It should have been a beautiful moment between a man and his dog. Philip Womack made a quip about Cerberus, the three-headed hell-hound, but for Una, the beloved lurcher, it was all Greek. Then she ran off after a squirrel. And Womack was left to wonder what else she didn’t know about the great civilisations of the past.       

The Greeks and the Romans laid the foundations of so much of what we read, listen to and watch today, from the baked pies of Game of Thrones to the Lotus-eaters of Love Island. In this unique introduction, Womack leads Una and us on a fleet-footed odyssey through the classical world. You’ll learn to tell your Odysseus from your Oedipus, your Polyxena from your Polydorus … but the story of the hunting dogs that tore their own master apart may be best left for another day.