Olivia Coolidge brings the Roman Empire to life through ten vibrant short stories highlighting the various peoples of that era. You are there in the amphitheater witnessing gladiatorial spectacles; you share with the poverty-stricken poet in the tense moments before a murder in the baths; you cringe before the hatchet-faced gangsters managing the charioteers; you stream out of the city with the Roman populace to pay honor to its dead on the Feast of Roses; and you realize that the time is ripe for Jesus Christ, born in the Roman world of Caesar Augustus. "Under Augustus, there really came to be a golden age. If we really want to study what the people of Rome-in the broader sense-were like, we should look for them there." Olivia Coolidge