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Gerasa had a large forest to
its west. As late as 1939, Nelson Glueck (p. 121) described
Jerash as "close to an extensive forest region where one can still ride
for hours in leafy shade." This was likely the same "forest of Ephraim" in Gilead where Absalom got his hair caught in a
tree.
When the Greeks arrived in the late
4th century BC under Perdiccas, regent of the late Alexander's
empire, they saw the potential for a
city. Their question would have been: What god or goddess rules
here? In other words, who must we get permission
from? Who has the power to protect us? Zeus, of course, but Zeus
was responsible for everything, whereas the city founders would have
wanted to know which deity had this spot in particular as the apple of his
or her eye. The forest was the clue: Artemis!
Nature is
diverse, and diversity engenders diverse gods.
Monotheism requires the desacralization of nature: one must
cease to hear a god in the brook or see a goddess in the
rainbow. Bereft of its divinity, nature lies flat out, available to
be experimented on. (Experimental science could only develop in a
monotheistic civilization.) For those who've
grown up in a world where nature is not divine and experiment
seems quite natural, it is difficult to fathom how
the Greeks or Romans could take their gods as seriously as they
did. But if you have ever been alone in a forest and
suddenly felt an uncanniness, as if some hostile, intelligent and
cunning attention were fixed on you from all around, then you have
encountered the kind of phenomenon that the ancients attributed to
Artemis.
She was a goddess of the forest, and here was a forest, much
bigger then. On seeing it, the founders of Gerasa
must have thought, "It is she who has power
here."
A forest untouched by human beings (no trees felled,
no paths cut) is called "virgin," and so the goddess of forests had to be
a virgin:
Artemis (not lightly do poets forget her) we sing, who amuses
herself on mountains with archery and and the shooting of rabbits
and wide circle dances.
When Artemis was
still just a little slip of a goddess, she sat on her father's knee and
said: "I want to be a virgin forever, Papa, and I want
to have as many names as my brother Phoibus [Apollo], and please, Papa,
give me a bow and some arrows-please!...
"And let me be Light Bringer
and wear a tunic with a colored border down to the knee, loose for
when I go hunting wild game. And give me
sixty dancing girls, daughters of Ocean, all nine years old, all little girl
sea nymphs, and twenty wood nymphs ...to take care of my boots and
tend my swift hounds when I'm done shooting lynx and stag,
and give me all the mountains in the world,
Papa, and any old town, I don't care which one: Artemis will hardly
ever go down into town. I'll live in the mountains, and visit men's
cities only when women, struck with fierce labor pangs, call on my
name, for the Moirai [Fates] ordained when I was being born,
that Artemis be a helper of women, because mother in bearing and
birthing me had no pain at all: I just slipped right out of her dear
round belly." And with that she stretched out her hands to her
father's beard, but hard as she tried couldn't reach his whiskers;
and he nodded, laughing and caressing her, and said:
"When goddesses bear me children like, this, I
hardly mind Hera's jealous anger."
- From the Greek poet
Callimachus (305-240 BC), Hymn III
to Artemis
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In Latin she is Diana, "Deana" in
two Gerasene inscriptions. She appears on vases and in
sculpture as a tall, haughty, forbidding, long-striding, independent young
woman, wielding the bow of a huntress, fondling a lion or deer-or grasping it
by the throat. (Readers of Henry James will remember Isabel Archer; the name
is surely no accident.) She was Apollo's twin sister, and like him, she
could bring sudden death with her arrows. He killed men, she women. But Apollo also
healed, and his sister's special province, as said, was helping women
through childbirth.
In Gerasa we find her in
pure Greek form. It was not the case here that a local
god presided and the Greek equivalent was grafted on, as
happened almost everywhere else in the region. It happened, for example, in
Ephesus, where Artemis was conflated with the indigenous Astarte, the fertility goddess. It
was this maternal virgin whose outraged worshippers chanted at Paul,
"Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" (Acts
19:28)
In Gerasa the Greek element preponderates. Those
devotees who left inscriptions with one exception had Greek or Latin
names. She is called "Laconian," Spartan. In more than 330
Gerasene inscriptions, "the name of only one Semitic deity,
Pakeida, has been found... One has but to compare the inscriptions of
Palmyra or Bostra with those of Gerasa to sense a world of difference in
all of these matters." (McCown, 151)
Nearly all the city's known coins include "a
charmingly designed bust of the youthful huntress with her quiver showing
over her right shoulder and her hair in a smooth chignon at the nape of
her neck." (McCown, 132)
They bear the legend, "Artemis, tyche of Gerasa," where
tyche means good
fortune. Each Roman city had its Tyche, but nowhere else
in the East, not even in Ephesus, did a city take Artemis
for that role. In her pure Greek version she was, after all, no city
slicker. "Artemis will hardly ever go down into town."
So the Greek newcomers
looked at the encroaching forest and found her in it. Perhaps they saw
that they'd have to clear trees for farmland (as Joshua had told the Ephraimites
to do).
This would have required Artemis' permission. They
could compensate her by making Gerasa her city.
But to build a Temple to
Artemis must have seemed presumptuous, considering that her
temple in Ephesus had been one of
the world's Seven Wonders. It had burned
on the day of the night when Alexander was born,
July 21, 356 BC. Artemis couldn't rescue it, for she was off in
Macedonia helping his mother deliver. But the rebuilt version
was still a matter for boasting.
In Gerasa, the siting of the
Artemis temple determined the plan for the public part of the
city. One crucial move was topographical: to choose the
place of the cella, the chamber containing her statue, on the most prominent height. Then the
planner drew two lines: the north-south line through that place
and the line of the Via Sacra leading to it from the residential section.
These two lines made up the basis, we have seen, for the
entire city plan.
The Via
Sacra crossed the Chrysorhoas, so the Gerasenes built a
bridge. This must have supported a staircase, for the ascent was too
steep for vehicles. At the first terrace on the west bank
they erected an arched gate, which the Byzantines later converted
into the apse of a church. The gate led into a colonnaded street,
which became the church's nave and side aisles. Then the procession
arrived at an open space in front of the temple's entrance, called a
"propylaeum."
Inside the
propylaeum begins a great staircase, almost 20 meters wide, eased by
landings every six steps. On either side are high
walls, directing the view to the distant pillars of the temple
itself.
And now we approach the temple.
"All but one of the twelve great columns
of its portico are still in place," wrote the archaeologists in 1930.
"Some of them rock with the gusty winds...but their foundations are so
solid and they are so delicately poised that the many earthquakes to which
Transjordan is subject have not overthrown them." (
Fisher and
McCown
, 4.) In their slender grace they would have brought
to the devotee's mind the young women with whom Artemis, gazing
from the inner chamber, always surrounded herself.
Gerasa (Jerash): History, Geography and Sacred
Geometry
A Walk Through Gerasa
© 2007 Near East Tourist
Agency (NET)
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