Imagining the Roman Empire: Essays on Travel & Antiquity in the Mediterranean (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798991580298)

Four countries, two travelers, one month, ten essays.

We don't consider ourselves scholarly experts, travel gurus, or essayists by nature. We are students of the Classical world, and with both passion and hubris, we set out one summer on a long and arduous journey throughout the Ancient Mediterranean.

Our desire to cross the grand territory of the Roman Empire and document our travels in words arose somewhat accidentally. We only wished to blog and photograph our trip for family and friends, but our investigation into the past and present of each archeological site we visited turned into a more intense and perilous quest than we had expected.

After all, time-traveling is not for the faint of heart. Buried beside the ruins of these ancient and sacred sites lay the remains of those who lived long before us, traces of them visible in the very rock and stone through which we picked a very old path. Trying to untangle the centuries of history from the ground, from shadows and memories now long forgotten, proved more difficult than we could have imagined. Even many months after our trip came to an end, the heavy burden of more than a millennia has stayed with us.

Only two thousand years ago-a mere breath in the history of humanity-the Roman Empire spanned from the Western shores of Portugal to the edges of India in the east, and from the borders of Ethiopia in the south to Britain in the north. Our goal to cover the entire Empire in our travels was more of a dream than reality; in truth, we would hardly brush the surface of its once far-reaching territory, visiting a handful of cities and attempting to reimagine its full weight and texture from a few meager scraps.

However, the few places we did reach were remarkably beautiful and vibrant with life, both then and now. Some have been extolled for centuries, others are obliviously left on the wayside. All of them hold memory. We understood early on that our pens were recorders not of facts or events, but of truth, that subtle, malleable substance that shines forth from the past like sunlight through a crack in rock.

Truth is where present and past mingle, like song and myth once did in poetry, so that one might glimpse Clytemnestra lingering atop her crumbling acropolis or Odysseus and his ship dipping beneath the waves of a wine-dark sea...

Accompanying our essays are photographs of just a few of the breathtaking and fascinating places and sites we visited, along with hand-drawn maps where applicable.

Zoë Tavares Bennett and Grace DeAngelis have degrees in Classics, specializing in Ancient Greek and Latin. Bennett is currently a graduate student in UCLA's Proto-Indo-European Studies program and DeAngelis is currently a graduate student in Princeton's Classics department.