Readers who expected this book to be an expanded version of the series of journeys which Barnaby Rogerson chronicled in Cornucopia are in for a pleasant surprise. With sheaves of new photographs by Sir Don McCullin, beautifully reproduced, it also benefits from Barnaby’s fascinatingly detailed and amusing captions and, perhaps even more valuably, his excellent bird’s-eye view of Asia Minor in classical history.

This supplies a real want, one which I suspect is faced by almost every traveller in modern Turkey who tries to make sense of the region’s classical past. We may have a nodding acquaintance with the names Ionia or Cilicia, but of their contribution to history – let alone art – we are often ignorant, and the veil descends yet further when we stumble into Mysia and Bithynia and Pontus, and worry about the Battle of Actium and whether the Romans picked up where the Greeks left off. Most efforts to explain the shifting kaleidoscope of satrap, principality, kingdom and empire in the region now covered by modern Turkey, over the course of a thousand years, are too general and vague, until it all comes to feel like the usual jumble of obscure items of harness and brown pots that greets a visitor in Room I of an archaeological museum.

‘The Story of Asia Minor’, the essay that accompanies the 146 photographs, is subtitled ‘Achilles to Augustus’. Rogerson explains how the two travellers, sponsored by Cornucopia, sought out “monuments from the high noon of the Roman Empire – the time of the Five Good Emperors, as it known: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius”. Dispensing with the more fashionable tropes of modern classical studies, the author points out that this Antonine Age was simply a happy time for humanity at large. To understand how this happened, and how Anatolia bequeathed its share, Rogerson swiftly limns in the background, reaching back to Troy’s Bronze Age antecedents, the Iron Age, the rise of the Lycian League, the arrival of the Persians, and on to the Peloponnesian War and the rise and fall of Alexander.

We learn how power was distributed among the Hellenistic kings, and how Rome used one against the other, and won, even though for all the Romans’ power, “in terms of material, intellectual or spiritual benefits they could offer nothing at all to the people of Asia Minor. The Roman Empire for its first hundred years, was an entirely predatory state.”

Hence, we discover, the near-inevitable explosion of the Mithridatic wars, Rome’s shocked response, and Pompei’s peace, which delivered some autonomy and the creation of the so-called Decapolis of self-governing cities, “home to a complex fusion of cultures which has the added fascination of being the intellectual background to the youth of Christ”.

Plainly Rogerson did not waste his time while Don McCullin waited for the evening light (they were either up very early, or to bed very late); his days seem to have been spent happily plunging into every museum between Istanbul and Antalya, ferreting out the main lines of connection while treasuring those nuggets of information that spearhead the best stories, and give shape to the most cogent explanations. We are privileged, I suspect, to be reading the polished version of what Rogerson would have found himself explaining to his companions over another supper of aubergines and eggs in a small provincial pansiyon; and it is all the better for that.

He has spotted how an Augustan formula – “beheading rulers but giving liberty to individual cities – single-handedly helps explain the golden age of the Roman Empire. It bridges the great dichotomy between the merciless deeds of centuries of aggressive Roman imperialism and what we actually found on the ground: the fountains cascading with fresh spring water brought down from the mountains on a long march of arched aqueducts; the fortress-like cisterns for conserving water over long summers; the storm drains; the splendid kiosks in the centre of market squares, allowing elective magistrates to police fair practice among the traders; the opulent senate, and such vastly ambitious theatres and circus tracks that you realise each city was the festival centre for a much larger rural hinterland.”

A final section of the essay deals with the settled peace of the Augustan Empire and the five adoptive successions that gave us the Good Emperors, whose own successors, Rogerson declares, “had a coherent vision that could have kept this ancient world alive,” as he shudders, “before the Christian mobs start smashing the faces of the old gods in their temples”.

William Dalrymple’s introduction celebrates Don McCullin’s career, and looks to understand the link between his earlier work, photographing the gritty realities of war and flesh and death, to recording the stony relics of a vanished empire. “These images,” he decides, “share his ever-present sense of beauty in wreckage, and that savouring of elegy and loss.” They seem to testify to the value and significance of life, too, lives like ours, celebrated or challenged, in times of hope and of tumult. Aphrodisias crowning Zoilos AD30 is not mocked by a missing arm: time has laid that moment low, and the sculpture itself, it seems, was recovered by archaeologists from where it had been flung into the hastily erected defensive walls of Aphrodisias; but the modest slant of Zoilos’s head and the generosity of the city he embellished remain in Don’s photo as reminders of the perpetual human comedy, of which Zoilos and his sculptor and Don and we are all part.