dons_life's Journal

The sea, the sea

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2017/07/the-sea-the-sea.html

I have spent the last week on a boat with friends, sailing around the south coast of Turkey. Those are her sails, above. It was, I confess, mostly for holiday purposes, but there were a couple of days of antiquity hunting. The truth is (and believe this justification if you will!) that some of the best sites are actually much more easily accessible from the sea than from the land, so it makes good sense to combine the pleasures of the deep (best bathing I know), with shore-dashes to the serious antiquarian stuff.

Anyway, on one slightly marathon day we did three inland ancient cities, all within reasonably easy reach of Bodrum (and of each other), and a good trip to make if you are ever in that area: that was (in the order we visited), Miletus, Priene and Didyma.

Guidebooks are rather down on Miletus (despite it being the home of the whole Milesian School of Pre-Socratic philosophy Thales et al.) . They recommend the theatre, which is as you see damned good, but suggest that there is not much else to see. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

We didnt have time to do the whole site, but we explored the second century AD baths (the Baths of Faustina, named after the wife of Marcus Aurelius), which were a real textbook set of facilities. Here is the plunge pool:

And we also had fun in a beautifully restored fifteenth century mosque on the site.

Priene is very and interestingly different. Most of what is visible at Miletus and most of these big Asia Minor sites is Roman. But, thanks to a big fire and the silting up of the coastline, Priene really didnt make it into the Roman period in any big way. So what you see is, unusually, more or less completely pre-Roman Hellenistic.

It is, I warn you, a tougher nut to crack than Miletus: a stonking climb up a steep hill, over which the determined town planners of Priene imposed a perfect grid plan. I was indeed pretty knackered here, as you see (the remains of the columns providing a useful resting point):

But it is a great opportunity to put some physical remains next to the kind of political and social analysis of the place offered by Peter Thonemann in his excellent little book on the Hellenistic Age.

The last stop was Didyma, where there is a huge temple of Apollo, housing one of the most famous oracles in the ancient world. It was centred over a sacred stream, and had a pretty chequered history. At one point the stream apparently dried up, but flowed again when Alexander the Great passed by (which is obviously a metaphor for something!). And there is a sense in which, at least in the reformed, post-Alexander version of the cult, they have one eye on the procedures at Delphi, with a priestess apparently speaking mumbo jumbo, interpreted by a priest. But it does, even better than Delphi, give you some sense of the splendour of an A list oracle. This is one of the approach routes to the main oracular centre of the shrine.

It isnt hard to imagine what it might have felt like coming here with a question . . .

So a bit of a busmans holiday, but different from a similar trip last year with some of the same friends. Last year, as one of the party remarked, we went off to the sun in the immediate aftermath of Brexit. This year it was just Andy Murrays defeat!