Worlds apart

Classics is a boastful subject. Even the name — classics — has an inner boast; as does the classics course at Oxford, Literae Humaniores (‘more humane letters’), and the course’s second half, Greats.

Michael Scott, a classics professor at Warwick University and a telegenic media don, tries to put an end to the boastfulness in this book. It has always understandably annoyed him that, in the field of Greek and Roman studies, book titles often include the words ‘Ancient World’ — as if there were only one ancient world, and it only included Greece and Rome.

And so he attempts an ambitious reordering of ancient worlds — thus the book’s title — and brings the study of Greece and Rome together with Central Asia, India and China. He begins with the late 6th century BC — the early years of Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, and the Confucius era in China.