This collection of classic tales set in ancient Rome comprises a dozen stories which, despite having been penned by some of the finest writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, are largely unknown to the contemporary reader. The four tales by Arthur Conan Doyle will be unfamiliar to all but his most devoted fans, yet are well worth discovering, offering pithy and vivid vignettes of Roman life, shot through with the wry humour found elsewhere in his work. Anne C.E. Allinson’s contributions raise the literary bar through a pair of meticulously composed and richly colourful depictions of the era, while Edward Lucas White’s three top-notch pieces again deserve wider recognition but will be surprisingly hard to find elsewhere in print. Jules Lemaître’s finely rendered ‘Serenus’ brings unexpected complexity and nuance to the familiar theme of early Christianity in Rome, and ‘The Death of Nero’ by Edward Maturin – an author hugely popular in his day yet now seldom encountered – is a compelling and dramatic account of a fallen emperor on the run. In an entirely contrasting style, the inimitable fin-de siècle approach of French symbolist Marcel Schwob underpins the short ‘biography’ of Clodia, taken from his “Imaginary Lives”, a collection now increasingly well-regarded a century after its publication.