There are at least three categories of readers for this book: those who studied Classics in their youth and now want to recapture the spirit of the ancient authors; those who are wondering why they should read the Classics and will look here for an answer; those who teach Classics and hope to find suggestions about how to present the ancient authors to an audience often unwilling to pay them much attention.

Two modern scholars divide between themselves twelve ancient auctores: Pelling writes about the Greeks and Wyke writes about the Latin authors. The book is elegant and easy to read. Each author is introduced by a brief foreword; there are no notes and no pedantic discussion. At the end of each chapter a selective bibliography is provided, mostly in English. The two scholars often refer to their personal experience. Pelling, the son of a sports journalist, draws a parallel between Herodotus dialoging with the Egyptian priests and his father’s interview technique, and remembers when, as a sixteen-year-old, he first read the Odyssey during a family trip, mixing together the Welsh sentiment for nostalgia, a juvenile longing for adventures and the yearning for a familiar landscape. Wyke, who was educated in a London convent school, was introduced to reading Caesar by a (female) teacher by means of a broad overview of the Roman military world. Quite unexpectedly, the idea facilitated the assimilation of the text in an audience of girls, because it was made “alien, dangerous, masculine, and adult”. Such notes make the book attractively personal. The choice of the twelve topics is also very personal. The two authors make no secret that the chosen ones are not necessarily the most important authors of the classical canon (Catullus, for example, does not feature). There is chronological progression; there is attention to different literary genres. Above all, there is the experience gleaned by the two authors in the BBC Radio 3 series “Greek and Latin Voices”.

The book makes no claim to be a comprehensive guide to Classical literature. It is designed instead to be suggestive, offering “a palatable taster of what ancient literature and culture can do for us in the present day”. Each author’s work is presented along with their possible value to 21st-century readers, with examples of how they have been read in previous centuries, thereby demonstrating the role that each of them has played in modern times. There is also an overall presentation of the authors, with a few quotations (in English) from their works, and occasional readings of individual texts not always immediately related to the subject concerned.