This is the story of Messalina - third wife of Emperor Claudius and one of the most notorious women to have inhabited the Roman world.

According to the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, the Empress Messalina was a sexually insatiable schemer. The tales they told about her – including a twenty-four-hour sex competition with a prostitute – have taken deep root in the Western imagination, but Messalina’s real story is much more complex.

In her reappraisal of one of the most slandered female figures of ancient history, Honor Cargill-Martin finds an intelligent, passionate and ruthless woman who succeeded in asserting herself in the overwhelmingly male world of imperial Roman politics. Rather than setting out to ‘salvage’ Messalina’s reputation, she looks at her life in the context of her time. Above all, she seeks to reclaim the humanity of a life story previously circumscribed by currents of high politics and patriarchy.

* A Financial Times Book of the Year * A Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday Summer Read *

HOLD THE POWER AND GLORY OF ANCIENT ROME IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND.

'Fantastic ... expert storytelling' CONN IGGULDEN
'Excellent' SUNDAY TIMES
'Riveting and utterly original' MAIL ON SUNDAY

A wild she-wolf tenderly nurses infant twins Romulus and Remus.
Marcus Junius Brutus looks out over chaos and conflict, flaunting the bloodied daggers with which he murdered Julius Caesar.
Trumpets blare, crowds roar, gladiators enter the grand Colosseum. Let the games begin.

Frescoes fade and books vanish, but the story of Rome’s epic rise and fall survives in scenes struck in gold, silver and bronze. Told through the lives of twelve remarkable coins, this is ancient Rome as you’ve never seen it before.

'Extremely enjoyable' EMMA SOUTHON
'Wonderful ... there are riches aplenty in these pages' CHRISTOPHER HADLEY
'Ingenious - filled with illuminating details' MATTHEW KNEALE
'Fascinating, original and fun' FINANCIAL TIMES

A MUST-READ AS CHRISTOPHER NOLAN'S EPIC FILM 'THE ODYSSEY' SAILS ONTO MOVIE SCREENS THIS SUMMER!

THE INSTANT TIMES BESTSELLER

Award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser takes readers on an epic journey to uncover the true story of the real women behind Ancient Greece’s greatest legends in Homer's epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey . . .

'Bold and intellectually thrilling.' TOM HOLLAND, historian and co-host of 'The Rest is History' podcast

'Absolutely blew me away . . . this book is quite wonderful.' ELODIE HARPER, author of The Wolf Den

'A wonderful, beautifully written and important book.' DAN JONES, author of Henry V

'A book the world has been waiting for . . . I loved it.'
BETTANY HUGHES, author of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Contrary to perceptions built up over three thousand years, ancient history is not all about men – and it's not only men's stories that deserve to be told.

In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world’s greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer’s epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women – queens, mothers, warriors, slaves – were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not – until now) remembered them.

A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer’s epics charted entirely by women – from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope – Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologized women of Greece’s greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it.

Historicus Barry Strauss verhaalt twee eeuwen van geweld en revolutie in ‘Opstand in Judea’.