In the original dust jacket. Purple cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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A very well kept book: see photographs.

A portrait of life in ancient Athens examines the hedonistic lifestyles of the Greeks, detailing the vice, excess, and ephemeral pleasures that marked the classical world. This fascinating book reveals that the ancient Athenians were supreme hedonists. Their society was driven by an insatiable lust for culinary delights – especially fish – fine wine and pleasures of the flesh. Indeed, great fortunes were squandered and politicians’ careers ruined through ritual drinking at the symposium, or the wooing of highly-coveted, costly prostitutes.James Davidson brings an incisive eye and an urbane wit to this refreshingly accessible and different history of the people who invented Europe, democracy and art.

Reviews:

• This is a very well researched topic and presented by the author in an accessible manner. The everyday life in ancient Greece continues to fascinate readers all over the world and this book is an excellent addition to one’s library on the subject. Highly recommended.

• Beautifully written, humorous book that wears deep learning very well and explains extremely well. This is a book of it’s time – the crossover of academic history/sociology/women’s studies is self-consciously evident – but it remains a cracking good read and a very good introduction indeed to classical period Athens. It was recommended by Prof. Mary Beard in her blog A Don’s Life as part of a general reading list and I can see why – this isn’t a beefed up essay/dissertation proposal but a work of profound scholarship accessible to the general reader with a modicum of background.

• Fascinating exploration by James Davidson of Athenian ideas on the bodily pleasures: food, drink, and sex and what overindulgence in them was thought to say about a man’s (and we are mainly talking about the citizen men here because that’s what we know about) character in a world with no hard-and-fast rules forbidding pleasures but where how much you indulge yourself was under continuous scrutiny from your peers.