For Ancient Greece as well as Ancient Rome, the Trojan War provided a history that seemed possessed of a power as magnetic as it was malleable; thus, in this single source these two great civilizations were able to find two distinct sets of heroes, two distinct sets of virtues, and two eternal poets. But different as Greece and Rome's experience of the Trojan War may have been, they united in an identical longing for a heroism that was attainable in the present only by reaching out for an impossible past. In Carol Thomas and Craig Conant's broad and varied account, the reader will have the...