Glanum

Listen first. Cicadas fill the pines on the slopes above you, and the gravel crunches softly under your shoes. The light here is pale and dry, and it falls on pale stone. Ahead, a narrow valley opens between the white cliffs of the Alpilles, a small range of limestone hills. Low walls, broken columns and worn steps run up the valley floor. This is Glanum, a town that people lived in for centuries, and then left behind.

Before the walls, there was water. A spring rises at the head of this valley, where the rock closes in. Long before any Roman arrived, the local Celtic and Ligurian people treated that spring as sacred. They linked it to a healing god called Glanis and to a group of mother goddesses, the Glanicae. The town grew around the water and took its name from the god. Keep that spring in mind as you walk. Everything here points toward it.

Now for the first surprise. Many visitors expect a purely Roman site. But Glanum was shaped by Greeks as well. The Greek colony of Massalia, the city we now call Marseille, lay to the south. Its trade and its taste travelled up into Provence. By the second century before Christ, the people of Glanum were building in a Greek style. They raised houses around courtyards with columns, and public buildings with careful stonework cut in large, square blocks.

The local people even wrote in Greek letters. Archaeologists found inscriptions here in the Gaulish language, but spelled with the Greek alphabet. Think about that for a moment. A Celtic community, speaking its own tongue, writing it down with a script borrowed from Mediterranean traders. Glanum was a meeting place of cultures long before Rome took control. You can see that mix in the stones around you, where Greek precision sits beside later Roman additions.

Rome came next. After Julius Caesar besieged Massalia in 49 BC, the region moved firmly into the Roman world. Glanum was rebuilt and expanded. A forum appeared at the centre of town, with a basilica, which in Roman terms was a large hall for business and law courts. Temples rose nearby. The town gained baths, with rooms for hot water, warm water and cold water, in the Roman fashion. Daily life here began to look like life across the empire.

Look for the twin temples near the forum. They stood side by side, and part of one corner has been rebuilt so that you can judge their scale. The raised columns give the eye a sense of height that the low foundations cannot. Close by stood a small temple to Valetudo, the Roman goddess of health. An inscription links it to Marcus Agrippa, the close friend and general of the emperor Augustus. Once again, the theme is healing.

Walk south along the main street and the valley narrows. The ground climbs gently. On either side, foundations mark out houses, shops and sanctuaries. The street is the spine of the town, and it leads you straight toward the sacred spring. Near the end, a stone stairway descends to the water source. Pilgrims came here to drink, to bathe and to pray for cures. The same path still guides your feet today, almost two thousand years later.

Here is a second detail many people miss. The Romans did not trust the spring alone. Higher up the valley, they built a dam across the gorge to store water for the town. It is often described as one of the earliest Roman dams known in this part of the world. Very little of it survives, and later works changed the site. But the idea is clear. Glanum depended on water, and its builders worked hard to control it.

The town did not last forever. In the third century, around the 260s, raiders from beyond the Rhine moved through Gaul, and Glanum was badly damaged. Its people slowly abandoned the valley. They moved down onto the open plain to the north. That new settlement became, over the centuries, the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. So the modern town did not replace Glanum from outside. In a real sense, it is Glanum's descendant, just one short walk away.

Over time, earth and rubble from the hills washed down and covered the ruins. For centuries, only two monuments stood clear above the ground. Locals call them Les Antiques, which simply means the ancient ones. You passed them near the road at the entrance. Scholars noticed them long before anyone dug up the town. Serious excavation began in the early 1920s, and archaeologists worked here for decades. Much of what you see today came to light in the twentieth century.

Let us look again at those two monuments. The first is a triumphal arch, one of the oldest of its kind in Gaul, from the time of Augustus. Its carvings show captive prisoners in chains, a clear message about Roman power. The second is the mausoleum of the Julii, a tall tomb monument in three stages. An inscription says that three brothers of the Julius family raised it for their parents. It is remarkably complete, and it still stands almost whole.

There is one more neighbour worth knowing. Just across the road stands the old monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, which later became a hospital for the mentally ill. In 1889 and 1890, the painter Vincent van Gogh lived there as a patient. He painted the olive groves, the cypress trees and the jagged line of the Alpilles. The ruins of Glanum were still mostly buried then. But he looked at the same hills that rise above you now.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment near the forum and look up the valley. Notice how the cliffs frame the town, and how the street runs toward the hidden spring. Feel the warm stone, and listen to the cicadas again. Greeks, Gauls and Romans all walked this ground, each adding a layer. As you walk back toward the arch and the tomb, remember that the town around you began with a single source of water.