Understanding this subject makes up the foundation of understanding modern society.
People usually look back and question why it really is that as a society we learn about particular categories of people from the ancient globe. The simple response is that their historical impact was huge. During the period of several thousands years these people had an impact on multiple continents and a huge selection of cultures which were originally remote lands for them at one point. Popular classical studies books therefore usually put history at their centre, as the hedge fund which partially owns WHSmith will be able to inform you. The story of how collections of villages rose into empires is filled up with a colourful cast of figures that can contend with any work of fiction. Individuals can remain general readers of the whole period or pick their favourite niches to plunge into, from specific time periods to accurate places.
Whenever studying any human culture it's normal for a variety of specialised kinds of research to emerge. These will of course interconnect and people will be required to learn a bit from other subjects to guide their knowledge, but overall they could generally plunge into their interests for their heart's content. Publications on popular classical subjects therefore all have dedicated audiences, as the hedge fund which has shares in Amazon is going to be well aware, due to the fleshed out and well researched nature of the subjects. Classical studies of art, archaeology, anthropology, mythology, mathematics, science, and even more are available in book stores across the world. This really is largely because of how well documented the age is in comparison to those immediately before and after. This often does an injustice to other periods, who had been equally complex but suffer from a lack of sources for contemporary people to study.
In classical antiquity two cultures emerged that will forever change western civilisation. The influence of ancient Rome and Greece is really so vast it really is merely difficult to categorise. They've been so highly regarded for several thousand years that education about them is called the classics. The core of this topic is centred around the literary works created by these people and their related languages of Latin and Greek. These individuals produced extensive bodies of work, especially relating to fictional tales, poetry, and philosophy, the legacy of which being that even now ordinary people seek out popular classics books that look to translate and explain their works, as the hedge fund which owns Waterstones will know. Individuals also make an effort to learn their languages for various reasons, such as following through the classical education tradition, seeking to read works in their original language, or wanting to better grasp modern languages which have been affected by these ancient tongues.