What was it like to live on the edges of ancient empires, at the boundaries of the known world? When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his new bleak and barbarous surroundings. Like many Greeks and Romans, Ovid thought the outer reaches of his world was where civilisation ceased to exist. Our fascination with the Greek and Roman world, and the abundance of writing that we have from it, means that we usually explore the ancient world from this perspective too. Was Ovid’s exile really as bad as he claimed? What was it truly like to live on the edges of these empires, on the boundaries of the known world? Thanks to archaeological excavations, we now know that the borders of the empires we consider the ‘heart’ of civilisation were in fact thriving, vibrant cultures – just not ones we might expect. This is where the boundaries of ‘civilised’ and ‘barbarians’ began to dissipate; where the rules didn’t always apply; where normally juxtaposed cultures intermarried; and where nomadic tribes built their own cities. Taking us along the sandy caravan routes of Morocco to the freezing winters of the northern Black Sea, from Co-Loa in the Red River valley of Vietnam to the rain-lashed forts south of Hadrian’s Wall, Owen Rees explores the powerful empires and diverse peoples in Europe, Asia and Africa beyond the reaches of Greece and Rome. In doing so, he offers us a new, brilliantly rich lens with which to understand the ancient world.
