Ancient History

Caesar 15% off

Goldsworthy, Adrian Keith Normal price £9.99 — Discount price £8.49 — You save £1.50  <convert> 

From the very beginning, Caesar's story makes dazzling reading. In his late teens he narrowly avoided execution for opposing the military dictator Sulla. He was decorated for valour in battle, captured and held to ransom by pirates, and almost bankrupted himself by staging games for the masses.

As a politician, he quickly gained a reputation as a dangerously ambitious maverick. By his early 30s he had risen to the position of Consul, and was already beginning to dominate the Senate. His affairs with noblewomen were both frequent and scandalous.

His greatest skill, outside the bedroom, was as a military commander. In a string of spectacular victories he conquered all of Gaul, invaded Germany, and twice landed in Britain - an achievement which in 55BC was greeted with a public euphoria comparable to that generated by the moon landing in 1969. In just thirty years he had risen from a position of virtual obscurity to become one of the richest men in the world, with the power single-handedly to overthrow the Republic. By his death he was effectively emperor of most of the known world.

Cannae 15% off

Goldsworthy, Adrian Keith Normal price £14.99 — Discount price £12.74 — You save £2.25  <convert> 

On 2 August 216BC, Hannibal won his greatest victory in the plain north of the small, hilltop town of Cannae in southern Italy. By the end of the day his outnumbered mercenaries had enveloped and massacred the greater part of the largest army Rome had ever fielded, turning this into one of the bloodiest battles ever fought, rivalling even the industrialised slaughter of the twentieth century AD. For the Romans Cannae became the yardstick by which other defeats were measured, never surpassed and only once or twice equalled in the next six centuries. Cannae remains one of the most famous battles ever fought, frequently alluded to in modern military writing, and Hannibals tactics are still taught in the military academies where todays officers are trained. This volume is a brand new look at the battle, and explains clearly and concisely exactly how it was that Hannibal achieved his historic victory.

City of the Sharp-nosed Fish 15% off

Parsons, Peter Normal price £25.00 — Discount price £21.25 — You save £3.75  <convert> 

In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging a low sand-covered mound a hundred miles south of Cairo. When they had finally finished, ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri. Shipped back to Oxford, the meticulous and scholarly work of deciphering these fragments began. It is still going on today. As well as Christian writings from totally unknown gospels and Greek poems not seen by human eyes since the fall of Rome, there are tax returns, petitions, private letters, sales documents, leases, wills and shopping lists. What they found was the entire life of a flourishing market-town - Oxyrhynchos ( the city of the sharp-nosed fish' ), on a side branch of the Nile - encapsulated in its waste paper. The total lack of rain in this part of Egypt had preserved the papyrus beneath the sand, as nowhere else in the Roman Empire. We hear the voices of barbers, bee-keepers and boat-makers, dyers and donkey-drivers, plasterers and poets, weavers and wine-merchants, set against the great events of late antiquity: the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the coming of Christianity, as well as the all-important annual flooding of the Nile.

Boudica's Last Stand 15% off

Waite, John Normal price £16.99 — Discount price £14.44 — You save £2.55  <convert> 

It is Britain, AD 60. Three Roman towns are in ashes and thousands lie dead. With her new allies, the Trinovantes and the Catuvellauni, Boudica and the Iceni march defiantly towards their enemy. They seek one last pivotal victory to drive the Romans from their land forever. Not far away the Roman governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus awaits them. His ground chosen, his strategy decided, his small force awaits the great native army. If his strategy is sound they will prevail, if not they will be massacred, losing the province forever. Is it really revenge Boudica wants for the vile humiliations the Romans heaped on her? Or is she playing for much higher stakes? And Paulinus, can he defeat the odds to win the day? To answer these questions, this book will re examine events from a fresh, tactical perspective and produce a clearer picture of a revolt crushed on a newly suggested battle site, offering a new interpretation of a battle that decided 2000 years of Britain's cultural heritage.

Death in Ancient Rome 10% off

Edwards, Catharine Normal price £25.00 — Discount price £22.50 — You save £2.50  <convert> 

For the Romans, the manner of a person's death was the most telling indication of their true character. Death revealed the true patriot, the genuine philosopher, even, perhaps, the great artist, and certainly the faithful Christian. Catharine Edwards draws on the many and richly varied accounts of death in the writings of Roman historians, poets, and philosophers, including Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, Seneca, Petronius, Tacitus, Tertullian, and Augustine, to investigate the complex significance of dying in the Roman world. Death in the Roman world was largely understood and often literally viewed as a spectacle. Those deaths that figured in recorded history were almost invariably violent - murders, executions, suicides - and yet the most admired figures met their ends with exemplary calm, their last words set down for posterity. From noble deaths in civil war, mortal combat between gladiators, political execution and suicide, to the deathly dinner of Domitian, the harrowing deaths of women such as the mythical Lucretia and Nero's mother Agrippina, as well as instances of Christian martyrdom, Edwards engagingly explores the culture of death in Roman literature and history.

Trojan War 15% off

Strauss, Barry S. Normal price £20.00 — Discount price £17.00 — You save £3.00  <convert> 

Based on the latest archaeological research and written by a leading expert on ancient military history, the true story of the most famous battle in history is every bit as compelling as Homer's epic account - and confirms many of its details. "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are cornerstones of Western literature. But did the war they describe really happen? Spectacular new archaeological evidence suggests that it did. Recent excavations and newly translated Hittie texts reveal that Troy was a large, wealthy city allied with the Hittie Empire. Located at the strategic entrance to the Dardanelles, the link between the Aegean and Black Sea, it was a tempting target for marauding Greeks, the Vikings of the Bronze Age. The war may have been the inevitable consequence of expanding Greek maritime commerce. Troy was destroyed by fire between 1200 and 1180 B.C.; large piles of sling stones, arrowheads and spearheads (not to mention skeletons that had been hacked by swords) suggest that it had prepared for a siege, but may have suffered a sudden conquest.

Great Pyramid 10% off

Romer, John Normal price £25.00 — Discount price £22.50 — You save £2.50  <convert> 

Solomon's Temple 

Hamblin, William J., Seely, David Rolph £24.95  <convert> 

Thermopylae 15% off

Cartledge, Paul Normal price £20.00 — Discount price £17.00 — You save £3.00  <convert> 

"Thermopylae" re-examines a crucial act in one of the greatest dramas in middle eastern history: the invasion of Europe from the 'east' by Great King Xerxes of Persia, 150 years before Alexander the Great famously invaded the Asiatic Persian empire from the European 'west'. Facing the huge inrushing Persian army at the narrow pass at Thermopylae were a few thousand Greeks, at their head King Leonidas and his 300 chosen champions from the militaristic state of Sparta, who inspired the rest by fighting courageously to the death. The battle of Thermopylae - which means 'hot gates' - was at its broadest a clash of civilizations; one that momentously helped shape the identity of Classical Greece and hence the nature of our own cultural heritage.