An enlightening survey of the Greek intellectual tradition during the Roman Empire.

Publishers Weekly

Well-informed, rewarding analysis of an unjustly overlooked period and its intellectual legacy.

Kirkus

Ambitious and readable...I know of no other survey of intellectual life in the imperial Greek world accessible to the non-specialist reader.

The Wall Street Journal

Too often we ask what the Romans did for us – but this important and beautifully written book reminds us to ask what the Greeks did for the Romans – and for us in turn! This is a banquet of delightful insight, important ideas and colourful characters.

Michael Scott

Charles Freeman's latest effusion of cultural history is a paean of tributes to ancient Hellenic intellection, philosophical in both a technical and a more general sense... Freeman sportingly and illuminatingly engages with a wide variety of styles of thought and expression, from epideictic oratory and satire via historiography and mathematics to philosophy proper. Sophisticated Greek culture did not only take firm hold of the Greeks' Roman conquerors' imaginations: thanks to Byzantium and the Renaissance (other specialisms of our exceptionally broadminded author), it engages us still to this day.

Paul Cartledge

This is a much-needed book. The astounding brilliance of Greek writers of the Classical period, the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, is well known. But Greek learning did not end with the end of the Classical period. Freeman demonstrates the extraordinary richness and the variety of the work being done by the Greek intellectuals of the Roman empire... We meet orators, philosophers, historians, geographers, astronomers, a travel writer, a medical botanist, physicians, a satirist, polymaths with various interests and Christian scholars. Gradually a picture emerges of the magnificence – and the lasting importance – of work being done by the Greek intellectuals of the Roman empire.

Robin Waterfield, author of Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy