Chambers of the Sun Part 8

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Pergamum - The City of the Snakes

Athena Pension, Bergama - September 12th, Afternoon

A shortish entry today, you'll be relieved to hear, as I'm a little short on sleep and frankly there isn't a great deal that I can add to the photographs and the history books. Lofted away from the gentle breezes of the Ionian coast, the town of Bergama is about as arid as I have ever seen. The air is desiccated, the people dry, and even the vegetation seems to be out to get you. I am unsurprised that the book of Revelations insistently places the seat of the Devil in the basilica here:

"To the angel of the church in Pergamum write:

These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword. I know where you live - where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city - where Satan lives. Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: you have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality....Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth." (Anybody who knows about this sort of thing will recognise the Gideon text, so I apologise in advance)

This mass of contradiction is a fairly adequate summary of Pergamum; all the constituent parts of its history do not properly seem to add up to form a city. Its foundation myth goes back to Andromache's flight after the death of her third husband Helenus - their son was called Pergamus - and yet it hardly surfaces in Classical literature, as it is almost remarkable when an Ionian city is not mentioned by Herodotus. The earliest temples that have been uncovered on the acropolis have been dated to the early fourth century BC, and yet there is still no literary record of the town until the Hellenistic period was well underway. The upper town would have made a phenomenally useful stronghold, and yet it seems to have capitulated so lamely to Alexander in 334 that his otherwise incorrigibly pedantic historian, Arrian, does not see fit even to drop a reference to the siege.

Then, all of a sudden, it bursts into such extraordinary life under the Attalid dynasty that it is recognised by the Hellenistic world as second only to Alexandria as a centre of learning. An explosion in wool and silver wealth gave Eumenes II the chance to endow a library so vast that Mark Antony is said to have taken two hundred thousand scrolls therefrom as a wedding present for Cleopatra. The city appears to have had little trouble in rustling up the scholars to maintain such a collection, without actually producing anybody of distinction until Galen in the second century AD. After brief importance in late antiquity, it fades almost unassisted back into the lone and level sands.

Although the biography is unpromising, the material sequel is spectacular. The acropolis, mounted perhaps five hundred feet above the modern town, is accessed by four miles of gently snaking road. I think that of all the classical sites I have seen, only the temple at Bassae can rival Pergamum's aspect, especially to the north. I strongly recommend that the reader looks at the photographs for himself, as I could not hope to do the vista justice. Once there, and over the initial disappointments of the outrageous ticket prices and the amount that has been shamelessly reconstructed from ashlar, I found that the most impressive features were the astonishing examples of Roman terracing - where the most intrepid of engineering corps had practically built great vaulted chambers out over the void for the sole purpose of a temple above - and the breathtaking situation of the amphitheatre. This last site is constrained by the difficulty of the geography, or rather, at this gradient, geology, so as only to be able to hold some 10,000 spectators, but the sheer descent behind the skene gives a backdrop comparable only to pictures that I have seen of Delphi.

In spite of its scale, or perhaps because of it, the acropolis feels slightly dead. The Asclepium, on the other side of the valley, has a definite feel of animation, but it is the rather sad genius of the Second Sophistic that lurks here. Coming early in the Turkish morning - that is, at 8.30 - I had the whole site to myself for two hours as the shadows shortened, except for a couple of wizened Turkish ladies who came to gather wood. Of the temple of Asclepius itself a solid base still survives, but the most impressive sacred structure by far is the neighbouring temple of Telesphorus, accessed by an tunnel sunk below ground. The majority of this building lies underground as well, and the vaulted roof radiates from a central base, with a circular portico running around the outer wall. Massive columns share the enormous weight of the vaulting, most of which is remarkably well-preserved. It is, frankly, astonishing that such an ambitious sanctuary should have been dedicated to such a minor god, the brother of Panacaea and Hygeia. There is still a little Victorian fountain channeling the water of the original well of Asclepius, complete with what I assume are sacred frogs. The water tastes of melancholy, and the whole complex and the age in which it flourished are tinged with the faint sadness of the twilight after a glorious day.

The whole of the Second Sophistic period - which was probably the first literary period ever to have been diagnosed in its infancy - was characterised by the acute awareness that the genius of the Classical age had passed, and devoted its efforts to celebrating and refining that culture to the point of absurdity. Although it yielded the grace of Plutarch and the exquisite humour and imagination of Lucian's fancies, it also produced a great deal of artificial rhetoric. The age as a whole is caught with wonderful sensitivity by Walter Pater in his book Marius the Epicurean, and I wished that I had brought a copy along. The writers of the period failed, I believe, not because of the excess of their plagiarism of the Classical forms, but because of their negligence of the Classical vigour, the unspoken rule that no literature should be produced independently of the wellsprings of its inspiration. Cicero's oratory demonstrates an unequalled mastery of form, but its profoundest strength is that it is driven by the exigencies real need and a real audience, while a writer like Fronto was writing purely for the sake of literature. Even Galen, whose say would dictate the progress (or rather lack thereof) in medicine for fifteen hundred years, was conscious of moving primarily in the ethical and practical shadow of Hippocrates of Athens.

I think there is a very important lesson to be learned in the malaise of this epoch, a lesson that could profitably be applied to our own literature: a literary culture can never produce work of the highest merit if it is divorced from the sources of action of its time.

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Comments

[Phineas Pett]

Pergamum
What a superbly written "blog"! I cannot forgive the Turks or even remotely like them, for the destruction of Christian Byzantium in 1453, or the attempted genocide (which they will not acknowledge) of the Armenians in the early 20th century, and I have a dream of seeing Justinian's great dome of the Holy Wisdom under the Cross again, but the aura of the Ionian Greek coast and the hieratic majesty of the fading eastern Empire beguile me. Pergamum, one of the Seven Cities of Asia in the Apocalypse, was said to be the throne of Satan for there was the centre of Emperor worship in the days of the first century persecution of the Church. But what a trip!