Two thousand years ago, a Roman named Juvenal looked at his city's morning rush of grown men lining up to flatter the rich for a basket of food, and instead of joining the line he wrote it down so precisely that the basket is still funny. That is the whole method of this book.

Scrolls & Trolls hands the present back to the people who saw it coming. Cicero on the timeline. Aristotle on the For You page. The Stoics on your gratitude journal. Persephone's Spotify Wrapped. A WebMD self-diagnosis by Achilles. The jokes are new; the technique is the oldest one in Western writing, the satirist's wager that you will let a joke in through a door you were holding shut against an argument.

The author reads the Latin and the Greek in the original, which matters less for showing off than for getting the citations right, because in this kind of comedy the accuracy is the punchline. Funny on purpose. Cited on purpose. Both.

JENNA Z. LIANG founded Scrolls & Trolls in 2025. She reads Cicero, Juvenal, Horace, and Catullus in Latin and works in Greek. This is her first book.