The scope of the work, the paper reports, is enormous: from the Pillars of Hercules to the China of Wang Mang, from the misty forests of eastern Westphalia to the heart of Africa; even Central America makes an appearance. Merchants, conquerors, travelling scholars, kings, celebrated exiles run through the pages; some thirty characters weave their stories together; everything is told in the present tense, with frequent flashbacks and sudden changes of scene, so that the reader, who can no longer read for long, may take his sips like an invalid taking water.

Now hear the eloquence. The Senate, if we believe the reviewer, "throws a mega-party" in Octavian's honour; ships set sail promptly; Nicolaus the historian, made adviser to Herod, is said to take the next job with the next dysfunctional family; the king himself dreams up projects to raise his approval ratings, as if he consulted the auguries of the polls every morning. On the Palatine, where gangland bosses are said to be among the householders, the villas are pimped up, and when a neighbour has columns of rare marble hauled into his driveway, envy drifts across the hill. It smells, he says, of incense and sweat and fish sauce.

Fish sauce, ye gods! The principate is founded, a new order is imposed on the world, Actium is won, the Altar of Peace rises, and we are left with nothing but our noses. I used to rage at Hannibal, who endured so much only to serve a schoolroom game: "Go on, madman, race across the savage Alps, to please schoolboys and become a declamation." But Hannibal at least became a declamation, a thing that needs a schoolmaster, a cane and some art. Augustus becomes the chatter of a cookshop; Maecenas, as the book puts it, is "something like a minister of culture", as if he fed his poets through departmental ledgers and application forms; and the Meroites, in the region now called Sudan, speak a language the book strips of all gender, so that they seem to run ahead of their time by so many centuries. Naturally: all the ancients are either just like us or, if unlike us, better prophets of us.

But hear what burns me most. Rome, for this author, is in many places a Moloch: senators gobble pheasants and flamingo tongues, the poor flee in despair into crime. I said all this, and more fiercely, about collapsing tenements, about the client trembling before dawn at the rich man's threshold. But I climbed those stairs myself; this man puts on my cries like a costume hired by the hour, so that lukewarm readers may believe themselves better than their ancestors. Satire is the complaint of a citizen who lives in the same city; to him Rome is a theatre where the Romans always play the villains, so that the spectator may go home virtuous. This is no indignation; it is flattery of the reader.

Still, we must admit what the reviewer himself admits: the book has fine finds, Virgil slowly shaping his lines, Ovid enchanting the Roman public. Nor is the breadth of the world a crime; we know the Chinese sold silk, we know the Ethiopians had kings, and scholars, Raimund Schulz, Owen Rees, Josephine Quinn, have tried to draw the ancient world on a wider map, while Walter Scheidel demands that Europe be pushed out of the centre, not without dissent among the experts. The fault is not that he looks far, but that he looks lightly. And the reviewer rightly asks, when the author calls that age a time of upheaval and uncertainty, whether it is not always so. Every age thinks itself the hinge of the world; only levity makes itself the mirror of the world.

The remedy, wonderfully, lies in the book itself. From Vitruvius, the paper reports, an ancient law of Ephesus is cited: an architect, on taking charge of a public work, declares what it will cost; once the estimate is received, his property is pledged to the magistrate until the work is finished; if the expense exceeds the agreed sum by more than a quarter, he pays out of his own pocket. Impose this law on writers. Let the man who promises "the world condensed into a single year" put up his property as surety; if the anachronisms exceed a quarter of the book, let him refund the reader from his own purse.

Then we shall see how many mega-parties the Senate throws, how many Maecenases run ministries. Meanwhile, citizens, go back to Livy, who also told of great things and never once smelled fish sauce, because he read history not with his nose but with his mind.