CITY FROM THE SAND

For centuries Leptis Magna was a lost, buried city. Founded by far-ranging Phoenician traders, it was a great port in Carthaginian times. Later it was allied to Rome, but the city fathers made the mistake of siding with Pompey against Julius Caesar. For this the city was fined 300,000 measures of oil annually. Later still it became the home town of a Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, who made it one of the grandest and wealthiest cities of the empire. Nubian slaves, lions for the Roman arenas, ivory and African gold flowed through Leptis Magna into the civilized world, until the harbor silted up. Marauding Vandals sacked the city. Then, in A.D. 523 Berber raiders depopulated it. Sand crept in and swelled through the streets,, clogged the ancient irrigation system. By the 11th century Leptis Magna was utterly buried, forgotten.

In the 17th century a French consul dug down into the dunes, sent hundreds of ornate columns to Louis XIV. At the start of the 19th century an English sea captain sent home a second load of marble loot. It now ornaments the grounds at Windsor Castle. The winds blew and the dunes again covered what was left, until digging began in earnest in modern times.

There is still much digging to be done. But already there stands glowing against the Mediterranean blue a vast forest of marble splendor, slightly decadent in detail by Hellenic standards, and yet overpowering in total effect. The ruins, says Bernard Berenson, "are evocative and romantic to a degree that it would be hard to exaggerate. One wants to look and dream, and dream and look. Leptis is, all considered, one of the most impressive fields of ruins on the shores of the Mediterranean."

It is also one of the least visited. The sere, solemn world of Leptis Magna lies 76 desert miles east of Tripoli on Libya's Barbary Coast, reachable only by primitive bus or costly taxi. There are no guards in sight, and visitors often go home with a bit of the Classical Age in their pockets--usually a marble shard. It is possible for a traveler to ramble through this forest of fluted stone and broken stone bodies for hours without meeting anything at all of the present except himself, the burning air and the sea.

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