This light hearted little book takes a similar format to the Schott's miscellany series, and contains a wealth of trivia, anecdotes, and so on about the ancient world, with an eye for the entertaining and the bizarre. The hundreds of short entries range from curse tablets from Bath, to the fratricidal Parthian royals, from the wit of Socrates, to the interpretation of oracles and with plenty of quotations from primary sources, Martial getting a particular look-in.