In every country with a long history, there was necessarily a good ruler, about whom no one would say a bad word. True, in Russia this question remains open. Some admire Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, while others consider them tyrants and murderers. Someone believes that Alexei Mikhailovich not in vain received the nickname Quiet, and some delve into the distant past and worship Alexander Nevsky or Vladimir Svyaty.
There were two such good rulers in the Roman Empire. Even the most critical writers could not find anything wrong with the actions of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan. The first was such a modest man that, having written one of the greatest philosophical treatises in the history of mankind, "To Myself," he did not show it to anyone, and this manuscript was found only after his death. Can you imagine an emperor who wrote a great philosophical work and would not order it to be studied in school as a compulsory discipline? But what I like most about Marcus Aurelia is that when they brought him a bunch of letters written by his enemies, who raised a rebellion and relied on many nobles in Rome itself, the emperor immediately burned these letters in front of everyone.
Marcus Aureliib.
“I don’t want,” he said calmly, “to be disappointed in friends and lose confidence in people.
It's so good that the conspirators were defeated and no one stabbed the emperor in the back.
Trajan became emperor at a mature age. He, too, was an amazing person. For example, Trajan did not want to travel around Rome in a stretcher, and until old age he walked on foot so that from his own greatness, as he laughingly said, he would not forget how to use his legs. And he knew how to use his legs - he was incredibly strong and enduring, he could walk the mountains for weeks and row on the galley all day like a simple rower.
Do not think that Trajan was a simpleton - such sages as Tacitus and Pliny, who wrote about him, would surely have noticed this.
Like Marcus Aurelius, he did things that it would not be a sin to remember and repeat to other rulers, but they usually do not.
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Trajan did not tolerate informers and Roman security agencies. When he came to power, Rome was literally stuffed with informers, because they received a share of the property of a man who dared to speak disrespectfully about the emperor or tell a joke. Denunciation became a lucrative business, no one was immune from the terrible execution - and all the relatives of the accused were also executed. Nobody was going to check the denunciations - it's unprofitable.
Do you know what Trajan did when he ascended the throne? He took all the lists of the security service and ordered to collect all informers around the country. They were put on somehow put together ships and sent to the open sea. Trajan said: "Let them sail, let them flee from the land devastated by their denunciations, and if storms and thunderstorms save someone from the rocks, let them settle on the bare cliffs."
And for the future, Trajan decided not to initiate any cases based on denunciations, and if the denunciation is secret and anonymous, burn it without reading it.
And do you know what happened in ancient Rome?
"Our fear," wrote Pliny, "is not inspired by informers, but by laws."
I would like to tell about the life and death of Trajan in connection with the secret of Baalbek.
You may not have heard of such a place, but it is worth learning about it. Or maybe you even want to go there someday. By the way, these days Baalbek hosts annual open-air music festivals, and the best orchestras in the world perform there.
To get to Baalbek, you need to climb the dry slopes of the Lebanese mountains, and behind them will open a fertile valley, where the Phoenician city of Baal Bek has long stood, that is, the city of the god Baal, which in Russian is called Baal. In time immemorial, a temple was built in the city dedicated to the local god Khalad, who ruled over lightning and rain and was considered the embodiment of the Sun. It is not surprising that the Romans, sensitive to local indigenous religions, rebuilt the temple and called it the Temple of Jupiter, and the city was renamed Heliopolis - the city of the Sun.
Heliopolis was advantageously located at the crossroads of trade routes in a fertile, water-rich valley. In addition, it was the most important rear base of the Romans in their endless wars with the Parthians.
The temple in Heliopolis was famous all over the world, and since the temple is known, then, as a rule, another oracle appears with it, predicting an unfavorable future for the commanders and emperors.
And the glorious emperor Trajan, starting the war with Parthia, could not help but visit Heliopolis and consult with the oracle.
Trajan, as an intelligent person, did not come to the oracle empty-handed. He brought back a clean writing tablet wrapped in a rag. All commentators, talking about this, are amazed at the mind and foresight of the emperor, and I wondered for a long time, what did Trajan want to say in a world where it was supposed to be explained with the fate of riddles? Is it that he is as pure as an untouched tablet, and his fate is not written? Or asked to reflect his future on a clean tablet?
