Books by Anthony Everitt

"The Roman emperor Nero has long been the very image of a bad ruler--cruel, vain, and incompetent. He committed incest with his mother, who had schemed and killed to place him on the throne, and later murdered her. He supposedly set fire to Rome and thrummed his lyre as it burned. Afterward he cleared the charred ruins of the city center and, in their place, built a vast palace. Historians of his day despised him, and it's their recollections that have been passed down through the ages. But, in all of the horror, there is a mystery. For a long time after his deposition and suicide, anonymous hands laid flowers on his grave. The monster was loved. In this ... biography, Anthony Everitt, the celebrated biographer of classical Greece and Rome, reveals the contradictions inherent in the reign of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus and offers a reappraisal of his life"--

The story of Athens is truly intriguing: how did a tiny community of 200,000 citizens manage to give birth to towering geniuses across the range of human endeavour, create one of the greatest civilizations in history, and lay the foundations of our own political and intellectual heritage?Taking the city itself as his central subject, Anthony Everitt relates the story of this early metropolis, taking in the strengths, flaws and unique brilliance of this ambitious experiment in civilization. Filled with adventure and astounding reversals of fortune, The Rise of Athens celebrates the city-state that cradled the world's first democracy - from its revolutionary beginnings through to the flowering of its intellectual and artistic achievements - and explores its eventual decline into a lesser city under outside rule. In his deft and fluid style, Everitt shows how our culture has been profoundly influenced by the Athenians: inventing the arts of tragedy and comedy, architecture and sculpture, establishing the concepts and language of western philosophy, and raising political issues that still vex thinkers to this day.