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 and a working harbour — the sort of place to which Rome sent a man it wanted out of the way rather than dead, under a sentence called relegatio. It is where an exiled elder named John spent a season, and where a winter's writing began the whole of this story.
A modest, respectable house in the streets above the State Agora — not one of the painted terrace houses of…
A small scroll-copyist's workshop in the craftsman quarter of Ephesus, with the living rooms above it and an…
One of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis stood a mile and a half outside Ephesus…
The seven cities of Roman Asia were strung along a real road — the postal circuit that ran Ephesus, Smyrna…
The Christians of Ephesus had no church building. They met in houses — dining-room gatherings of a dozen or…
The largest theatre in the Roman world at the time: some twenty-five thousand seats carved into the hillside…