Virtual antiquity: ‘the closest thing to a time machine that lets you experience ancient Greece’

In 2022, Meta ran an advert campaign that included the line: ‘In the metaverse, history students will be able to go back in time’. Although Meta was careful not to promise actual time travel, the campaign implied that the metaverse will provide unmediated access to historical events, facilitating a deeper engagement with the past than hitherto possible. In such contexts, the idea of time travel takes on a metaphorical meaning, collating and conflating different ideas of history. In this article, I explore the widespread use of the time travel metaphor to describe the experience of simulations set in the ancient world, which I define as ‘virtual antiquity’. First, I look at how developers frame historical video games and VR simulations as time travel. Second, I spotlight scholarship and critical reviews that make use of the metaphor. Third, I consider how players articulate their experience as a form of time travel, focusing on responses to the Virtual Reality Oracle (2023) and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018). I conclude by examining how the metaphor underpins the production and consumption of virtual histories. It does so, I suggest, not by transporting players to the past, but by pushing the bounds of historical representation.