From Harry Potter Latin to Hunger Games Rome: the classical jokes hiding in your favourite children's books

From Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, from Narnia to Winnie the Pooh, many of our best-loved children’s books look back to the classical world in unexpected ways…

Ancient Greece and Rome make awesome settings for children’s books, as anyone will know if they’ve read Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books, The Roman Mysteries by Caroline Lawrence, or Rosemary’s Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth. But while these books are very clearly inspired by the classical world, many other children’s books have also been influenced by the legends and language of Greek and Rome, in ways you may not have imagined…

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