Robert Wood’s life did not end with his books on the desert cities. He went into politics, became under-secretary of state to Pitt the Elder and spent a decade as an MP for one of his patron the Duke of Bridgewater’s pocket boroughs. But his political career was most notable for his pursuit of John Wilkes, the radical journalist, politician and campaigner for civil liberties. Wood was only a minor player in the battle between Wilkes and the British government, but he scarcely covered himself with glory. In 1763 he seized the papers of Wilkes on the orders of Lord Halifax, secretary of state, only to be fined £1,000 after Wilkes brought an action for trespass — a notable blow for liberty in which Wood found himself on the losing side. As under-secretary to Lord Weymouth, Wood again pursued Wilkes. The irony is that Wood had more in common with Wilkes than he did with the philistine ministers whose cause he defended. For Wilkes, like Wood, had spent time in Rome among the dilettanti who gathered there, chief among them Winkelmann, the historian of antiquity, and the artist Mengs, who had painted Wood’s portrait.

The only minister Wood served who shared his passion for antiquity was the aged Lord Granville. It fell to Wood to bring the preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War, to Granville as the Lord President of the Council lay on his deathbed. Wood offered to return later, but Granville quoted Sarpedon’s speech from the Iliad, pointing out that great men must prove their merit with great deeds. He insisted that Wood should read him the text of the treaty and gave it “the approbation of a dying statesman, as the most glorious war and most honourable peace this nation ever saw”. In later years, Wood returned to his first love: his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, with a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade was published posthumously in 1775, with engravings of the drawings done by Borra in the region around Troy during their travels there a quarter of a century before. After his death in 1771, Wood’s works were not forgotten. Still quoted today is Horace Walpole’s prophetic tribute, in a letter of 1774: “The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”

Palmyra itself, meanwhile, remained in a state of suspended animation for another century before another British traveller encountered it in the Syrian wilderness. Gertrude Bell, the subject of Werner Herzog’s new film Queen of the Desert, was not merely the adventuress portrayed by Nicole Kidman, who falls in love with a married consul (played by Damian Lewis), but an accomplished archaeologist, Arabist, diplomat and spy, who played a big part in the creation of modern Iraq and founded the Iraqi Archaeological Museum in Baghdad. In May 1900 she wrote to her stepmother, Florence, about her arrival, after passing “the famous Palmyrene tower tombs”, in Palmyra itself: “I wonder if the wide world presents a more singular landscape. It is a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs . . . It looks like the white skeleton of a town, standing knee deep in the blown sand . . . Except Petra, Palmyra is the loveliest thing I have seen in this country.” Her friend and brother officer T. E. Lawrence echoed her, in words that are inscribed on a plaque in Palmyra: “Nothing in this scorching, desolate land could be so refreshing.” Agatha Christie, who stayed there in the charming old Hotel Zenobia (now destroyed along with the ruins whose visitors it served), gushed: “It is lovely and fantastic and unbelievable, with all the theatrical implausibility of a dream . . . It isn’t — it can’t be — real.”