An oracle is not a person, but a place of fortune-telling, where the fortuneteller himself or a team of fortune-tellers sits, who informs the next commander the bad news about his fate. And in response to the blank tablet brought by Trajan, the priest of the oracle, thinking, gave the emperor the same blank tablet.
The emperor was shocked by the oracle's insight. I think that the meaning of the answer was this: guess, do not guess, but how you came into the world naked, you will leave it. However, I may be wrong, but if you offer your own version of the meaning of the prediction, then you can also be wrong.
On the same day, Trajan got tired of talking in riddles, and he asked directly:
- Now tell me how it will end?
And he was given a bunch of twigs, wrapped in the same rag as the clean plate.
At this point I ask you to stop and try to guess what that answer meant.
Lots of options!
It was 116 years old. Trajan got screwed up, accepting the gift of the priests, and went on a campaign.
I think that if he defeated the enemy, the beam would mean many victories. If he lost the war, then the rods would mean the tribes and peoples who together defeated him.
But Trajan did not manage to do either one or the other. He fell ill with dysentery and died, and when his body was burned at the stake, the priests of the oracle began to shout at all the intersections: we warned that he would be burned at the stake of twigs!
The emperor's position was hopeless: no matter what the oracle said, the priests would still claim that he guessed right.
But the glory of the oracle from Heliopolis was so great that all the emperors and consuls began to look there for the light, listen to advice, and then spend months trying to figure out their meaning.
Soon a command came from Rome to build a temple in Heliopolis for all the temples. This is how the prediction made for Trajan was appreciated!
The construction was delayed for decades, although it was tirelessly watched from Rome. The Severian dynasty considered the temple to be the main one in the empire, perhaps because Lebanese blood flowed in their veins.
The temple was so huge that they could not complete it, and few people knew that the original plans of the architects were never implemented.
The Acropolis, that is, a complex of temple buildings, began with a wide staircase on which an entire legion of soldiers could be accommodated. A fifteen-meter arch decorated with sculptures led into a courtyard surrounded by a colonnade. The area of this yard was more than a hectare.
In the middle of the courtyard was a huge altar for sacrifices.
The columns that surrounded the courtyard were almost worth their weight in gold. They were cut from porphyry from the quarries of Egypt. The columns were transported to Beirut by sea, and from there they were dragged through the mountains.
The central courtyard closed the Temple of Jupiter. He stood on a platform that rested on slabs. Each of the slabs was equal to twenty meters in length, five in height and four in width. Cutting out such a slab and then delivering it to the site from the quarry is very difficult even today. It was not for nothing that, after several centuries, the Arabs, who took possession of those places, were sure that the slabs were ordered to be transferred to the genies by King Suleiman, that is, the biblical Solomon.
The genies had nothing to do with it. The Roman Empire had wonderful engineers, and they would never do extra work. But they knew that earthquakes are frequent in this area, and the temple was ordered to be built for centuries.
Therefore, the foundation of the temple must be powerful, heavy, in order to extinguish the impact of an earthquake of any strength. In addition, there were vast cellars under the temple, and the slabs served as ceilings for them - after all, the temple itself was incredibly heavy.
But the volume of work was beyond the reach of even Roman engineers. As a result, only three slabs were laid at the base of the temple, which were collectively called "trilithon". Each of the slabs weighs a thousand tons, from each one could build a building twenty meters long and fifteen meters high with walls half a meter thick.
An attentive observer will immediately notice that according to the plan there should have been four plates. But the place of the fourth is occupied by several relatively small slabs.
No documents have survived to explain why the fourth slab remained in the quarry a few kilometers from Baalbek. Its weight exceeds the weight of the rest of the plates, and the person who climbed on it looks like an ant on a suitcase.
The temple of Jupiter stands on the platform formed by the trilithon plates. The temple is surrounded by columns, which also deserve mention.
The diameter of each of the columns is three meters, they are much higher than twenty meters, that is, their height is equal to the height of a seven-story building. Each column weighs a little less than a slab, and each, moreover, is crowned with a multi-ton, magnificent capital. These columns, the creation of an engineering genius, are much more complex than slabs.
Inside the temple was a statue of Jupiter-Helios.
Ancient authors write that he was young, beardless and dressed in the tunic of a charioteer, in his right hand he held a thunderbolt, and in his left he immediately had lightning and a sheaf of wheat.
