The sardonic guide to Roman history you've always suspected you needed, featuring over 340 pages of acerbic, interesting and occasionally rude stories of the glory, madness, might and occasional abject terror of Ancient Rome. It's history with the potential to be rather interesting. First emerging in the 8th Century BC, Ancient Rome was one of the original bad boys of human civilization. Roman culture emerged from the Etruscans, who had grown bored of smacking each other over the head with heavy things and decided that the best way of advancing humanity was to wander around the Mediterranean, smacking everyone else over the head with heavy things instead. Along the way, they learned to worship some bonkers gods, invent stuff, build some other stuff that you can still see, pioneer Western society and terrify the sh*t out of everyone. Spanning roughly from the time that Augustus tried to persuade everyone that he was a god by threatening to throw them in the Tiber unless they realised he was a god to the period in the third Century when everyone had lost their minds, The Compendium of Roman History offers a broad, funny and above all interesting snapshot into the complex, brutal and slightly mad culture that thrived around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Be prepared for a journey involving murder, black magic babies, bizarre Egyptian curses, wholesale slaughter, abject terror, elephants on tightropes and Emperors getting struck by lightning.