This book is about how space determines thinking, and the spatial references found in Roman literary texts of early imperial date. As the motto of the book —a stanza from the poem La Trappola (‘The Catch’) by the Italian poet Franco Marcoaldi says (in free paraphrase) — ‘It is a sad and unsustainable adventure to exploit the energy of life in the unceasing battle between closed and open, between vast landscapes and anguished stagnation’. And though the title of the book refers only to enclosed space, closure is here imagined nearly always as a counterpart of quasi-unlimited open spaces. As the author claims in her introduction, 21st-century humans obsessively visualize enclosed spaces that provide an illusion of safety, protection, retreat and invisibility, but at the same time are just as interested in the freedom and unconfined possibilities, or even the chance of conquest, associated with wide-open spaces. Narrow spaces cannot, however, be imagined only as safe places, but also as loci of confinement, torture and captivity, and vice versa: vast landscapes are loci of exposure, danger and homelessness. Victoria Rimell’s book analyzes these polarities of interior and exterior spaces in well-known Roman literary texts.