I. THE EARTHQUAKE OF A.D. 115 AND THE RECONSTRUCTION
OF APAMEA IN THE SECOND CENTURY
'While Trajan was tarrying in Antioch'—it was in the winter
of A.D. 115, after the conquest of Armenia and the annexation
of Mesopotamia, before setting out for the Tigris, Ctesiphon and
the Persian Gulf—'a terrible earthquake occurred; many cities
suffered injury, but Antioch was the most unfortunate of all'.
... There had been many thunderstorms and portentous winds,
but no one would ever have expected so many evils to result
from them. First there came, on a sudden, a great bellowing roar,
and this was followed by a tremendous quaking. The whole
earth was upheaved, and buildings leaped into the air; some were
carried aloft only to collapse and be broken in pieces, while others
were tossed this way and that as if by the surge of the sea, and
overturned, and the wreckage spread out over a great extent even
of the open country. The crash of grinding and breaking timbers
together with tiles and stones was most frightful; and an
unconceivable amount of dust arose, so that it was impossible for
one to see anything or to speak or hear a word. As for the people,
many even who were outside the houses were hurt, being snatched
up and tossed violently about and then dashed to the earth as if
falling from a cliff; some were maimed and others were killed.
Even trees in some cases leaped into the air, roots and all. The
number of those who were trapped in the houses and perished
was past finding out; for multitudes were killed by the very force
of the falling debris, and great numbers were suffocated in the
ruins ... And as Heaven continued the earthquake for several
days and nights the people were in dire straits and helpless, some
of them crushed and perishing under the weight of the buildings
pressing upon them, and others dying of hunger, whenever it so
chanced that they were left alive either in a clear space, the timbers
being so inclined as to leave such a space, or in a vaulted colonnade
... So great were the calamities that had overwhelmed Antioch at
this time. Trajan made his way out through a window of the room
in which he was staying ... And as the shocks extended over several
days, he lived out of the doors in the hippodrome.
This long, apocalyptic description of the catastrophe is to be
found in the Epitome of Book LXVIII of Dio's Roman History
1;
the date itself is given by Malalas: it occurred at dawn on 13
December; and the Byzantine chronicler states that it was the
third major earthquake in the series of disasters which had visited
the city
2.
Situated some 56 miles to the south, in the Orontes valley, within
a zone of frequent seismic disturbances, Apamea suffered the
same damage as Antioch, and its reconstruction was on a par
with that of the capital of the province, where Trajan is said to
have raised the two great emboloi3 and built a public bath and an
aqueduct4. At Apamea too, work started with the colonnades of
the main street, one of the baths and the water supply of the city.
400 m south of the northern gate, an important inscription on
the main entrance of the baths—dated A.D. 116 by the mention
of the governor C. Iulius Quadratus Bassus whom Hadrian
superseded at the head of the province for some months before
his accession—records that having bought the ground at his own
expense and founded the baths, the basilica inside them and the
portico of the street in front, with all their decoration and bronze
works of art, a certain L. Julius Agrippa, son of Gaius, of the tribe
Fabia, dedicated the whole to his native city5. A second and larger
text, from the same baths, specifies that there were bronze copies
of the well-known Hellenistic groups of Theseus and the Minotaur,
and of Apollo, Marsyas, Olympos and the Scythian slave; it states
also that the benefactor of the city built several miles of the
aqueduct—a feature usually connected with the construction of
such a huge building
6. This L. Julius Agrippa, whose ancestors'
names were inscribed at Rome on bronze tablets displayed on
the Capitoline hill as friends and allies of the Roman people and
whose great-grandfather Dexandros was the first high priest of
the province at the time of Augustus, retained royal honours until
Trajan's reign and was perhaps descended, like some tetrarchs
both on his father's and on his mother's side, from the royal family
of Cilicia, itself connected with the Judaean house
7. However that
may be, L. Julius Agrippa participated in the restoration of Apamea
in proportion to his riches; the silence of our epigraphical
documentation on the site, however, precludes us from knowing
whether other benefactors, as in Antioch
8, following the appeal of
the emperor, carried out the building of houses and baths
elsewhere in the city.
Work started immediately, as is clear from the dedication of the
northern baths in which Trajan is Germanicus Dacicus, but not
yet Parthicus, i.e. before April to August A.D. 116 and therefore
just a few months after the disaster of December 115. Does this
indicate that the rebuilding of the colonnade began with the
northern part
9, the constructions on the agora and near the middle
of the city being dated in the 40s and the 60s of the century
10? It is
not impossible. Due to the exceptional width of the plan,
restoration evidently went on for the whole century; only a
catastrophe such as this earthquake could afford the opportunity
for new town-planning on such a large scale. The main avenues,
following the plan
en croix de Lorraine which dated from the time
of the city's foundation (300/299 B.C.), were enlarged to
respectively c. 37 m (on the north-south axis) and 22 m (on the
east-west one), instead of c. 30 and 16 m, comprising the
porticoes. With a total length of nearly 2 km between the northern
and the southern gates, the north-south axis represents, as the Rev.
