For a text book, it manages to cover a great deal of ground in a very short (by textbook standards) page count, and as a dip-in-an-out primer on ancient Roman culture, you can't find much better. That said, it's not a fluid, easy-to-read book...and the author is more infatuated with Republican Rome, rather than its imperial successor. That said, his enthusiam bursts through in a number of topics, and its pages are full of fascinating nuggets of information that I discovered for the first time. Very useful indeed.