The Classical World
An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian

The Roman Empire reached its apogee during Hadrian's rule. Hadrian was a philhellene and took interest in the development of Greece, especially Athens. Whilst at Delphi, Hadrian asked: "Where was Homer born?" Robin Lane Fox uses this as a starting point of his history of the classical world. Fox def......more

Clearly written by an academic, but intended for the popular history market, this book was worth the reading but still a disappointment - on a number of levels. The format is largely chronological, running from circa. 800 BC through to 140 AD, with the occasional themed chapters on cultural, military......more

Disappointing is the first word that comes to mind when reviewing Robin Lane Fox's ambitious attempt to provide a one-book history of the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Contrived is another. You will learn a lot about the history of Ancient Greece and Rome, from the Archaic Greek world of Homeric e......more

At first glance, “The Classical World” gives a very positive impression - a single volume of sensible length providing a brief but reasonably detailed overview of perhaps the most formative six centuries in history of Western Civilization, written by one of the most prominent experts in the field. Un......more

Robin Lane Fox's monumental Classical World was a tour de force of a book spanning the worlds of Greece and Rome right from the time of the epic poet Homer (7th(?) - 8th(?) Century BCE) to the Roman Emperor Hadrian (1st - 2nd Century CE). Robin Lane-Fox is a professor of Classical History at Oxford U......more