Another Voice

6 June 2009

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

After Apamea, we drove to an almost perfectly preserved Byzantine town whose inhabitants seem to have quit without lingering or despoilation, and into which nobody else has ever moved. In the slanting evening light, on a dry, limestone-littered moor, stood this ghost town created from huge blocks of stone according to what appeared a standard plan for houses, as though designed and built in Legoland. As we marvelled at the time capsule from an era with which we feel about as much affinity as with Outer Space, it struck me that in a few lifetimes’ time, our successors may survey what still stands from our own civilisation with the same sense of otherness, the same sense of the interposition between them and us of something close to an eternity.

It is completely wrongheaded. It may be that ‘A thousand ages in Thy sight/ Are like an evening gone’. But in our own sight, we should not view as a thousand ages what really is just an evening gone.

Matthew Parris is a columnist on the Times.

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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.