For those readers seeking an engaging general introduction to the classical world, The Ancient World by Jeremy Toner would make an excellent first port of call.Footnote ¹ It is part of a new (though hardly original) series of ‘Small Introductions to Big Topics’ which thus far includes Politics, Art in History, and Shakespeare. The book chooses to focus not on toga-clad Romans and gleaming marbles temples but on that ‘other’ ancient world filled with noise, colour, death, and disease, populated not primarily by emperors and poets but by the ‘silent’ majority of slaves and the freeborn poor. Despite the catch-all title, this is a book which is more obviously about the Roman than the Greek world. This is, however, a small grumble and Toner's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. Of particular interest is the discussion of watermills and the generation of energy (71–6), comparison between the empires of Rome and China (104–18), and the way in which a ‘Rome-coloured vision’ from the medieval period up to the high-classical watermark of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries informed the West's perspective of, and engagement with, Islam (122–30). Illustrations are not abundant (and it is a shame not to have included a picture of the Vietnam Memorial discussed on pages 135–7), but they are decent enough, with several helpful maps of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds (with the seas – the Black Sea and Red Sea included – coloured pink – neatly complementing the book's presentation of a less-familiar-looking ancient world).

From small books on big topics to large books on enormous topics. Michael Lovano's two-volume encyclopaedia of ‘Caesar's World and Legacy’ – All Things Julius Caesar – has been written for the general reader and interested students.Footnote ² The ‘All Things’ stable also includes similarly vast two-volume encyclopaedias dedicated to the medieval world and to Chaucer and his world. This work seeks to cover not just the life and times of Caesar, but his extraordinary political and cultural legacy. The black-and-white illustrations are for the most part crisp, and detailed sections on further reading provide helpful points of navigation for the reader. Relevant inset boxes are scattered throughout: the section on ‘Gardens’ (368–72) includes an inset on (you guessed it) ‘Caesar's Salad’. At a length of nearly a thousand pages this is an impressive undertaking for a single author, but a significant question remains about how one is supposed to use such an encyclopaedia without being overwhelmed by the material that it seeks to present. There seems to be too much for a general reader, but conversely not enough for the specialist (see, for example, the entry on the ‘Ides of March’ (411–16), which retells the story of Caesar's death with little attempt at source criticism). The uncompromising alphabetical arrangement makes for some interesting juxtapositions –‘Caesar I–IV (Computer Games 1993–2006)’ follows on from ‘Brutus (ca. 85–42 bce)’, while ‘HBO's Rome (2005–2007)’ sits between ‘Haruspicy’ and the ‘Helvetii’ – but one wonders whether, for example, it would not have made more sense to group entries on Caesar's later reception together for the sake of coherence. As it is, there seem to be too many different things going on at once. Caesar would perhaps have sympathized: even he had difficulties when ‘all things had to be done by Caesar at one time’ (Caesari omnia uno tempore erant agenda; B. Gall. 2.20).

The general reader wishing to make a first foray into the world of Caesar would be well advised to pick up T. P.Wiseman's Julius Caesar (one of a series of Pocket Giants, covering such figures as Alfred the Great, Jane Austen, and Nelson Mandela).Footnote ³ This is an excellent introduction to a complicated period and a many-sided man. Wiseman wears his great learning very lightly and writes with much verve and wit – and admirable concision (the book is only 127 pages long). The opening paragraph provides a perfect (and knowing) example of the way in which history can help us to see our own world anew and how, at the same time, our own worldview influences the way that we view history:

Although some may lament the lack of an index, this is a book that stands on its own feet without one, a book to consume in a single serving, designed as a springboard to the further reading and digital resources set out in the final three pages. Those hoping to read about ‘veni, vidi, vici’, ‘et tu, Brute’, or ‘Caesar's wife must be above suspicion’, will be disappointed. Wiseman is unrepentant: ‘I wanted to stick to what is important’ (112). This might seem like a knife in the front to those whose interest lies with the Classical tradition, but such readers will be reassured to discover that the last entry in the section of further reading is Maria Wyke's Caesar. A Life in Western Culture (Chicago, IL, 2008).

From the long-running Cambridge series of Key Themes in Ancient History comes The Ancient City by Arjan Zuiderhoek – a useful and stimulating work which surveys for students of ancient history and for scholars working in other areas of the field current scholarly debates on ancient urbanism, while at the same time sketching out the key characteristics of Greek and Roman cities.Footnote ⁴ For a start what exactly is an ancient city? As discussed in the Introduction, it was Moses Finley who put his finger on the elusive and intangible nature of the ancient city when he said that no-one can agree what the city is, but everyone knows what the label means ‘in general terms’ (4). Size, density, demographic features, and the layout and structure of the built environment have all been proposed as ways of defining the city, but all have in some important ways been found wanting. Instead of seeking a precise scientific definition, Zuiderhoek wisely chooses to accept concepts of urbanism that are ‘a bit fuzzy round the edges’ (8), paying particular attention to those settlements that Greeks and Romans considered to be cities and also to those places which a majority of specialist scholars consider to be cities. The study is further underpinned by a desire to move away from elitist approaches to Greek and Roman urbanism which have often downplayed and diminished forms of urbanism which occur within other societies. As Zuiderhoek argues, ‘to privilege the European urban experience at the expense of the rest of the world may in the end not be very helpful if we want to come to a better understanding of Greek and Roman cities’ (15). Ten chapters take us from an introduction on ‘The Ancient City as Concept and Reality’ (1–19) and an ‘historical’ chapter on ‘Origins, Development and the Spread of Cities in the Ancient World’ (20–36), through thematic chapters focusing on, for example, ‘Urban Landscape and Environment’ (56–77), ‘Civic Ritual and Civic Identity’ (94–105), and ‘The Urban Economy’ (131–148). A final chapter concentrates on the end of the ancient city and seeks to consider what sort of ending it was: ‘an abrupt halt, a slow decline or a profound transformation?’ (167).

If one is looking for a specific case study against which to test some of the ideas of ancient urbanism discussed by Zuiderhoek, then right on cue comes a volume dedicated to the most studied urban centre in the world: Rome. An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present, co-authored by Rabun Taylor, Katherine W. Rinne, and Spiro Kostof.Footnote ⁵ Since Kostof, a pioneer of the environmental approach to urban history, died in 1991, his re-emergence in print in 2016 might seem something of a surprise. In fact, it is a series of previously unpublished lectures delivered by Kostof at Columbia University in 1973 which underpins the middle ‘medieval’ section of this volume (taking the story of the city from Constantine through to the fourteenth century). Ancient Rome is covered by Taylor in chapters 2–14, while Rinne takes the story forwards to the modern day in chapters 26–35 (with particularly interesting sections on, for example, Rome under the Risorgimento [313–23] and Mussolini's remaking of Rome with the help of ‘His Majesty the Pick’ [329–39]). Where other studies have chosen to focus on specific periods from Rome's long story, the current work embraces Bourdieu's longue durée (though with no explicit mention of Bourdieu himself) in order to create an ‘urban biography’ (2) of the Eternal City. The focus is unashamedly not on abstract notions of urbanism but on the physicality of this most distinctive of cities: ‘Rome, the physical place, serves as the protagonist, and its most powerful citizens are agents in its perpetual state of realization’ (2). The illustrations are copious and of excellent quality, and the exuberance and remarkable vicissitudes of the protagonist in this 3,000-year narrative keeps one reading on with all the excitement of a good novel.