I have seen Cyrene and Leptis Magna. I never have to see another Greek or Roman ruin.
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In last year's attempt, I had hoped to camp in the Sahara, visit oases and caravanserai, and buy a Colonel Gadhaffi watch in a Tripoli souk. But the real high points were to be two ancient cities, among the greatest Greek and Roman sites on the Mediterranean. And only seen by a handful of Westerners.
Below is the agora at Cyrene. Even 19th Century British explorers, no chauvinistic slouches, were impressed.
“To have lived in the flourishing times of Cyrene would indeed have been a source of no trivial enjoyment; and we are ashamed to say how often we have envied those who beheld its numerous buildings in a state of perfection, and occupied, in their former cultivated state, the beautiful spots on which they stand.”
(From Proceedings of the Expedition to Explore the Northern Coast of Africa: From Tripoly Eastward, in MDCCCXXI and MDCCCXXII by Captain Frederick William Beechey, R.N., F.R.S. and Henry William Beechey, Esq. F.S.A. 1828)
I won't bore you with much detail. Cyrene, reached from what is now Benghazi, was one of the Greek world’s major intellectual centres. Its Temple of Zeus was bigger than the Parthenon in Athens.
Click on the picture below and spot the man on the bottom right dwarfed by the temple's columns.
Cyrene was destroyed by an earthquake in 365, covered and largely forgotten as time passed. Its rediscovery by Europeans led to a looting binge. This London newspaper shows just some of Cyrene's treasures that, by the middle of the 19th Century, had found their way to England.
That so much of Libya's heritage is in, among other places, the British Museum, is probably just as well. Although Cyrene is a World Heritage Site, security and preservation are abysmal. I never expected to walk across two thousand year old mosaics, but there was little choice.
There is pleasure in strolling ancient streets, but a curious sense of violation crossing what was once the (wonderful) floor in someone's home.
A splash of water gives just a hint of the ancient colours, largely bleached by time and elements and, more lately, scuffed by my boots.
So, mosaics entirely open to sun and rain. Temples on which one can clamber at will. Handrails? Fences? 'Don't Walk Here' signs? You must be kidding. And the looting, though rapacious imperialists are gone, continues. Artifacts of all descriptions - from busts to coins to ceramics - vanish into neighbouring Egypt.
To the east of Tripoli is Leptis Magna, once the largest - and certainly most magnificent - Roman city in Africa. This is the theatre.
The colosseum or amphitheatre could seat 45,000 spectators.
One of the few classical (more accurately, light classical) works I can instantly recognize is Respighi's 'The Pines of the Appian Way' with its evocation of vanished legions and ancient blood soaked glories. Walk the streets of Leptis Magna and Cyrene with that running through your brain and - off the top of my head - I can't come up with anything better - you get goosebumps.
At a more basic level, just like the mosaic floor in Cyrene, public toilets offer a human touch 'mid monumental ruins. One could have a slave warm the marble.
Paolo della Cella and Anthony Aufrere were two of the first European visitors:
“Of Leptis magna (sic) nothing now appears except some shapeless ruins scattered about and half buried under the mounds of sand, which the wind and sea mutually strive to accumulate upon the seashores.”
(From Narrative of an Expedition from Tripoli in Barbary, to the Western Frontier of Egypt, in 1817 by Paolo della Cella and Anthony Aufrere 1822)
Nearly two centuries later, in this oil super-rich country, the preservation is such that the huge hippodrome, where chariots once raced, is being washed away by the sea. If you click on the picture below, you can just see the last seats. Get there quickly or they'll be gone.
