Bygone Splendour
Last Wednesday the team of our division at my office made a works outing to Augusta Raurica, an ancient Roman city located about 20 km east of Basel near the village of Kaiseraugst. It is the oldest known Roman colony on the Rhine. Today there is a large archaeological site with a museum.
It somehow touched me to see how, over a period of about 300 years, from about 40 BCE to 260 CE the city developed to a prosperous place, with a big amphitheatre, numerous temples and commercial centres. Then, after battles with invading German tribes, the upper village was destroyed and a small fort and settlement remained over the centuries. It was the biggest Swiss city until the 19th century. In the last decennies archeology has restored parts of the ruins and tried to reconstruct how people lived at the flourishing times. Many layers of mud had covered the ancient sites, often several meters of debris.
Reconstructing bygone splendour: How did people live in the past? A lot remains speculation. And what about our way of life? How will people think about it in some thousand years?
We often have the impression that the society where we are living in is a stable situation, with all the infrastructures. But things can quickly change, and there have been so many empires coming and going. Also in our lives the qualities of time cycles keep on changing, often without our noticing it.
In Kaiseraugst people had found precious silver plates on fields, without knowing their value, and had even thrown some away into the garbage. It’s not so easy to discover a rare value, when you don’t have the eye to see. Some had taken silver treasures to their homes, but had to give them back, because these are common good. Also a very “normal” human trend of “appropriating” things…
Mercury, the messenger of God – for long periods he was waiting hidden in the earth. Likewise for long centuries the ancient wisdom, symbolised by the statues of Gods, was in the West lying deeply buried under orthodoy and materialism.
