Miletos

The ruins at Miletos include a magnificent amphitheatre, dating (in its present form) from the second century AD.

The city had a long and illustrious history, stretching back at least to 1,500 BC and including some of the earliest rational Greek thought about the nature of the physical world, in the 6th century BC. But the history was turbulent, including all the adult male population being killed and the women being sold into slavery by the Persian King Darius in the 490s BC, and also numerous struggles with other Greek powers.

Like so many of these Greek cities in the Aegean area of modern Turkey, which all came gradually under Roman dominion, Miletus had reached a period of sustained peace and prosperity by the second century AD, and that is reflected in the way the amphitheatre is built on a massive scale with huge blocks of marble (one wonders what tax burden the city’s rulers had to impose on the citizens to finance this extravagant construction). But you can see that the castle built centuries later on top of it is an altogether more desperate affair: no doubt built in a hurry, trying to protect the inhabitants from marauding invaders. Many of the other cities show the same sad decline in the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries, sometimes due to rivers silting up as well as to the relative weakness of the Byzantine state compared with what had gone before.