“Et tu, Brute?” asks Julius Caesar in the titular play by Shakespeare. “Are you not entertained!?” roars Russell Crowe’s character to the crowd after slaying his opponent in Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator.

Do you have fond memories of your favorite history professor, who could engagingly convey lots of information, filling in along the way the process of how it came to be known? Maybe he or she also ...

Ancient Rome is important, Mary Beard tells us at the start of “SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome” (Liveright, $35), her smart and exuberant survey of the first millennium of Roman history. “Rome still ...

If there can be any such person as a "favorite classicist," Mary Beard fills that bill. Erudite but accessible, appealing on and off the page, Beard reaches both a readership familiar with ancient ...

In what is certainly not a traditional treatment, the brilliant and witty Prof. Beard (Cambridge), author of The Roman Triumph and many other works, takes us on a thoughtful walk through the story of ...