Read Meditations

Seneca writes to Lucilius on time, death and the cost of living well.

Petronius as a hallucination: Nero's Rome with no moral centre at all.

Sun Tzu's thirteen chapters on winning without fighting, quoted in every boardroom.

Socrates on justice, the philosopher-king and the cave; the book Western philosophy replies to.

Aristotle on virtue as a habit and happiness as an activity; the golden mean.

Legions, elephants and the Senate; the Total War that made the series.

Mary Beard's thousand years of Rome from a village to an empire, without the togas.

Two legionaries through the fall of the Republic; HBO and the BBC's expensive Caesar.