Saunders acknowledges that Athens was part of a larger world but largely confines herself to the city in surveying “Greek” art and thought, political institutions, home life, and social customs. The picture she draws isn’t entirely idyllic, as she points to sharp class divisions and repeatedly contrasts the very different lives boys and men could expect with those of girls, women, and enslaved people in general. While sending Pentathlos, a fictive 9-year-old who introduces himself as an Athenian from 440 BCE, to school and then to Olympia for exciting glimpses of the original Olympic Games, she also adds bits of color by, for instance, noting that athletes competed naked—glimpsed from afar in Robins’ austere, static illustrations—or explaining that ancient Greeks did not have toilet paper (they “used pieces of pottery”). Inserted sans safety precautions, recipes for fried or baked goods and instructions for a homemade open flame oil lamp and a drinking cup with “paint” in its list of ingredients may put hands-on sorts at risk. Still, readers should come away with glimmers of this civilization’s enduring legacy. Figures in the illustrations are mostly light- or tan-skinned.