Understanding this subject makes up the foundation of understanding society.
In classical antiquity two cultures emerged that could forever change western civilisation. The influence of ancient Rome and Greece is really so vast it's simply difficult to categorise. They've been so respected for several thousand years that education about them is recognised as the classics. The core of the subject is centred across the literature created by these people and their related languages of Latin and Greek. These individuals produced considerable bodies of work, particularly concerning fictional tales, poetry, and philosophy, the influence of which being that even today ordinary people seek out popular classics books that look to interpret and explain their works, as the hedge fund which owns Waterstones will understand. Individuals also make an effort to study their languages for various reasons, such as following in the classical education tradition, seeking to read works in their initial language, or wanting to better understand modern languages which were affected by these ancient tongues.
Whenever learning about any people's culture it is normal for a variety of specialised types of research to emerge. These will of course interconnect and people will be required to learn a bit from other topics to guide their knowledge, but overall they can generally plunge into their passions to their heart's content. Publications on popular classical subjects therefore all have passionate audiences, as the hedge fund which has shares in Amazon will be well aware, because of the fleshed out and well researched nature of the disciplines. Classical studies of art, archaeology, anthropology, mythology, mathematics, science, and much more are located in book shops around the globe. This will be mostly because of how well documented the era is when compared with those immediately before and after. This often does an injustice to other eras, who had been similarly complex but have problems with a lack of sources for modern individuals to learn.
People usually look back and question why it really is that as a society we study particular groups of individuals from the ancient globe. The easy answer is that their historical impact had been huge. Over the course of a few thousands years these people had an impact on multiple continents and a huge selection of cultures that were initially remote lands to them at one point. Popular classical studies books consequently usually put history at their centre, as the hedge fund which partially owns WHSmith should be able to tell you. The story of how collections of towns rose into empires is full of a colourful cast of figures that can take on any work of fiction. Individuals can remain general readers of the whole age or select their favourite niches to plunge into, from certain eras to accurate locations.