This month's World Heritage Site

Rome\'s Builders Outdid Even Themselves With Lebanon\'s Baalbek\'s Temple

By Patrick Totty Posted on History

Every school child knows the Romans built big. The Coliseum in Rome has been a popular movie backdrop for generations, and history books always seem to linger over photos of the great dome of the Pantheon or still-functioning Roman aqueducts in France.

But the Romans saved one of their biggest construction efforts for a far-flung outpost of their empire, in what is present-day Lebanon. The temple at Baalbek, about 40 miles northeast of Beirut, is the ruin of the largest religious structure ever built by Rome. The base of the temple, begun around 20 A.D., was almost 290 feet long (88 meters) and 160 feet wide (48 meters). The 54 columns that supported the structure’s immense roof were each more than seven feet (2.2 meters) in diameter and soared 65 feet in height.

Although the temple was dedicated to Jupiter Heliopolitanus, the Romans, in their typical syncretic fashion, set aside space for local Semitic gods, including Baal and Ashtar. In fact the local name for the temple site, Baalbek, was a derivative of the Semitic “baal beqaa,” “god of the plain.”

There was simply nothing else like it in the whole Roman Empire. The temple was so big that emperors often invoked Jupiter Heliopolitanus for auguries and support. They also added to the temple throughout the years, mandating and subsidizing the construction of courtyards, tributary temples and sculptural elements that, although eroded and vandalized through the ages, rank among the finest sculptures of ancient Rome.

Alas: With the fall of Rome and the subsequent rise of Byzantium and Islam, as well as hundreds of years of political turmoil, Baalbek fell into slow ruin. Much of its stonework was carted away by builders from near and far, attracted by the legendary quality of the marble quarried for its construction.

Today, the temple is only a shell of its former self. Yet visitors who make the easy trek from Beirut can still trace the immense foundation and observe the workmanship and scale of several smaller buildings that managed to remain remarkably intact. Six of the 54 great columns from the main temple still stand. Even in their miserably shrunken number, surrounded by ruins, they give modern travelers a shiver thinking about just how big the Romans dared to build.