Every piece of literature is different and demands its own treatment. I found that an ancient novel, for example, can be précised in a series of episodes. A speech in a play often tells a story in itself; it can hold its own. A section of dialogue can provide a window onto a longer tale. I have also selected a few stories from ancient books of myths told in summary. These are typically very short. Extracting from something longer, such as the Aeneid or Argonautica – an epic tale of Jason and the Argonauts – has its challenges, but I have tried through my selections to give a flavour of the whole. I decided not to include fragments from ancient anthologies and the Greek lyric poets on the grounds that they seldom of themselves tell satisfyingly complete or accessible stories, but broke my own rules on a couple of occasions, primarily to give a taste of some of the women writers of antiquity. So little of their work survives that a fragmentary poem by Sappho, while not possessed of the liveliest story, is the more tantalizing for its rarity.

The principal joy of working on this anthology has been the opportunity to read the breadth of Greek and Latin literature and moreover to discover the most appealing translations of the hundred stories I liked most. The pages ahead contain a mixture of the familiar and the esoteric. Samuel Butler’s translation of Homer’s story of Odysseus and the Cyclops, ‘a horrid creature, not like a human being at all, but resembling rather some crag that stands out boldly against the sky on the top of a high mountain’, has an early starring role. While following the Greek closely, Butler was unafraid of omitting the odd word (for example ‘sitophagus’ – ‘corn-eating’ – before ‘human being’) to maintain the story’s pace.

In the twentieth century, E. V. Rieu revealed a similar aptitude for translating the monumentalism of Homer into natural English. ‘How strangely the Trojan and Achaean soldiers are behaving’, he wrote of the soldiers at Troy, ‘strangely’ replacing ‘wondrous deeds’ in the Greek of the Iliad. We might expect T. E. Shaw – Lawrence of Arabia – to have relished translating passages of Homeric heroism, but I was intrigued as to how he would have handled the delightfully domestic scene of Odysseus’ reunion with his wife Penelope in the Odyssey. It turns out rather well. His lively and often colloquial turn of phrase – ‘my heart is dazed’, ‘these shabby clothes’ – finds a contemporary counterpart in Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation of the poem.