"This well-illustrated and scholarly book is a pleasure to read. The style is vigorous and concise, enabling a vast amount of information to be packed into a short space. The pen portraits of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus are masterly, and so too are the brief accounts of the philosophies of the Stoic and Platonic schools. The light and shade of the Antonine era is vividly portrayed, the quacks and shamans and the practitioners of black magic rubbing shoulders with poets, philosophers, and emperors. All play their part in completing a vital picture of the Indian summer of the ancient world."