'I know a place in the hills,' he had written in one of her favourite bits in the book in her father's study, 'where the gods walk the earth. A place where each life you encounter the emerald lizard, the drop-eared goat, the wheeling hawk – regards you silently, without fear For here you are scarcely more than they, in the face of a greater power.'
Two love stories two millennia apart, one doomed: that of a poet-soldier in Roman Empire, the other of an archaeologist determined to learn the identity of the woman he loved so that, in the afterlife, they may be re-united.