Paul Veyne is a French archaeologist and historian and an honorary professor at the College de France. He is the author of several books in French as well as Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Teresa Lavender Fagan is a freelance translator living in Chicago; she has translated numerous books for the University of Chicago Press and other publishers.
"A short, angry eulogy. . . . A colourful and very readable account
of a city that thrived in the middle ground between political
empires and cultural worlds, refocused on its recent destruction
and on a single question: why?"
-- "London Review of Books"
"Palmyra (a best seller in France in 2015) is the merest wisp of a
book. You could comfortably read it in an hour. It offers no
radical new theories about the history or culture of ancient
Palmyra. Mr. Veyne is one of the foremost living historians of the
ancient world, and here, without jargon or pedantry, he describes
the city's art, its religion, its architecture, and its people.
What cannot be expressed in words is shown in photographs. . . .
Scarcely more than a page is explicitly dedicated to the Islamic
State, but don't be fooled. The Islamists' destruction of Palmyra
is the true subject of every word of the book. . . . Mr. Veyne's
book is propelled by an argument of luminous simplicity. . . . The
final sentence of the book should be carved over the entrance to
every school in the world: 'Yes, without a doubt, knowing, wanting
to know, only one culture--one's own--is to be condemned to a life
of suffocating sameness.' Mr. Veyne does not mention Islamic State;
he doesn't need to. . . .This is a book of passion and moral
integrity that ought to be read by anyone with the slightest
interest in the ancient world."-- "Wall Street Journal"
"Veyne, the most eminent living historian of Rome, has written an
elegiac lament on the meaning for world history of this looted
city. His short book describes how Palmyra, an oasis on the route
across the north Syrian desert, around the turn of the common era
became immensely wealthy as a staging post in the trade route from
the Roman Empire to the Parthian Kingdom and the lands beyond as
far as India and China. . . . Veyne's account offers an excellent
survey of the relationship between the city and the wider Roman
Empire."
-- "Times Literary Supplement"
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