Folio commissioned Hokyoung Kim for the artwork, while the late author’s wife, Wendy Benchley, provides a fascinating new introduction. Overwhelmingly patriarchal (and scattering penis symbols everywhere), obsessed with social status, often brutal, but also diverse and fascinating. This edition also includes a biography of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, theme discussions and study questions, which can be used both in the classroom and at home to further engage the reader in the story.

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the classics editor of the TLS.The incident of Ampliatus feeding a slave to his eels is based on the actual historical case of Vedius Pollio. D. Rome for a hydraulic engineer -- of the Aqua Augusta, an aqueduct that serves about a dozen towns in the Bay of Naples region of southeastern Italy, including the doomed Pompeii.

The main streets in Pompeii are treacherous with their undulating stones, and I have seen more than one person fall. The appalling fate of girl babies, the way gladiators were trained, the position of women and slaves, all are described for the reader so Lucia and Tag really live. The result is an often gripping piece of detective work that also offers a tantalising window into the reality of daily Roman life. Here, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains, painting an exhaustive portrait of an ancient town. The front cover design is a tie-in to the BBC documentary 'Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town', which was based on this book.This is the less popular entrance to the ruins and away from most tourists (who often arrive at the Porta Marina entrance). Mary Beard's expertise shines through, as well as her common-sense dismissal of some of the more fanciful interpretations of archaeological evidence. Since our earliest beginnings, every documented society has gathered to perform elaborate rites and ceremonies - from mass worship to body modification - yet ritual poses a deep paradox: why do we give the utmost importance to otherwise pointless activities? I also loved Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum by Paul Roberts, which was printed to accompany a 2013 exhibition at the British Museum.

Those scars didn’t begin with the eruption — there was a devastating earthquake 17 years earlier — and didn’t end with it. So much of Pompeii's impact is visual, which is why I would also recommend books with plenty of photos of the site, its buildings, frescoes and objects, all of which build a picture of daily life in the town.Another book which helped me imagine the world Amara would have experienced in the 70s AD was Robert Knapp's Invisible Romans , especially his chapters on prostitution and slavery. The opening, “Life Interrupted,” is unforgettable, tracing the people who fled unsuccessfully from the volcanic eruption. I’ve been on an archaeology kick this year, and this book (a Christmas gift) was right in my sweet spot – detailed but accessible, with a personal viewpoint that brought the four “lost cities” to light. It is clear, concise, and well-illustrated, and unlike many such books that appeal to a more general audience, it is authored by an expert who has been working on site and teaching about Pompeii for most of her career.

I could see the famed orator delivering his fierce attacks against Catiline amid the grand temples of the Forum and its surrounding hills. By providing a fresh interpretation of the graffiti on the walls, Beard even lets the Pompeiians speak: ’Ladicula’s a thief’, ’Atimetus got me pregnant’. Corelia gets Attilius the proof that he needs from her father's written records when he is performing repairs to a collapsed section of tunnel in the region around Vesuvius. The eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 buried a city and its people, their treasures and secrets. On the way to the ticket office, you will pass a large display of plaster casts--the archaeological remains of some victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the centre of a sophisticated civilisation: the Neolithic site of Catalhoeyuk in Central Turkey, the Roman town of Pompeii on Italy's southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia and the indigenous American metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Attilius also discovers that Exomnius was investigating the phenomena around Vesuvius since he recognised some of them from his hometown of Catania after an eruption of Mount Etna.