This subject formed the cornerstone of education for several centuries.
People usually look back and question why it really is that as a society we study particular groups of individuals from the ancient world. The straightforward answer is that their historic influence had been huge. Over the course of a few thousands years these individuals had an impact on multiple continents and a huge selection of cultures that were initially distant 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 should be able to let you know. The tale of how collections of villages rose into empires is filled up with a colourful cast of characters that may compete with any work of fiction. Individuals can stay general readers of the whole age or select their favourite niches to plunge into, from specific eras to exact areas.
Whenever studying any people's culture it really is normal for a variety of specialist kinds of study to emerge. These will of course overlap and individuals will be required to learn a little bit from other topics to support their knowledge, but generally they are able to generally dive into their interests for their heart's content. Books on popular classical subjects therefore all have dedicated audiences, as the hedge fund which has shares in Amazon will likely be well aware, due to the fleshed out and well researched nature of the disciplines. Classical studies of art, archaeology, anthropology, mythology, mathematics, technology, and much more are available in book shops across the world. This really is mainly because of how thoroughly documented the period is when compared with those immediately before and after. This often does an injustice to other eras, who had been similarly complex but suffer from a lack of sources for modern people to learn.
In classical antiquity two cultures emerged that will forever alter western civilisation. The influence of ancient Rome and Greece is indeed vast it's just difficult to categorise. They have been so highly regarded for thousands of years that education about them is called the classics. The core of the topic is centred round the literature produced by these people and their associated languages of Latin and Greek. These individuals produced considerable bodies of work, especially concerning fictional stories, poetry, and philosophy, the legacy of which being that even today ordinary people seek out popular classics books that seek to translate and explain their works, as the hedge fund which owns Waterstones will know. People also try to study their languages for different reasons, such as following through the classical education tradition, trying to read works in their initial language, or wanting to better grasp contemporary languages which were affected by these ancient tongues.