The Liber pontificalis could simply be described as a history of Rome from the very particular perspective of the Christian church and the popes. Yet it is a far richer and less straightforward narrative than that, and it would not have been the first text to have enchanted readers with a vision of Rome. Think of the Greek geographer Strabo, writing during the reign of the Emperor Augustus: ‘If you were to pass back through the ancient forum and were to behold one forum ranged after another and the royal stoas and temples, and were to see the capitol and all the monuments on it and the Palatine and the Porticus of Livia, you might easily forget everything outside the city.’1