New Books in Ancient History

After Caesar's assassination, the triumvirs drew up a kill list; one such target, a man named Lucius Plotius Plancus, fled to a villa near Naples and tried hiding behind a curtain. The soldiers found him anyway–thanks to his heavy perfume.
Pliny the Elder, writing a century later, used the perfume to suggest the killing was justified. Historians have often taken that at face value, as proof that Rome despised Eastern luxuries. Jeremy Simmons reads it as a joke—Pliny was calling the man a walking corpse.
In Jeremy’s latest book Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade (Princeton, July 2026) he asks what happened when goods like pepper and perfume arrived at their destinations. The goods took on new lives: perfume became a way of talking about death, pepper a medicine prescribed for its heat, Roman coins turned pendants in South Asia—or how soldiers knew the price of spices even on remote Hadrian’s Wall.
Jeremy is an assistant professor of history and the college at the University of Chicago.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Sea of Treasures. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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How Roman Britain ended is one of the most controversial questions in British history. Unique among former Roman citizens in Western Europe, the Britons established long-lived kingdoms, resisting 'barbarian' political takeover for centuries. Yet so little is known of them from written records that even the names of most of their kings are effectively lost to history.

Packed with the latest discoveries and ground-breaking research, in Tyrants and Traders: Tintagel, Arthur and the Lost Kings (Bloomsbury, 2026) Professor Ken Dark brings the fascinating, but mysterious, world of these rulers and their kingdoms to life. Archaeological evidence, along with re-analysis of the few existing texts, reveals an unexpectedly sophisticated society, connected to a wider international network of trade and cultural contacts than might until recently have seemed imaginable. Professor Dark demonstrates through the latest archaeological discoveries that Tintagel – an eroded coastal stronghold in Cornwall, closely associated with the later legend of King Arthur – was a royal fortress and trading centre of one of the most important British kingdoms of this period.

This is a historical period filled with memorable characters and stories: from the outraged churchman Gildas, attempting to reform the corrupt rulers he thought threatened civilized life itself, to St. Patrick, who played a major part in converting Ireland to Christianity, to no less than King Arthur – whose historical existence Professor Dark shows to be much more likely than usually supposed.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Romans loom large in the imagination, credited with roads, aqueducts, politics, plumbing and empire – yet these familiar achievements tell only part of the story. The Romans: A People’s History (Reaktion, 2026) turns away from generals and emperors to focus instead on the millions of ordinary men and women whose voices rarely made it into history. Drawing on inscriptions, literature, household objects, mosaics and myth, it reveals how plebeian lives shaped the culture that still surrounds us: from food and labour to beliefs, entertainment, violence and political resistance. Not shying away from contentious subjects – misogyny, slavery, racism and the enjoyment of brutal spectacle – Paul Chrystal offers a rich, human-centred account of Roman civilization, suggesting that what ordinary Romans endured and achieved still echoes in how we live, argue and govern today.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ancient Greek lives on in our culture in surprising ways. Sometimes funny - the word for an actor, hupokrites, gives us 'hypocrite'; sometimes beautiful - an astronaut is literally a sailor of the skies. And that's before we get to the myths which gave us our Achilles heel or our Midas Touch. And what about crocodile tears, which comes from the Greek's belief that crocodiles cried while eating their victims!

Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World (Bloomsbury, 2026) is a learned but always entertaining journey through the world of the Ancient Greeks, their extraordinary language and how it has shaped our own understanding of the world today. After all, what is language but the frame through which we understand the world? Davie aims to bring more than just humour, he seeks to trace the thread of ancient Greek thought that runs through our own civilization, always with the lightness of touch and fascinating etymology. We meet Eros and Aphrodite, Alexander the Great and Oscar Wilde, the stoics, Epicurus and Sparta.
While this is a book about language and the touching and illuminating presence of the ancient Greeks in our current words, it's also about how Ancient Greece shapes our culture today.

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How did the state become Christian in late antiquity? Many scholars
have traced the Christianization of the Roman world in the centuries
following the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312 CE. Robin
Whelan, however, turns his attention away from the usual suspects in
such accounts-emperors, empresses, bishops, ascetics, and other holy
people-to consider a surprisingly understudied set of late ancient
Christians: those who served the state as courtiers, bureaucrats, and
governors. By tracing the requirements of regimes, the expectations of
subjects, and patterns of engagement with churches and churchmen, he
argues that that those who served the state in late antiquity could be
seen-and indeed, could see themselves-as distinctly Christian authority
figures-just as much as the emperors and kings whom they served, and the
bishops and ascetics whom they governed. Serving the Christian State in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Robin Whelan is Reader in Mediterranean History at the University of Liverpool.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston

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