Small World

I spent the morning discovering the tomb of Queen Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Marc Antony (Remember the movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton?) Their daughter married King Juba II of Numidia and Mauritania, a Roman client-king. They reigned here in the second century A. D., and the Roman Emperor let him keep his title as long as King Juba knew the Romans were really in charge.

After seeing Cleopatra Selene’s mausoleum, we went to the Roman town of Tipasa, known in the second century as Colonia Aelia Augusta Tipasensium. The buildings were in ruins, but one’s imagination reveals how magnificent they must have been. One villa half way up a mountain has a solarium overlooking a beach and 28 bedrooms. I could get used to living there. A Christian basilica here served for two hundred years. Still it is beautiful in its ruination. Our guide took a bottle of water and poured it on the mosaic floor. It suddenly came to life with browns, golds and greens that must have been dazzling when they were new.

The big take-away for me today was that the Romans really did think of Mediterranean Sea as “Mare Nostrum,” or “Our Ocean”. I suppose I grew up thinking almost unconsciously of the great cultural and racial divide separating Europe and Africa. In my mind Europe and Africa were as different as Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. What I’m learning today, however, is that in the Roman mind, there was no difference between them. The Romans really did feel a kind of manifest destiny that impelled them to own all of the Mediterranean Sea and all of the lands surrounding it. Northern Africa was as Roman as Italy. Egypt was Roman. Turkey was Roman. The Mediterranean was just their little lake, an interstate highway to their colonies around the world. I know that in my head, but for some reason I have to keep on reminding myself that St. Augustine was an African.

We had time to sit and rest under an olive grove overlooking the beach. I gazed at the lovely ruins around me. I thought about the people who lived here, people who considered themselves Roman, people who identified themselves as members of the greatest nation the world had ever seen. They must have thought it would last forever. For them it was “our ocean,” because it was all Roman. It was “our world” because the whole known world was theirs. It was a small world. It was a safe world. It was their world. The Romans’ little world was exactly as it was supposed to be.

Until the Vandals came. Czytaj więcej