W. M. Thomson wrote after his visit to the site in 1846, 'one of the
longest and most august colonnades in the world'
11, and, until now,
one of the best, if not the best example of those
plateiai which are
a characteristic feature of the urban landscape of eastern cities and
especially evident since the anastylosis conducted by the Syrian
General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums (Pl. X, 1). The
width of the paved road at Palmyra is 11 m between porticoes 6 m
wide and columns 9.50 m high
12; at Antioch, it is only 9 m, between
porticoes also 9 m wide
13; at Apamea, however, it reaches 20.80 m
between porticoes 7 m wide. The general impression is thus quite
different, as this elementary comparison makes vividly clear.
In the centre of the town, reconstruction was completed only
some decades later. On the agora, among the consoles of the rear
wall of the porticoes, two dedications of the Council and the
People to C. Julius Severus as [νπατι]κός (there is not enough
space to read [σνγκλητι]κός) offer a terminus post quem of A.D. 139
14;
this seems to fit the more ornamented and already baroque
architecture, with the alternating curvilinear and triangular
frontons over the niches of the first floor and the protruding
elements of the entablature; moreover, the calyx of acanthus
leaves at the bottom of the columns in the North Propylea
15
resembles those of the South Gate and of the Arch of Hadrian at
Gerasa, dated A.D. 129/130
16. C. Julius Severus' consulate was the
occasion of this homage; but Severus had been legate of the
Legion IV Scythica, one of the three Syrian legions during the
Empire, and appointed by Hadrian governor of the province in
132 at the outbreak of the Jewish revolt, when the then governor C.
Publicius Marcellus was sent to Judaea to annihilate the rebellion.
No doubt it was during this period and with these functions that
Severus won the esteem of the city
17; as a son of another Julius
Bassus, he was himself a descendant of the royal dynasty of the
Attalids and perhaps a relative of L. Julius Agrippa
18, whose activity
during the governorship of C. Julius Quadratus Bassus might well
also be explained by the importance of those family networks and
C. Julius Quadratus Bassus' own relationship with Trajan,
especially after the second Dacian campaign during which he had
held particularly high command and earned the ornamenta
triumphalia
19.
Nearby, in front of the east entrance to the agora, three of the
remarkable spiral fluted columns have consoles which once bore
bronze statues of the emperors Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius
and Lucius Verus (Pl. XI, 1–2)
20; the dedication was made around
A.D. 166, as indicated by the epithet Parthicus Maximus given to
Marcus Aurelius, and thus fifty years after the beginning of the
reconstruction in the northern part of the avenue. And here too
the benefactors, two brothers, Ti. Flavius Appius Heracleides and
Ti. Flavius Appius Sopatros, are members of one of the greatest
local families directly linked with the power structure: as
convincingly argued by Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais, they seem to have
received the Roman citizenship under the Flavians from Sex.
Appius Severus, who was tribune of the Legion III Gallica
quartered at Raphanaea, south-west of Apamea, and whose
daughter Appia Severa married L. Ceionius Commodus (cos. A.D.
78 and subsequently governor of Syria), the grandfather of Lucius
Verus, whence the dedication on the colonnade
21. But frequent as it
may have been in the local onomastic, the cognomen Sopatros
suggests a connection with the famous Sopatros of the fourth
century, the Apamean rhetor, father of a friend and correspondent
of Libanius. An unpublished console in the rear wall of the
colonnade, in front of Julius Agrippa's baths, might afford new
evidence of the importance of this family at Apamea between
those two termini, as it is dedicated to a Ti. Flavius Appius
Sopatros, the most famous son of our Sopatros, in the year A.D.
230
22. In view of the very few dedications inscribed in this place on
the main street, it is no doubt a real token of local excellence,
which indicates the antiquity of the family and supports the
hypothesis that the Sopatroi of the fourth century might well be
the Αππιοι Σώπατροι too.
To sum up so far, it is clear that the great local families—the
municipal elites—participated, as they did in so many other cities
in the East and in the western provinces at the same period, in
this phase of embellishment of the town after the earthquake. As
in many other cities too, it is not surprising to find among those
benefactors, who so often performed the main liturgies and were
at the very origin of the imperial cult in the province, those
families which were descended from ancient local dynasts of the
Hellenistic period and had kept some influence during the Empire
through co-operation with the new regime. Significantly enough,
the three main groups of inscriptions on the colonnade and the
agora all suggest persons of this kind.
A final but fragmentary document, whose origin is unfortunately
not precisely known, is also worth mentioning in this respect. It
is a dedication of Agrippa, presumably L. Iulius Agrippa, to his
friend the consular Iulius Quadratus, who might be either the
above mentioned C. Iulius Quadratus Bassus, governor in A.D.
