of the kings in the eastern Mediterranean who had grabbed, or been given, parts of the territory conquered by Alexander the Great. In the second century CE, the ‘villa’ (as it is now euphemistically known) that Hadrian built at Tivoli, a few miles from Rome, was bigger than the town of Pompeii itself. And there he re-created for himself a miniature Roman Empire, with replicas of the greatest imperial monuments and treasures – from Egyptian waterways to the famous temple of Aphrodite in the town of Cnidos, with its even more famous nude statue of the goddess.
