Victoria Rimell is Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Sapienza Università di Roma. The author of three previous books with Cambridge University Press - Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (2002), Ovid's Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination (2006) and Martial's Rome: Empire and the Ideology of Epigram (2008) - she has published many articles on Latin literature and Roman culture.