116, or his homonym C. Antius A. Iulius Quadratus, governor
between A.D. 100/1 and 103/4 and therefore at a date before the
earthquake
23; particularly important is the epithet
philos, which
stresses the link between the local dedicator and the representative
of the emperor.
As already pointed out, reconstruction continued throughout the
century, judging by the style of the various sections of the
north-south colonnade or by the inscriptions. By the second half
of the century, together with the series of spiral fluted columns
near the agora, work reached the southern part of the avenue: the
decoration of a nymphaeum built near the intersection with the
south decumanus, has clear, late Antonine, baroque features
24; and
the theatre, cut in a depression flanking the city-wall to the south
of the acropolis, in a wonderful position on the edge of the
Orontes valley
25, has the same plan as the famous monument at
Aspendos, dated by a dedicatory inscription to the reign of Marcus
Aurelius
26.
Footnotes
1 Cassius Dio LXVIII, 24–5, quoted in Loeb translation
of E. Cary .
2 Malalas 275, 3–8 (ed. Bonn) .
3 Ibid. 275, 21–2; for archaeological commentary and
1932–9 excavations, see J. Lassus, *Les portiques
d’Antioche = Antioch-on-the-Orontes V* (1972),
7, 133–4, 145–6 .
4 Malalas 276, 1–2; cf. G. Downey, *A History of
Antioch in Syria from Seleucus to the Arab Conquest*
(1961), 223 .
5 J.-P. Rey-Coquais, “Inscriptions grecques d’Apamée,”
*AAS* 23 (1973), 40–41 no. 1, pl. I, 1; cf. J. Ch. Balty,
*Guide d’Apamée* (1981), 56, fig. 50 .
6 Rey-Coquais, ibid., 41–6 no. 2, pl. I, 2; cf. *Guide
d’Apamée*, 205–6 no. 20, fig. 230 .
7 R. D. Sullivan, “The Dynasty of Judaea in the First
Century,” in *ANRW* II.8 (1977), stemma facing
p. 300 .
8 Malalas 278, 20–279, 2; cf. Downey, op. cit. (n. 4),
218 .
9 In Antioch the paving of the main colonnaded
street started at the southern end where a
commemorative inscription was placed on the
Gate of the Cherubim: Malalas 280, 20–281, 6 .
10 For console inscriptions: *IGLS* 1312–13;
W. Van Rengen, “Inscriptions grecques et latines,”
*Colloque Apamée de Syrie I* (1969), 96–7 no. 1;
id., “Nouvelles inscriptions grecques et latines,”
*Colloque Apamée de Syrie II* (1972), 104–6
nos. 4–5 .
11 W. M. Thomson, “Journey from Aleppo to Mount
Lebanon by Jeble, el-Aala, Apamia, Ribla, etc.,”
*Bibliotheca Sacra* 5 (1848), 685 .
12 A. Gabriel, “Recherches archéologiques à Palmyre,”
*Syria* 7 (1926), 81, fig. 2; A. Ostraz, “Note sur le
plan de la partie médiane de la rue principale de
Palmyre,” *AAS* 19 (1969), 109–20 .
13 Lassus, op. cit. (n. 3), 146–7 .
14 Van Rengen, “Nouvelles inscriptions,” cit. (n. 10),
106 .
15 J. Ch. Balty, *Guide d’Apamée* (1981), 72–3,
figs. 68–70 .
16 C. H. Kraeling, *Gerasa, City of the Decapolis*
(1938), 73, 401–2, pls. VIII a–b, X–XI, XXX c,
XXXI a .
17 Van Rengen, “Nouvelles inscriptions,” cit. (n. 10),
106 .
18 Contra: J.-P. Rey-Coquais, “Syrie romaine de
Pompée à Dioclétien,” *JRS* 68 (1978), 64–5 .
19 Chr. Habicht, *Die Inschriften des Asklepieions =
Altertümer von Pergamon VIII, 3* (1969), 43–53
(no. 21), pls. 8–9 .
20 *IGLS* 1312–13; W. Van Rengen, “Inscriptions
grecques et latines,” cit. (n. 10), 96–7 no. 1 .
21 Rey-Coquais, art. cit. (n. 5), 66 .
22 Unpublished console text: dedication to Ti. Flavius
Appius Sopatros, A.D. 230 .
23 List of governors of Syria: Rey-Coquais, art. cit.
(n. 18), 62–7 .
24 A. Schmidt-Colinet, “Skulpturen aus dem Nymphaeum
von Apamea/Syrien,” *AA* (1985), 119–33 .
25 J. Barlet, “Travaux au théâtre, 1969–1971,”
*Colloque Apamée de Syrie II* (1972), 150–2 .
26 K. Lanckoronski, *Städte Pamphyliens und Pisidiens*
I (1890), 179 n. 1 (no. 64 cd) .
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