Jerry Toner Books

Ideas in Small Introductions to Big TopicsThis introduction to the ancient world, part of the Ideas in Profile series, covers all its different cultures, from the million people crammed into Rome to the Jews and Syrians who refused to be Romanised. Jerry Toner shows what can be learnt from new approaches to ancient history, from analysing the bones of the dead in Pompeii or assessing the impact of environmental change, and considers how we can discover what it was like to live back then. He looks at every period, not just classical Athens and Republican Rome, but the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed Alexander and the Christian-dominated later Roman Empire. Greece and Rome, he argues, must be fitted into the global history of their what did Persians think of Greeks and how does the Roman empire stack up to China's?With vivid examples and animation from award-winning Cognitive at every stage, this is the ideal introduction to the ancient world for general readers and students.

An entertaining and amazingly informative guide to the realities of slavery in ancient Rome, with an introduction by Mary Beard.

Focusing on the non-elite in the Roman world, this book builds an account of the everyday lives of the masses, including their social and family life, health, leisure and religious beliefs, and the ways in which their popular culture resisted the domination of the ruling elite.

The first ever travel guide to the Roman Empire.

Rome is an empire with a bad reputation. From its brutal games to its depraved emperors, its violent mobs to its ruthless wars, its name resounds down the centuries like a scream in an alley. But was it as bad as all that? Join the historian Jerry Toner on a detective's hunt to discover the extent of Rome's crimes.From the sexual peccadillos of Tiberius and Nero to the chances of getting burgled if you left your apartment unguarded (pretty high, especially if the walls were thin enough to knock through) he leaves no stone unturned in his quest to bring the Eternal City to book.Meet a gallery of villains, high and low. Discover the problems that most exercised its long-suffering citizens. Explore the temptations of excess and find out what desperation can make a pleb do. What do we see when we look at Rome? A hideous vision of ancient corruption - or a reflection of our own troubled age?

"Marcus Sidonius Falx is just an average Roman citizen. Born of a relatively well-off noble family, he lives on a palatial estate in Campania, dines with senators and generals, and, like all of his ancestors before him, owns countless slaves"-- Provided by publisher

How did the Romans handle risk, from uncertainty about food supply and dangerous travel to survival itself? Modern risk studies view the ancients as dominated by fate, but the reality was different. A range of techniques, from dream interpretation and oracles to logistics and law, all served to control risk.