Ancient Stages

It's funny how history can be lost between stones and grass, between the distance of time and memory. I stood on the ruins of the tribunes of the Greek ampitheater of Taormina and felt a thousand lifetimes flash by. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be an ancient Greek, washed and ready to take in a night of theater. What it would be like to be there when all was still whole, the ampitheater standing polished, gleaming stone in the saddle of a hill, with the open back of the stage giving way to a backdrop so perfect it couldn't be painted. Etna, the ever-present house of the god Hephaestus, standing tall behind the stage. I’d be there to worship, the theater my temple, the stories of gods and men played before me. Three tragedies and a comedy, all that’s needed to achieve catharsis. Perhaps I’d walk to the back of the theater first, to look out over the endless blue of the Ionian sea and the Mediterranean beyond, towards Greece, towards home.

Then the Romans came, the theater expanded and rebuilt with brick. The tragedies of the Greek stage gave way to the everyday tragedies of the death of gladiators, killed for sport, for spectacle, the temple transformed into a circus. But that couldn't last forever. Somewhere across the sea, an empire collapsed, and with that, the Arabs came to Taormina. They couldn’t abide the Romans, or the town, and destroyed everything they could. The pillars of the stage fell, and the stage lay dormant, for decades leaving only the silent, far-off eruptions of Etna to play to empty seats.

Eventually, the Spanish came. Taking advantage of what was already there, a rich family turned the lofted space above the entrance into an apartment with an incredible view and an amazing backyard (I wondered if they ever picnicked on the seats. I knew that if I lived there, I’d eat breakfast over the ocean every day).

The centuries passed across the stage, and with them kingdoms rose and fall, the earth shook and the mountain erupted, taking with it most of a far-off city, and still, the theater stood. Even when the bombs came, during a war that engulfed the entire world for the second time, the theater remained.

As I stood there on 2200 years of history, surrounded by an ephemeral parade of other tourists, I wondered what the following centuries would bring, what history the stage would host or bear witness to. I wondered if, even after humans were gone, if the theater would still remain, its stage lit only by the passing sun and the fires of Etna.