Summary:

An extremely comprehensive book that covers everything you ever wanted to know about the Romans and Greeks. It takes you from 'Abaculus' to 'Zythus', with everything inbetween. 'The study of Greek and Roman Antiquities has, in common with all other philological studies, made great progress in Europe within the last fifty years. The earlier writers on the subject, whose works are contained in the collections of Grosovins and Graevius, display little historical criticism, and give no comprehensive view or living idea of the public and private life of the ancients. They were contented, for the most part, with merely collecting facts, and arranging them in some systematic form, and seemed not to have felt the want of anything more : they wrote about antiquity as if the people had never existed : they did not attempt to realize to their own minds, or to represent to those of others, the living spirit of Greek and Roman civilization.'