ABSTRACT
Anyone who studies the ancient world must wonder what it was like to live there, and to an extent all study of the past is an effort to recreate it, at least in our own minds. Such a reconstruction is necessarily imperfect: even today, a visitor or even an immigrant to a foreign country can never erase the past entirely and begin to think quite the way the locals do. If, as L. P. Hartley wrote, the past is a foreign country, we can never really experience it the way the Greeks and the Romans did-even if a timemachine were actually to take us there and leave us there forever. But the wish to reconstruct the past remains, and many efforts have been made to do so, with various levels of success.
