There's a Roman temple in Lebanon that's bigger than the Parthenon — and almost nobody talks about it. The Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek stands thirty-one metres tall, with columns nearly double the height of Athens' most famous building. Built around 150 CE, it's the best-preserved Roman temple on Earth. The adventurer Richard Halliburton, exploring in the 1930s, called it 'the Court of Happiness' — a name locals had used for centuries. But happiness doesn't capture what happened here.
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Gods & Monsters·4/5·1′
The place
Baalbek
The Temple of Ecstasy
Inside the best-preserved Roman temple on Earth, where initiates died and were reborn in rites that merged Greek Bacchus with Phoenician Adonis
c. 150 CE (construction under Antoninus Pius); Phoenician era (Adonis cult origins)Baalbek
Moral of the Story
“Every civilisation has sought the same impossible thing — a doorway between death and life, a way to die and return, to lose the self and find it again transformed — and the ruins of the Temple of Bacchus stand as proof that for a brief moment in history, in a valley in Lebanon, thousands of people believed they had found it.”
Characters
B
Bacchus/Dionysus (the dying-and-rising god)A
Adonis (the Phoenician youth whose blood turned the river red)T
The Maenads (ecstatic female followers)O
Otto Puchstein (German archaeologist, 1898-1905)R
Richard Halliburton (American adventurer-writer)Source
Macrobius, Saturnalia I.23; Euripides, The Bacchae; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii (fresco cycle); Puchstein, Otto & Wiegand, Theodor. Baalbek: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen, 1921-1925; Halliburton, Richard. Complete Book of Marvels; Hajjar, Youssef. La triade d'Héliopolis-Baalbek, 1977; Pococke, Richard. A Description of the East, 1745