Ba'albek, Politics and Power in Roman temples by Carolanne Mekeel-Matteson, BA, MFA Opposite the Lion in the Heavenly place is the Virgin, wreathed with corn ears, investress of Justice, foundress of cities, the gifts from which it has been our fortune to know the gods. So she is at one and the same time the mother of the gods, Peace, Virtue, Ceres, the Syrian goddess, weighing life and rights in the balance. Syria brought forth a constellation seen in heaven to receive the homage of Libya. Hence we have all learned. So Marcus Caecilius Donatianus serving as tribune in the duty of prefect by favour of the Emperor understood, led by thy deity. Third century pagan creed inscribed by an obscure soldier on a stone tablet found on the Roman wall at Carvoran in Northumbria THE REASON FOR THE ARCHITECTURE Julius Caesar conferred upon Beirut (which included Heliopolis) the title of “Roman colony” in 27 B.C. By the time of Augustus, Rome had begun an expansion eastwards and there became necessary a complex religious syncretism for the development of political colonization. 1 Diverse religious elements from all over the Empire were blended into a Roman religious state cult wherein any individual Roman citizen could feel a kinship to any other, regardless of his national or cultural origins. The prime architectural example of this Roman genius to rule was the temple and sanctuaries at Ba'albek in Syria. 2 [See Illustration 01 ] As Sir Mortimer Wheeler points out: Ba'albek is the end of one traditional and the beginning of another. Meanwhile it fitted the temper of the world into which it was born. It represents that momentary pause, which might properly be called the 'Antonine pause', in an age of vital transmutation; that moment of balance that was 'the period in history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.' In so doing, and in its own right, Ba'albek remains one of the very great monuments in the history of European architecture...” Mortimer Wheeler, Roman art and architecture, 1964, as quoted by Friedrich Ragette, Baalbek, page 51. 3 THE PROCESS OF SYNCRETICISM The term 'Antonine pause' so often used by art historians, is especially apt when used here at Ba'albek, 4 for it is a prime representative of the Syrian colony mode of Roman government in the east. When one age changes into another, one political era ends and another begins. We see in the syncretism which the temple complex at Ba'albek reflects, that the Romans were giving expression to a vital transmutation that was occurring in their world as the religious values of numerous cultural deities were distilled into a triad whose supreme deity was Ba'al/Jupiter-Heliopolitanus/Zeus. The success both politically and syncretically of the Romans can be measured by the difficulty art historians find when attempting to explicate the multiple iconographic links expressed in this art and architecture. 5 Therefore, before exploring the architecture of the temples themselves, it would be appropriate to look behind the structures and briefly explore both the gods and the east/west syncretism the Romans were promoting. If we can contend that Ba'albek was to become an exemplar of the religious-political system which began in the Augustinian period and was carried through Rome's golden age, then the manner in