Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations

Q: Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?

No, you don’t have to buy the ebook to participate, but we do recommend it to get the most out of your club. There are several premium social reading features that are only available when you buy the ebook, like annotations, reactions, comment threads, resources, discussion prompts, and more, all embedded right in the text. It’s a unique and immersive way to read.

Q: Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?

It’s annoying, we know. App store rules prevent us from selling directly in the app, so for now you can only purchase ebooks on our website. Don’t worry: when you purchase an ebook on the web, it’s automatically added to your bookshelf in the app.

Q: How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?

Kindle is a straightforward e-reader; Fable is an interactive e-reader that includes social features inside the ebooks. When you read an ebook on Fable, you can see and react to the text with others in real time. Start a discussion, share highlights and quotes, add emoji reactions—all of it lives right inside the book. It’s hard to explain and easy to see, so we recommend reading the free sample in one of our most active clubs to get a feel for it.

Q: Do you sell physical books too?

We do not sell physical books at this time. Wish we did? Let us know why here!

Q: Are book clubs free to join on Fable?

Most of our clubs are completely free to join. The only exceptions are clubs marked as “Premium” or “Career Development,” which do require a fee. You can find out more on each club’s detail page.

Q: How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?

The first step is to download the Fable app. From there, you’ll be able to create your own private or public book club and invite others to read with you. Once your club is created, click on the plus sign under “Currently reading” and search for this book to add it to your club.

By Mary Beard

Publisher Description

A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, this is “the perfect introduction to classical studies, and deserves to become something of a standard work” (Observer).

Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world, a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, but also the common people—the millions of inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the slaves, soldiers, and women. How did they live? Where did they go if their marriage was in trouble or if they were broke? Or, perhaps just as important, how did they clean their teeth? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard forces us along the way to reexamine so many of the assumptions we held as gospel—not the least of them the perception that the Emperor Caligula was bonkers or Nero a monster. With capacious wit and verve, Beard demonstrates that, far from being carved in marble, the classical world is still very much alive.

Download the free Fable app

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities

43 Reviews

3.5

Created 4 months ago

Aimée

Created 5 months ago

“Though this book took me a while to get through (partially as I was doing other similar reading for my degree), I really enjoyed it. It was a much more fun and digestible way of approaching the historiography of certain areas of the classics and gives a great reading list for those wanting to look further into it. Her point of view in the introductory chapter concerning keeping classics alive was particularly inspiring and her following chapters gave me lots of ideas for my own research as well as useful examples for me to use in my arguments.”

Jean Kojali

Created 8 months ago

“I have a complicated relationship with this book. I tried to read this about four years ago, when I was in the early years of university and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my degree. Based on the title, I thought this would be a solid introduction to classics. I got about 70 pages in before I realized I didn't understand 80% of what I was reading. I was pleased that this time around I was able to keep up with the ideas and commentary presented in this book. Overall, I found a lot of value in this book - the historiographic elements were particularly insightful, and Beard's analysis on the state of classics was refreshingly optimistic and sharp. I learned a lot through her questions on the limitations of sources and the decisions of certain scholars. The introduction and afterword were among the strongest sections in this volume. Unfortunately, I am unable to recommend this to somebody who is generally wanting to learn more about antiquity. Beard is a seasoned scholar, and the majority of these essays require some background knowledge of the topics covered. At times, Beard provides a bit of context for the respective topics (a sentence or two), but not nearly enough to fully appreciate her review of the works in each essay. For me at least, it was very easy to get lost in the middle of her essays, and I often had to go back and re-read portions. This rendered the reading process extremely laborious. I think I will return to this for specific essays, but I don't see a full re-read in the future.”

Scarlett

Created 8 months ago

“This book is just Mary Beard reviewing books on classics from the early 2000s, which is fine but not what I expected nor feel like I was promised. There were some interesting bits though and I do quite enjoy her style of writing reviews (the way she praises them for what they’ve managed whilst also giving her honest opinion on all the stuff they missed out). “But they are a powerful reminder of one of the most important aspects of the symbolic register of Classics: that sense of imminent loss, the terrifying fragility of our connections with distant antiquity (always in danger of rupture), the fear of the barbarians at the gates and that we are simply not up to the preservation of what we value. That is to say, tracts on the decline of Classics are not commentaries upon it, they are debates within it: they are in part the expressions of the loss and longing and the nostalgia that have always tinged classical studies.” “However benign an image he might choose to present in middle age, it did his power no harm for everyone to know that he had once been capable of blinding a man with his own hands. Scratch the surface and perhaps he still was. As in many political systems, the economy of force operated through anecdote and rumour, as much as through the spilling of blood.””

Lisa Gill

Created 12 months ago

About Mary Beard

Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling The Fires of Vesuvius and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated Confronting the Classics and SPQR. A popular blogger and television personality, Beard is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. She lives in England.