Ben-Hur was the first literary blockbuster to generate multiple and hugely profitable adaptations, highlighted by the 1959 film that won a record-setting 11 Oscars. More than a century before The Hunger Games and Harry Potter, and decades before Gone with the Wind and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, General Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur was spun off into dozens of popular publications and media productions, becoming a veritable commercial brand name that earned tens of millions of dollars.
Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster surveys the Ben-Hur phenomenon's unprecedented range and extraordinary...

Set in the turbulent years after Caesar's assassination in 44 BC, Season Two of the HBO-BBC series Rome lays bare a city shaken by the violent power struggle between Octavian, Caesar's adopted son and heir, and Mark Antony, his most trusted general, bound in the seductive spell of Cleopatra.
Rome Season Two: Trial & Triumph is the first academic volume to explore the second season of this critically acclaimed and commercially successful drama. It brings together sixteen pioneering and provocative essays written by an international cast of leading classical scholars and...