There would have been a regeneration of Greece and Egypt, no shortage of heirs to the throne - and poor Horace would have been spared writing all that "morally correct public poetry".He also has a keen eye for a telling or unusual detail. Ever the huntsman (and horticulturalist), he points out that perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of the great war between the Greeks and Persians in the early 5thcentury BC were the Greek horses. For the invading Persians brought with them the seeds of "Median grass", which would provide an altogether superior diet for the equine population of the Greek world.But why stop with Hadrian? Why not look beyond to the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius (in many respects as Greek as Hadrian) or to the excesses of Commodus the gladiator? It is true, in a way, that Hadrian does represent the first time that "Greekness" and "Romanness" meld in such a decisive way. It is true, too, that the reign of Hadrian heralded changes that looked forward to the very different world of the late - and soon to be Christian - Roman empire. Yet it is also the case that Hadrian is where the Oxford university syllabus traditionally placed the end of ancient history.That is the real stable from which this book emerges.

It is almost as if we are eavesdropping at a series of New College tutorials, with their party pieces to amuse the disengaged undergraduate and their rigorous discussion of all those old chestnuts that have appeared on examination papers for generations. The Classical World has all the qualities, good and bad, of that style of ancient history teaching: witty, ferociously learned, enormously well read - as well as slightly conservative and decidedly laddish.Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge University and author of 'The Parthenon' (Profile). An orphan brought up in Switzerland by his eccentric grandmother, Daniel Serraz, protagonist of John David Morley's novel, is a man of indecision whose drift through life is exemplified by his bizarre hobby of floating down rivers in a wet suit. It is, at least, an antidote to his duties at an insurance company. His Japanese wife, Kozue - who works as an interpreter - drives along the bank to pick him up once he's finished.But when she miscarries their child, their telepathic closeness crumbles, each internalising their emotions. Kozue finds herself defending Japan's detestable position on whaling when she interprets at meetings of the International Whaling Commission; Serraz retreats into aquatic fantasies. Since boyhood, he has fancied himself as throwback to Ambulocetus natans, the evolutionary origin of the whale: an amniotic, atavistic emblem.

But in middle age, his predilection for immersing his ungainly bulk results in a brush with death in a Swiss lake.Reborn, by way of a pig's valve fitted to his heart, Serraz leaves his wife and the safety of Swiss medical care to go in search of his lost roots - his parents having drowned, he believes, off an Indonesian island His pilgrimage is a way of reclaiming his past, and present. It also leads him closer to the objects of his obsession.The villagers of Lef?n island without money, petrol, electricity or much else that defines Western civilisation, still hunt whales But they are specific in their cull. Their origin myth tells them that their ancestors came on the back of a baleen whale; therefore the pursuit of those species - with their harmless fringes of keratin, hanging like bony blinds to catch krill - is taboo.The sperm whale is a different matter. This, the largest of toothed whales, is deemed a worthy opponent. Sailing on raft-like tena, the hunters listen for the distinctive whoosh of a whale spout, a sound accurately likened to the ocean itself breathing. The harpooneer launches not only his weapon but his entire body at the leviathan, skidding off its back. Death on this scale can take hours; the account of the hunt (which the author evidently witnessed) is almost too gruesome to bear.But there is true beauty here, too, in passages which are dream-like and philosophical by turns.