“These cities are palimpsests, with layer upon layer of history, culture and identity drawn over one another, each obscuring the last but with glimpses stealing through.”

This is a study of five Mediterranean cities, Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch, not “lost” in the sense of being completely submerged or vanished, but in the sense of being decayed from their former grandeur. Tyre is now a quiet fishing port, with a lot of antiquity submerged just off the coast; what little is left of Carthage is absorbed in a suburb of modern Tunis; Syracuse has been through a period of heavy industrialisation and Antioch, like its modern incarnation Antakya, has been devastated by a series of earthquakes. Ravenna, alone of the five, is still more or less where it was and still relatively important, albeit as a centre for art rather than the western capital of the Roman empire, but its relevance to the theme will presently appear.

The question the book raises is, what causes a city to go into decline like this, and it becomes apparent that there is no one answer.  Being plagued with earthquakes won’t cause it alone; if the site is sufficiently desirable, people will come back and rebuild. On the other hand, a site desirably located for purposes of trade or defence will accordingly be desired by many, and may change hands correspondingly often, with violent consequences. Again though, the conquerors will usually have wanted it enough to rebuild on the ruins they have made, as the Romans did in Carthage.  A harbour silting up, or a trade route changing, can have more catastrophic effects.

The word “capitals” in the title is no accident; all these were once national or regional capitals, and losing that status was often the first step on a downward spiral – Syracuse lost out to Palermo in that way.  All have been ruinously fought over; all subject to natural disasters. But in many ways it is their differences that are more interesting. Modern Tyre still clings to its ancient “Phoenician” identity, to a sometimes alarming extent:

“Phoenicianism’, as it has become known, was championed by various political parties following the creation of modern Lebanon, most notably those with Christian and Druze leaders. This took on a darker side during the devastating civil war from 1975 to 1989, when ‘New Phoenicianism’ was picked up by far-right Christian militias and used as a way of differentiating the Christians from the Muslims, taking on a distinctly racist current.”

Yet in Tunis, descended from Tyre’s daughter-city of Carthage, the author remarks, “During my time in Carthage, I do not meet a single Tunisian who describes themselves as Phoenician”.

And the artists of modern Ravenna whom she quotes seem if anything to resent the dead hand of “history, which dwarfs everything the city is in the modern day. That trumps the reality of the city. It’s a mistake. Ravenna is so much more than her history, but you grow up with these ghosts”. Marco Miccoli, a skater and street art curator from Ravenna each year creates an exhibition in honour of Dante. ‘People are only interested, we only get permission, if it’s about Dante’.

Some of the book’s most powerful moments do in fact come from the juxtaposition of past and present. In Tyre she notes, “There is a second archaeological site just south of the modern city. This is where the most extensive excavations have taken place, revealing the necropolis, churches and the magnificent hippodrome. Directly adjacent stands the Palestinian refugee camp of Al-Bass. This ghetto is part of the city’s identity, and as I walked through the necropolis, the ramshackle buildings and barbed-wire fences loomed over me. One forgotten people beside so many more. Some of them have less private space than the dead Romans in their sepulchres.”

There is a lot of interest and information in this book, also some welcome humour “He stationed his war elephants around the edges of the city and instructed builders that wherever there was an elephant, there they should construct a tower. It is a loss to urban planning that this method of demarcation is no longer employed as part of the architectural process”. And while I knew the emperor Constans had been assassinated, I wasn’t previously aware that far from being stabbed as the usual custom was, he met his fate in the baths, bludgeoned to death with a soap dish.

I do have some quibbles. In the Ravenna section, spending pages on one of Byron’s love affairs strikes me as completely irrelevant. And like so many modern historians (particularly, I have to say, the female ones), she is too fond of bringing herself in as a character. I could especially have done without “The cave church was the first building I ‘checked on’ when I arrived in Antakya in February 2023, and when I entered to see everything exactly as it had been, I burst into tears. They were the first tears of many to be shed that day – and the only happy ones.” While I can understand her being emotional after the earthquake, I don’t need to know about it; authors can be emotional on their own time instead of embarrassing Gentle Reader with that sort of thing.

However, for most of the time this is a genuinely informative work with an interesting central concept. Living as I do on an island that was a stage on a major seaway, I appreciate an author who views the sea not as a barrier but a connection: “It was the crossing place and the meeting place: the centre of the world.” I could almost forgive the Author’s Note for beginning: “This book has been a journey”…