Every year a festival was held in Heliopolis, and the statue was taken out of the temple. It is curious that black stones, most likely meteorites, were kept in the temple's reliquaries. It is curious that the deification of meteorites and the understanding that these are precisely heavenly stones is characteristic of the Middle East. After all, the meteorite became the center of veneration in Mecca - in the Kaaba.
Heliopolis flourished before the arrival of Christianity. This religion supplanted the cheerful and formidable, sometimes magnanimous, and more often vengeful and even petty gods of Antiquity. The decline of Heliopolis stretched for centuries. And one must understand that the wealth of the temple was behind this. But over the years, temple holidays became more and more modest, and young Helios had fewer and fewer admirers.
Heliopolis, although it lost its significance as a religious center and the discerning priests of the local oracle were long forgotten, remained a prosperous city on trade routes, and Christian churches were built next to the dilapidated bulk of pagan temples - and besides the temple of Helios it was also famous for other buildings - Christian churches were built. The Byzantine emperor Theodosius already in the 4th century ordered the construction of a Christian cathedral in the courtyard of the Helios temple. It was built, but, apparently, the architects and engineers were weaker than the Roman ones - after a few decades, the cathedral collapsed. Not a trace of him remained.
Another Byzantine emperor ordered the porphyry columns to be broken down, transported to Constantinople and used in the construction of the Hagia Sophia. They decorate that cathedral today.
The robbed and half-forgotten temple of Helios was still holding on. Even when the Byzantines left those lands, giving way to the Arabs. Several earthquakes destroyed the remains of the city, and the temple survived - it was so magnificently designed. But people turned out to be stronger than nature. First, the Arabs and then the Turks used the temple as a fortress. They felled columns and demolished walls to build redoubts. Yet the temple has not disappeared.
The pillars of the temple that remained without a roof fell with each subsequent earthquake. After the devastating earthquake of 1759, only six columns remained. But they still stand.
Today archaeologists have cleared the acropolis to the best of their ability, found small temples of this complex. Once a year, symphony orchestras from all over the world gather there for the festival.
And if a thousand years ago the Arabs were sure that the temple was built by the genies by order of Tsar Suleiman, then in recent years another version has gained popularity.
In my opinion, it belongs to the breed of false secrets.
With the onset of the space age, legends have spread about aliens who have visited Earth on flying saucers and have built and painted a lot of things here. Even the primitive frescoes in the Sahara are theirs.
Alien supporters rewrite each other's versions, and this is how the secret of the Trilithon Heliopolis, which is now known under the Arabic name Baalbek, looks like in their presentation: “Until now, the questions cannot be considered resolved: by whom, when and for what purposes these“cyclopean”plates were carved …. It can be assumed that the cosmonauts surveyed the solar system by small ships, starting from the Earth. For these purposes, they may have needed to extract additional nuclear fuel on Earth and build special sites and storage facilities … Do the named distinctive structures, such as the Baalbek terrace, belong to these monuments? " This is what M. Aprest wrote in his article "Cosmonauts of Antiquity", but similar words can be found in many other similar works.
Of course, any reasonable person will only smile when they imagine alien aliens who were able to travel hundreds of light years, and on Earth they started making terraces for "small ships", because, you see, it was inconvenient to take off without these plates.
But so that there are no doubts, I suggest that you visit the quarries near Baalbek and look at the slab that the Roman engineers could not put in place, because the funding was cut (or the aliens did not put it, as they were rushing home to their Alpha Centauri).
If you look at the fourth slab, you will see numerous traces of chisels used by stonecutters, and more recently, until tourists flooded these regions, and chisels themselves were found in abundance there. However, traces of rather primitive processing are also visible on the main slabs of the trilithon.
And imagine an alien, terribly educated and enlightened, who sits on his haunches in the scorching sun and hammers a stone with a chisel. And this happens in the center of the eastern part of the Roman Empire, in 180 AD, in a densely populated country, in front of thousands of legionnaires and hundreds of thousands of local plowmen.
But sometimes we love not the secrets themselves, but incredible secrets, preferably with the participation of aliens, vampires and ghosts. What do we need slaves and engineers for when it's much sweeter to talk about space aliens!
And I am always offended if our ancestors, who knew how to build Egyptian pyramids and lay slabs at the base of the Temple of Helios, build the Great Wall of China or the Tower of Babel, are robbed of the fruits of their labors and give them to someone unknown. They didn't deserve such treatment.
I. Mozheiko
