"This classics stuff," sputters an uncomprehending sportscaster Tank McNamara in the cartoon strip of the same name, "can you bet on it?" Surely not, at least not if you're a studio; for every antiquity-informed wonder like Andrei Konchalovsky's 1997 version of The Odyssey, there's a dog like last year's Alexander. Alas, classics-inspired films as a rule haven't made much money since Sophia Loren's bodice heaved in The Fall of the Roman Empire, the mighty Gladiator being a rare exception.

Which might mean only that it's time to make better, more vigorous movies set in antiquity, movies in which the past is ever present, just as it is in real life. (Said that eminent screenwriter William Faulkner, "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.") The HBO series Rome makes a good start, and classicist Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other (Random House, $29.95) suggests another avenue. The war in question is the 30-year-long Peloponnesian War, fought 25 centuries ago, a bloody civil conflict among "Greek speakers who worshipped the same gods and farmed and fought in the same manner." Such leaders as Lysander, Alcibiades and Pericles allowed their nations to bleed nearly to death in the name of the empire, while democratic ideals gave way to massacres, famine and plague—and lots of treachery. There's room for a dozen epics in the struggle, and Hanson does a fine job of scene-setting.


The ancient Greeks liked their wine, of course. And so does the rest of the world thanks in large measure to the efforts of various classical Romans and their generations of offspring across Western Europe. One of the great heroes of winemaking—and of Don and Petie Kladstrup's Champagne: How the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times (Morrow, $23.95)—is the great Dom Perignon, who didn't really invent champagne ("it invented itself") but did wonders for the world's happiness quotient by tinkering with various exquisite and potent blends of juice. In the best of all worlds, the part of the good monk would belong to Johnny Depp, suitably cowled; he wandered most effectively across grapy terrain in The Ninth Gate, and he was Gilbert Grape, after all. There are plenty of other stories of vinous intrigue and mystery in the Kladstrups' pages, enough to keep a large cast of characters busy; the set-piece scene of a drunken German retreat in World War I, for one, begs for a camera.

Well worth a feature all its own is George Taber's lively Judgment of Paris (Scribner, $25), which chronicles an unusual competition. In 1976, Steven Spurrier, an English wine merchant transplanted to Paris, tried some new California varietals and organized a blind tasting with a panel made up of France's best-known wine experts. A superb Chateau Montalena 1973 chardonnay took top prize, grown in the rich soil of Calistoga, far from the prized terroir of Burgundy or Bordeaux. Taber's cast of characters is a fascinatingly mixed lot: a Chicago classicist (the classics again!) who took up winemaking; a Croatian refugee who helped prove that zinfandel originated in his homeland; and the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants who insisted, against the suspicions of their Protestant neighbors, that drinking wine was a good thing. It's a tale with as much dramatic promise as Seabiscuit and with an outcome well worth cheering.