The seven cities of Roman Asia as they actually stood — the harbours and theatres, the guilds and law-courts, the household lamps — and the ordinary people keeping an old faith alight while the first fervour cools.
Written or in the works — not published yet, so there is nothing to click. The list tells you when each one lands.
A silversmith of Ephesus whose living comes off the pilgrim trade — the miniature shrines, the amulets, the small holy things people carry home from…
The man who taught Philaretos the scroll trade — and taught his father before him. Broad, slow, generous, with a craftsman's ruined eyes. Euander has…
Neokoros — the priest-administrator of the Temple of the Sebastoi, and therefore keeper of the honour that makes Ephesus twice temple-keeper. Flavius…
Philaretos's sister, and the reason the household stands up. Kira has kept the accounts since she was fifteen, when their father died and left the…
The overseer's wife, and the warm centre of the house. Married thirty years, she keeps a home in the streets above the State Agora where the door…
Senior overseer of the Ephesian church: a man in his sixties who has spent thirty years keeping order in a scattered community that meets in houses…
A scroll-copyist in the craftsman quarter of Ephesus, and a specialist in the Ephesia grammata — the famous spell-scrolls the city exported across…
Patmos is not the bare prison rock of legend. It is a small, populated Aegean island south-west of Miletus, with villages, terraced fields, temples…
One of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis stood a mile and a half outside Ephesus — and was far more than a sanctuary. It…
The seven cities of Roman Asia were strung along a real road — the postal circuit that ran Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia…
Ephesus lived by its harbour. A colonnaded avenue half a kilometre long ran from the theatre down to the wharves, and the whole trade of Roman Asia…
Dedicated around AD 89 to the Flavian emperors, the Temple of the Sebastoi stood on the upper terrace of Ephesus and made the city twice neokoros…
A modest, respectable house in the streets above the State Agora — not one of the painted terrace houses of the rich, but a comfortable place with a…
A small scroll-copyist's workshop in the craftsman quarter of Ephesus, with the living rooms above it and an inner stair between. One high, narrow…
The Christians of Ephesus had no church building. They met in houses — dining-room gatherings of a dozen or so across the whole city, lamp-lit, with…
The largest theatre in the Roman world at the time: some twenty-five thousand seats carved into the hillside where Marble Street meets the road to…
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