Another Voice

Matthew Parris

Wednesday, 3rd June 2009

We call it ‘antiquity’. And yet, in this imperial Roman city, it seemed like yesterday

Call to mind London’s Regent Street. Suppose it straight, not curved. Suppose it about the same width but more than twice as long: a mile and a quarter. Picture it lined on each side not with shop fronts but with richly carved marble columns, more than 2,000 of them, approaching the height of Regent Street’s roof line. Top those columns with supporting massive, decorated stone lintels laid across. Picture the street paved not with tarmac but with stone slabs rutted with the grooves of a million cart and carriage wheels. Imagine it as the Champs Elysées of an imperial Roman city. Now place it on a high, stony, plateau in Syria, overlooking the wide valley and rich farmland of the Orontes river. Call it Apamea.

It existed. It still does. Much of it is there today, standing alone in the middle of bare fields in open country, hardly observed, some of its columns fallen in earthquakes, hundreds of them (I counted 606) upright. Surely this is a wonder of the world! Where are the tourist buses? Where are the guards?

But there are no perimeter fences, no entrance gates, no hordes of tourists, no armies of caretakers: nothing but a little warden’s hut at one end.

To walk, as I did last month, down Apamea’s great Roman boulevard, unsupervised in the warm glare of a Syrian afternoon and alone apart from two friends and a little boy trying to sell me some Roman coins, was remarkable. The emptiness, the silence, the absence of anything or anyone intruding from our own age, made it easier to recreate in the imagination the bustle and noise of a Roman street.

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lauriemacdonell-sanchez

June 4th, 2009 9:39pm Report this comment

Wonderfully evocative piece in many ways & a poignant reminder of how tiny is western civilization's notch on the continuum of time. Am re-reading Runciman's magnificent "A History of the Crusades" so the places, peoples, Byzantium's nadir, Islam's rise & Western Europe's groping its way out of the Dark Ages via adventurism in the Mideast are fresh in my mind. After learning of Apamea's & the other sites' excellent condition I anxiously await Syria's removal from the US Dept. of State's travel advisory list.

appa

June 5th, 2009 11:05am Report this comment

when you go to Syria do see Apamiea for me
But read Gibbon's history of Rome first

lauriemacdonell-sanchez

June 5th, 2009 4:01pm Report this comment

Dear appa: Thank you for the recommendation--Gibbon's "Decline & Fall..." loomed large on my parents' library shelves but I've read only parts of it--time to catch up! Have also read several versions of R. emperors' lives & other misc. things, but the subject & writings being so vast my knowledge will probably always be lacking. Hope you don't think I believe the Crusades were mere "adventurism"--it WAS necessary to reclaim/save the sacred sites from Muslim desecration, vandalism & exclusion of Christians, esp. since the region was largely Christianized @ the time. In the process of empire-building (as in any conflict, terrible things were done to the innocent by awful people on both sides, fueling a cycle of revenge that persists to the present day) Europe acquired the wealth & knowledge it needed to come into its own. Any particular view you'd like in photos?

David B. Wildgoose

June 7th, 2009 3:20pm Report this comment

I remember when I was a student in the mid 1980s reading a letter in The Daily Telegraph from an elderly gentleman who was taken as a young boy to visit an old man who remembered the troops returning from the Napoleonic Wars.

Memories and Experience can stretch a long way back.