We speak of ‘The Greeks and Romans’ even though the Greek and Roman world extended far beyond Greece and Rome. I hope this anthology will reveal something of its scale. Included are stories by authors from Alexandria and Panopolis (Akhmim) in Egypt, Carthage and Libya in North Africa, Samosata (Samsat), Smyrna (İzmir) and Halicarnassus (Bodrum) in what is now Turkey, Lesbos, Rhodes and Sicily, and an account by the Jewish historian Josephus, who defected to the Romans in the Jewish War of the first century AD. I’ve frequently broken the chronological arrangement of the stories in this anthology in order to reflect the development of themes between authors across time and space. The superiority of the countryside over the city, for instance, is a theme that occupies the fables of Aesop, who is thought to have been born in the sixth century BC, a second-century BC comedy by a Carthage-born former slave, and the Latin poetry of Horace.

The two youngest stories in this collection sit on the cusp of a new world. One is taken from the rather saucy mid-sixth-century AD Secret History by an historian named Procopius. The other comes from the Consolation of Boethius, who was born in Rome at around the same time the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed. These texts, though written by Christians, are still pagan enough to warrant a place in a collection of classical literature. For Boethius, in particular, it was almost a case of clinging on to the achievements of classicism lest they fell with Rome itself.

This anthology features many of the celebrated writers of Greece and Rome – but not every single one of them. My guiding principle has been to select from only such works as provide interesting and arresting stories. Classical literature, it must be said, requires us to widen our expectations of what a story is. The short story, for instance, was not a genre the Greeks and Romans recognised. Even the novel was a late development and comparatively rare. Far more common was literature written in dialogue form: tragedies, comedies, philosophical discussions, legal speeches, all of which typically extended to thousands of lines. This means that, while this anthology contains a number of complete, standalone stories, it also features plenty of extracts from longer works, some of which conform more readily than others to what we may imagine a ‘story’ to be.