The Classical World: an epic history from Homer to Hadrian, by Robin Lane Fox

At a gallop from Greece to Rome

Nonetheless, it was the family background of the first and most renowned Greek epic poet that was the subject of his inquiry. Quick-thinking, the priestess obliged: Homer was born on the island of Ithaca, and was none other than son of Telemachus, and grandson of Odysseus himself. This curious incident introduces the vast new (self-styled "epic") history of the classical world, both Greece and Rome, over 900 years from Homer to Hadrian, by Robin Lane Fox: Oxford classics don, huntsman, gardening correspondant and academic adviser on Oliver Stone's Alexander - not to mention a rider in one of its cavalry charges.

Lane Fox's basic message is that an enormous amount is lost in the split that most modern writers make between Greek history on the one hand, and Roman on the other. For a start, despite our usual assumption that Greek civilisation came first, the two cultures developed side by side: Rome, according to the Romans' own dating, was founded less than 20 years after the first Olympic Games.

More important, Greece and Rome were constantly interacting, and not just in that Greece was eventually swallowed up in the Roman empire. There were statues of Greek celebrities in the Roman forum from as early as the fourth century BC. And Rome's neighbours in Etruria were eager consumers of Athenian pottery from the sixth century on: the vast majority of "Greek" decorated pottery in our museums was actually found in Italy.

The emperor Hadrian represents the acme of that process of interaction. He was a Roman who more or less became a Greek. He sported a distinctively Greek-style beard; he was known for his "Greek love" of the beautiful teenager Antinous, whose sultry features he replicated in hundreds of statues littered across the empire; and at his "villa" at Tivoli outside Rome (a euphemism for what was a vast palace the size of a small town), he literally recreated the Greek world on Italian soil, with expensive - if somewhat theme-park-style - replicas of major Greek sights, monuments and works of art.

It is for this reason that Hadrian provides the linking thread through Lane Fox's great sweep. We are repeatedly told what Hadrian made, or might have made, of the events and cultures described: he was keen on Spartan values, ill-informed about Sicily, uncomprehending of the complexities of Roman civil wars. He is even introduced at the beginning as the book's "assumed reader".

Apart from this, The Classical World is, by no stretch of the imagination, a radical or particularly innovative account. It is a brisk narrative, which concentrates on the stuff of political and military history, as the chapter headings themselves make clear: "Tyrants and Lawgivers", "Alexander the Great", "The Rise of Julius Caesar", and so on. There is not much on anyone below the ranks of the elite. The nouveaux riches of Pompeii are rather sniffily dismissed for their vulgar tastes, while the Roman plebs are written off as "at bottom conservatives" (an extremely unlikely idea).

Nor does Lane Fox give much space to the infrastructures of trade, manufacture and exploitation that made the classical world tick, or to how it looked to those outside the main centres of power - although there are some fascinating pages on contacts with India. He has rather more to say about women, sex and the family, though not always with the surest of touches. Curiously, he seems more appalled at the Roman penalties, on both men and women, for adultery than at the social restrictions on women throughout his period (the "rules were for women's 'protection'"). "One way homosexuality" is his quaint term for those who were exclusively oriented towards their own sex - on the model, presumably, of "one way street".

Yet Lane Fox is an excellent storyteller and manages to make an engaging read out of some dry and slightly old-fashioned material. This is partly because he is not afraid to let his own likes and dislikes show. His wistful account of what might have happened if history had gone the other way and Antony and Cleopatra had defeated Octavian is memorably partisan. There would have been a regeneration of Greece and Egypt, no shortage of heirs to the throne - and poor Horace would have been spared writing all that "morally correct public poetry".

He also has a keen eye for a telling or unusual detail. Ever the huntsman (and horticulturalist), he points out that perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of the great war between the Greeks and Persians in the early 5thcentury BC were the Greek horses. For the invading Persians brought with them the seeds of "Median grass", which would provide an altogether superior diet for the equine population of the Greek world.

But why stop with Hadrian? Why not look beyond to the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius (in many respects as Greek as Hadrian) or to the excesses of Commodus the gladiator? It is true, in a way, that Hadrian does represent the first time that "Greekness" and "Romanness" meld in such a decisive way. It is true, too, that the reign of Hadrian heralded changes that looked forward to the very different world of the late - and soon to be Christian - Roman empire. Yet it is also the case that Hadrian is where the Oxford university syllabus traditionally placed the end of ancient history.

That is the real stable from which this book emerges. It is almost as if we are eavesdropping at a series of New College tutorials, with their party pieces to amuse the disengaged undergraduate and their rigorous discussion of all those old chestnuts that have appeared on examination papers for generations. The Classical World has all the qualities, good and bad, of that style of ancient history teaching: witty, ferociously learned, enormously well read - as well as slightly conservative and decidedly laddish.

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge University and author of 'The Parthenon' (Profile)