Matthew Parris
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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.
We were there somewhat by chance. To get from Damascus to Aleppo, near the Turkish border, we had hired a taxi for what was the better part of a day’s drive right up western Syria. The Mediterranean lay not far away, but unseen, the other side of the ridge of a coastal range of mountains. Syria is famous for its hundreds of classical sites — they include some of the best Roman ruins in the world — and it had seemed a waste not to take detours when we had a car and driver at our disposal. We had already persuaded him to include Krak des Chevaliers: a stupendous Crusader castle with echoes of Dover or Windsor, but much grander and more formidable, guarding a pass through the hills. And where else, we had asked our driver?
He seemed pleased to advise. An educated man, he had opinions of his own on the best of Syria’s classical heritage. He recommended the Imperial Roman city of Apamea, and two Byzantine ghost towns — and proceeded to drive us there. We spent an hour wandering along the marble colonnade which had once lain at the heart of a city of some half a million people, scores of bath houses, the biggest arena in the world, thousands of horses, and (an Apamean boast) 500 war elephants. Originally Greek then taken over by the Romans, the city had reached its peak in wealth and prominence early in the 1st millennium ad. The scene we were recreating dated back perhaps 1,800 years.
‘So long ago,’ I thought as I picked my way through fallen carved blocks. And then: ‘Hold on. Was it in fact so long ago?’
Why do we call this ‘ancient’ history — this place where there are still coins lying around, where the wheel grooves in the stone paving still look fresh-cut, and where on fallen stones the Greek graffiti, predating the Roman occupation, still looks unweathered? How long, really, is 1,800 years?
It’s nothing. Perhaps because I’m almost 60, I begin to reassess the boyhood idea that a thousand years is a very long time. I can imagine living a thousand years. When you’ve walked a mile, the idea of walking another 14 is entirely within your imaginative grasp. When you’ve only lived for ten years, a millennium may seem an eternity, but soon I enter my seventh decade, and this week went to Bakewell to visit my friend Barbara, who will turn 95 this year. I reflected (not to her) that she’s nearly a tenth of the way to a thousand years. A man may easily live to 100, and many of us will get most of the way there. The late Queen Mother bestrode in her life an entire century. She lived almost a quarter of the way back to Queen Elizabeth I.
At Apamea, the more I thought about it, the more I was struck by the inappropriateness of the impression of antiquity we attach to eras that are just yesterday in the history of our species. How quickly the fog seems to close in behind us.
Eighteen Queen Mother’s lives laid (as it were) end to end, take you all the way back to the heyday of Apamea’s preponderance, to the war elephants, and to the carts whose wheels had made the very ruts I was examining. My grandmother, whom I knew well and who was born in 1888, takes me in her own lifespan almost the first mile of the 13-mile journey to the fall of Apamea around the 7th century ad. Napoleon lived in the same century as Grandma — but why should that thought seem surprising?
Perhaps there is something wrong in the way history is taught. Perhaps we should not call it ‘history’. Maybe, too, the curious hole in our knowledge that we call the Dark Ages has helped interrupt the continuity and push the classical world to the other side of a temporal sea. But whatever the cause, the result is a serious distortion of the relativities. The adjacency we feel to our grandparents, even great-grandparents, tapers off so abruptly beyond that.
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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