As an avid student
of Rome, for me Athens is inescapable. The poetry, the drama, the teachers, the
art, and the philosophy shaped the culture, history, and self-perception of the
Romans. Much like the art historians who base much of their knowledge of Greek
art on the surviving Roman copies, my knowledge of Athens is largely filtered
through the writings and perceptions of the Eternal City. However focused my
classics education may have been on the Italian peninsula, I still stumbled
across many mentions of Athens and Greece during the course of it, more than I
initially remembered.
