Small things have become a big deal. If we are not compulsively watching YouTube Shorts we’re scrolling snapshots on Instagram. AI promises endless shortcuts to maximal knowledge; memes go viral. The world, or at least the internet, sits in our pocket. The defiant words of Alex Ryabchyn, a former deputy in Ukraine’s parliament, echo uncomfortably: ‘We are a huge amount of ants.’ 

Now Emily Gowers, professor of Latin literature at Cambridge, takes a magnifying glass to the subject in her latest book. What, she asks, might smallness have to tell us about the Romans – so often associated with the large and overbearing (monuments, systems of law and government, empire building) – and about ourselves? 

The Small Stuff of Roman Antiquity is based on a series of public lectures Gowers delivered during her tenure as Sather Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and is written with her typical brilliance and aplomb. At under two hundred pages (including endnotes, bibliography and a thought-provoking selection of