"...the thing about the ancient world, it is crammed, it is packed with [the] most interesting and eccentric and brave and villainous characters of all kinds," says Everitt.
According to NPR, The Rise of Rome "traces the rise of Rome as an unlikely evolution from a market village to the world's most powerful empire, offering insight into its political clashes, military strategies, leading figures and internal corruptions."
What might be of particular interest to us is how Everitt's book opens with a full-scale mythological tale:
The origin of Rome can be traced back to a giant of a wooden horse.
For ten years a coalition of Greek rulers besieged Troy, a mighty city-state at the foot of the Dardanelles, on the coast of what is now northwest Turkey. The expeditionary force was there largely thanks to the machinations of three deities: Juno, the wife of the king of the gods, Jupiter; Minerva, whose specialty was wisdom; and the goddess of sexual passion, Venus. They were competing for a golden apple inscribed with the words "A prize for the most beautiful."
A good-sized excerpt here.
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