Space and place are important anchors for human experience. The immediate environment shapes and frames our everyday lives, while the worlds we imagine, past and present, nearby and faraway, provide touchstones for ourselves as individuals and members of a community. It is the purpose of this module to examine the relationship between the ancient Greeks and Romans and the spaces and places they built, occupied, moved in, and imagined.
By engaging with a diverse body of written material, from poetry to the literature of geography, ethnography and historiography, ancient handbooks, to travel itineraries on papyri and objects, along with the fabric of religious, civic and domestic spaces, it explores how people in antiquity experienced, interacted within and conceptualized their immediate world. Moving between natural landscapes and urban environments, it also illuminates the importance of spaces and places in establishing understanding of other peoples, and other possible ways of living, that were reflected in different experiences and ideologies ‘at home’. The module also highlights the way ancient landscapes, surviving now in ruins, shaped later engagements with the ‘other worlds’ of Classical antiquity.