
is still very much alive.