This paper aims to bring into dialogue three texts in all of which movement and travel play a significant role in the authors’ attempt to describe and define the world they live in. In each of these texts travel is a means of experiencing the Roman world, which was often defined precisely in terms of its unprecedented spatial expansion (think of Vergil’s imperium sine fine, or the preface to Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities) – the core characteristic of the Roman world thus translates into physical movement, and physical movement becomes the primary means of experiencing a world that, to contemporaries, seemed to cover the entire span of the earth, from sunrise to sunset. 

At the same time, the very act of travelling the Roman world is intimately connected with core questions of identity and belonging, or, if you like, imperial existence. Polybius, for example, explicitly links the new possibilities of travelling under Roman rule with a radical shift in life-style away from traditional careers in politics and warfare towards observation and the acquisition of knowledge. He is himself the primary example of this new kind of existence, the embodiment of this sort of 'imperial subject’, but his work also undercuts in many ways the seemingly fixed boundaries between knowledge and power. In Chariton, on the other hand, the protagonists’ travels are intimately bound up with questions not only of local identities within the Greek world (Athens versus Sicily versus the Graeco-Persian world of Asia Minor), but also of cultural displacement as well as questions of centre and periphery and the existence of stable anchoring points, as it were, for all Greeks in what we might call (with due caution) a ‘globalised’ world. 

In my paper, I will explore the role of travel, power and identity in these two texts and then read the travel narrative underlying Acts against them, in an attempt to understand how the authors of each of these works employed travel as a trope to develop different concepts of life in the Roman world and how their specific historical, cultural and social environment influenced the ways in which they employed this trope.