Peter Jones in The Sunday Telegraph (May 27 2007).

It is a common assumption that, to get a feel for what the ancient world was /really/ like, you must hit the ‘Everyday Life’ button and bang on about eating dormice, putting on togas and inserting radishes in unlikely orifices, all in the context of family life. It is true that this may appeal to the ‘Cor strike a light’ reflex, but it does not help you to get under the skin of the people: and it is people who count. For that – in the absence of reading the original words in the original language - you need writers with imagination, and it is here that historians like Tom Holland and novelists like Robert Harris come into their own.

Philip Matyszak tries another tack: a sort of Lonely Planet addressed to someone from the present visiting the Rome of c. AD 200. With headings like ‘Getting There’, ‘Out and About’, ‘Shopping’, ‘Entertainment’, ‘Must-see Sights’ and ‘Roman Walks’, Matyszak packs in vast amounts of information of the ‘Everyday Life’ variety about this great city of a million or so people.

Everyone knows that Rome was built on seven hills: but which was the Hampstead, which the Westminster, which the Byker? Better find out. When you come to visit Rome, ensure you stay in a place with a strong front door, or a guard on it: Rome is a lawless place. As the satirist Juvenal points, you’ll be taken for a fool if you go out at night without first making a will. If you plan to visit a brothel, make sure it has an aqueduct connection. Everyone stays cleaner that way. If you want a good museum, visit a temple: like churches of a certain age, they tend to be loaded with works of art and curios (one has Julius Caesar’s sword). Don’t expect police to get you out of local trouble. Crime-fighting in Rome is citizens’ business, and their ways with offenders tend to be, let us say, abrupt. And so on.

The book is pocket-size, attractively presented and neatly illustrated with line-drawings and illustrations (eleven in colour), quotes from original sources liberally scattered about and an index. Matyszak may have missed a trick by not presenting it in the persona of a Roman of the time – it sometimes shifts rather uneasily between past and present – but if you have ever wanted to know anything about ancient Rome but never dared ask, this would make a good starting-point.

Meanwhile Simon Young, an even more serious historian than Tom Holland (starred first from Cambridge in Anglo-Saxon), has chosen with Farewell Britannia to go down the Robert Harris route, and, it must be said, with very great success. Like Harris, Young has the ability to recreate a sense of the cultural values that inform the thought-processes and actions of ancient peoples. The result is that what they say and do is as credible as the details of the everyday world in which they say and do it.

Young’s fictionalised history is set in AD 430, when the Romans have been out of Britain for some twenty years. It is told by an unnamed descendant of the Atrebates, an off-shoot of a powerful Gallic tribe that settled in southern Britain round about the time of Caesar’s forays in 55 and 54 BC. He picks out fifteen exciting episodes from his family’s nearly 500-year history: from Caesar’s arrival in Britain, Claudius’ invasion in AD 43, Boudicca’s revolt and Pictish attacks on Hadrian’s Wall, to an infanticide, a Christian martyrdom, a secret policeman foiled, and the barbarian invasions that heralded the end of the Roman occupation. Each episode is self-contained; each builds imaginatively on what we know from the records (sometimes very little); and together they present a varied and persuasive picture of the developing relationship between Briton and invader during those 400 tumultuous years.

This being a historical novel, Young briefly indicates what is fact, what invention, at the end of each chapter, leaving to an appendix a full, detailed and very interesting account of his sources and justification for his approach. The weight of scholarship behind the stories does not, however, encumber them, so lightly is the learning deployed on topics from druidic sacrifice to Roman spies, from wolf omens to male bonding by nipple-sucking. For imaginative and thrilling engagement with the history of those often shadowy and chaotic times, Farewell Britannia will be very hard to beat.