If you have wondered about the ancient sources of the phrase ‘royal road’ (via regia)1 since your first year of psychoanalytic training—but been afraid to ask—then Richard H. Armstrong's impressive treatment of the many uses Freud makes of antiquity will slake a long-endured thirst. (For impatient readers, the answer is given below.2) Those psychoanalysts interested in the Western classical tradition will be entranced by this book, a detailed and closely argued examination of Freud's relationship with the ancient world and of the ways he deployed his knowledge of antiquity in developing psychoanalysis. At the outset Armstrong promises his reader: