The Barbarians

We often think of the civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome as discrete incubators of Western culture, places where ideas about everything from government to art to philosophy were free to develop and then be distributed outward into the wider Mediterranean world.

But as Peter Bogucki reminds us in this book, Greece and Rome did not develop in isolation.

All around them were rural communities who had remarkably different cultures, ones few of us know anything about.