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By Jérôme Carcopino. Edited With Bibliography And Notes By Henry T. Rowell . Translated From The French By B. O. Lorimer

FROM THE PREFACE: “If 'Roman life' is not to become lost in anachronisms or petrified in abstraction, we must study it within a strictly defined period. Nothing changes more rapidly than human customs. Apart from the recent scientific discoverics which have turned the world of today upside down - steam, electricity, railways, motor-cars, and acroplanes - it is clear that even in times of greater stability and less highly developed technique the elementary forms of everyday life were subject to unceasing change. Coftee, tobacco, and champagne were not introduced into Europe until the seventeenth century; potatoes were first eaten toward the end of the eighteenth; the banana became a feature of our dessert at the beginning of the twentieth. The law of change was not less operative in antiquity. It was a commonplace of Roman rhetoric to contrast the rude simplicity of the republic with the lwxury and refinement of imperial times and to recall that Curius Dentatus 'gathered his scanty vegetables and himself cooked them on his little stove'!

London Penguin. 1967 (1941). 360p.

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By Mary Renault

FROM THE COVER: “In the fifth century B.C., Alexias, a young Athenian of good family, reaches manhood during the last phases of the Peloponnesian War. The adult world he enters is one in which the power and influence of his class have been undermined by the forces of war. Alexias finds himself drawn to the controversial teachings of Sokrates, following him even though it at times endangers both his own life and his family's place in society. Among the great teacher's followers Alexias meets Lysis, and the two youths become inseparable- -together they wrestle in the palaestra, journey to the Olympic Games, and fight in the wars against Sparta. As their relationship develops against the background of famine, siege, and civil conflict, Mary Renault expertly conveys the intricacies of classical Greek culture.”

Vintage Books. A Division Of Random House, Inc.. 2001. 400p.

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By Janine Assa, translated by Anne Hollander

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Half the human race - and even a little more - is made up of women. This mathematical truth, which history occasionally overlooks, tends too often to take on the glamor of a modern discovery, of an achievement of contemporary scientific progress. Must we suppose that the creature born of Adam's rib has required so many centuries to reach 'perfection"? It can indeed be asserted that ever since antiquity - and even before the birth of the Roman Empire - our masculine forbears have had to deal with woman already in possession of all the qualities recognized in the sex, of which either amiability or weakness is generally emphasized, according to the desire to win women over or to rule them….”

London. . Grove Press. Evergreen Profile Book 13. 1960. 196p.

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Edited By David Womersley

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Edward Gibbon (1737-94) published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in three instalments between 1776 and 1788. It was an immediate popular success, selling (as the delighted author put it) 'like a sixpenny pamphlet on the news of the day'. The book was immediately involved in controversy for its supposed hostility to established religion. But Gibbon's attitudes were much more nuanced, his intentions much more complicated, and his historical interests vastly more profound, than were those of any deist….”

London. Penguin Books. 1995. 97p.

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By Michael Grant

FROM THE JACKET: “….Michael Grant dives into the reasons why the reign of this Roman emperor, which lasted from 306 to 337 A.D.. marked a watershed in the history of civilization, albeit one charged with irony. Founding his capital at Constantinople, Constantine revitalized the Enstern half of the empire, enabling it to survive and flourish (as the Byzantine Empire) for another thousand years. Yet, as Grant shows, this shift of power to the east would prove fatal to the Western empire and have profound consequences for Europe as a whole. Constantine’s most far-reaching decision, however. was the legalization of Christianity and his conversion to the faith. Without this dramatic change Christianity might have remained a suppressed. minority religion---or worse. Grant points out the irony behind this watershed, too: For Constantine, the Christian God represented not peace but power, not humanity but success in warfare. Whatever the emperor's motives, Christian writers of that period--and after--greatly admired Constantine. Grant draws on their writings judiciously, while noting, for example, that Eusebius fails to mention Constantine's murder of his own son and his empress. Grant deftly explores the many questions surrounding these killings--Had the son plotted revolution? Had his stepmother, the empress, fallen in love with him? Had the emperor allowed a charge of rape (possibly false) brought by the empress against the stepson to stand?…

NY. Barnes & Noble. 1993. 282p.

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By Gerald S. Hawkins in collaboration with John B. White

FROM THE FOREWORD: “It is altogether fitting that the discoveries described in this book were made by an astronomer affiliated with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Samuel P. Langley, third secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and founder of its Astrophysical Observatory, was the first maior scientist to recognize the possible astronomic importance of the "rude, enormous monoliths" of Salisbury Plain. In his book The New Astronomy he wrote, "Most great national observatories, like Greenwich or Washington, are the perfected development of that kind of astronomy of which the builders of Stonehenge represent the infancy. Those primitive men could know where the sun would rise on a certain day, and make their observation of its place . .. without knowing anything of its physical nature." By "that kind of astronomy" he meant classical positional observation, the study of the motions rather than the structurest the "where" rather than the "what" —of beavenly bodies. His "new astronomy" was what we now call astrophysics. Langleywrote that in 1889,b y happy coincidence the same year in which construction was begun on the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He would have been pleased to know that just seventy-five years after he made his extraordinarily wise evaluation a worker in the observatory which he founded would play a part in establishing the great astronomical signiticance of Stonehenge.

London. Fontana. 1970. 259p.