What do moth species and cutworms, among many lepidoptera and virus, have to do with Alexander the Great? Where do the Pheromones and Antoninus of Apamea converge on Alexander's Asian Empire? Perhaps a cultivated and enterprising entomologist was inspired by the name or, more likely, by the idyllic setting or the impassioned history, of one of Syria's most romantic sites. For there, on the right bank of the Orontes on the Plain of Ghaab (or Al-Ghab), about three kilometers from the Al-Assi river, 55 kilometers from Hama, Seleukos Nikator I, "the Victorious, the Triumphant", one of Alexander's surviving generals elevated to the status of a reigning monarch, built one of the most beautiful of all the Hellenistic cities of Asia, and he named it for the lovely Apamee, or Apamea, his Persian wife.

The Macedonian conquest would appear to have been impeccably timed, and served to almost magically transform Western Asia. Though far from perfect, and definitely erratic given the disparity in the land, its peoples, their societies and faiths, the political and cultural infusion was such that it long outlived the successor states of Alexander's fleeting, and fanciful, adventure, creating lasting changes in communication, in art, literature, trade, jurisprudence, religion and mythology, education, and what Aristotle had laid down as the beginnings of science, but most important for a people who loved commerce and the luxuries or novelties it provided, it made possible a fuller economic exchange between the Asian and the European worlds. Despite wars, insurrections, revolutions, corruption, dissent -- all the permanent foibles of the human condition -- the Seleucid Empire was to give the Near East an economic order and a structure of justice - a unifying force-that Persia had provided prior to Alexander, and which Rome would supply after Caesar. "Harmony," says historian Will Durant, "was enforced by the kings, and was literally worshipped by the people as a god", thus fostering an enviable Greek world that at least for the Macedonians - for they, themselves, were outsiders -- idealized Greek values, but which would never again be fully Greek.

The so-called Hellenistic years - a catch-all term that has come to define a loose period over a vague geography, following the repartition of Alexander's conquests among a number of his otherwise incompatible and disharmonious generals-- were nonetheless worldly and wealthy, and eclectic in the best sense of the term. Commerce was the life of the economy. The river valleys, fertile then beyond belief, produced the stuff of great fortunes. The land was effectively irrigated by a system of canals. Bankers provided public and private credit, so coinage replaced the barter system. Ships were larger and faster, and overland routes more efficient. For two of these, however, the rival Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties fought the "Syrian Wars" that finally weakened them both to the point of vulnerability in the face of the inevitable destabilizing strategies and the ultimate military onslaught of Rome.

Until then the Seleucid monarchy, heir to the Asiatic territories and with them their traditions, was absolute. The Court, in nearly every aspect Oriental, was nevertheless elevated on Greek speech, administrative order and the loyalty of the Greek population, for which the Seleucid kings labored to restore former Greek cities and to establish new ones. Seleucos I founded nine Seleucias, six Antiochs, five Laodiceas, three Apameas, one Stratonice.

The Hellenistic infiltration was therefore a Renaissance of sorts, described by historians (see: Graham Shipley, The Greek World After Alexander, 323-30 B.C., London, Routledge, 2000) as one of the most fruitful and surprising of ancient history. "No change so swift nor so far-reaching had ever been seen in Asia," says Amelie Kuhrt. This vigorous, imaginative and definitely resourceful culture was full of variety, refinement and intensity. It was especially rich in art and learning. Yet with all of this, "Greek intellect made no entry into the Oriental mind," continues Will Durant, "so beyond the Mediterranean coast the Greek veneer grew thin, as at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris or Doura Europos on the Euphrates. There was no such fusion of races and cultures as Alexander had envisioned." For all practical purposes the Greeks accepted the Oriental deities, the East insinuated its fatalism into Greek philosophy, and all the while the Syrian cults - opulent, pleasurable, obsessive, succulent-- proceeded to enthrall the invading Macedonians. "The Greeks offered the East philosophy, the East offered Greece religion; religion, the more imperative of the two, became in the end triumphant."

At the beginning of Seleucos' reign Syria stretched from the Arabian Gulf to the Black Sea, from the Bosporus to the Tigris and Euphrates, and while these territories gradually shrank over the years, because of dispute and dissention, the core of the empire remained in the Orontes valley, with its tall grasses for the pasturing of a million horses. According to Roman geographer and historian Strabo, "Here the colt-breakers, hoplite trainers, and all the other educationalists in military matters drew their salaries." Seleucos, he says, owned 300 stallions, 30,000 mares and 500 elephants trained for combat. The commercially successful crossroads on the broad plain of Ghaab became crucial to the empire's Mediterranean dominions. Apamea, along with Antiochia, Seleucia and Laodicea - the Tetropolis -- was by this time considered one of the four most important cities in the region, in effect the power base of the Seleucids in Syria.

The settling of Apamea was by no means arbitrary. Archaeological discoveries verify early habitation, even to the extent of a workshop for the production of flints during the Paleolithic. An agrarian settlement occupied the site during the Neolithic, making it contemporary to Chatal Huyuk in central Anatolia, and to the same degree devoted to the figure of the Earth Mother. Scrapers, knives and scythes have been unearthed, indicating continuity of habitation until the Bronze Age. The first real community, however, with its orchards, grapevines, and great flocks of sheep, was possibly founded, according to Hittite texts, by Arkoulini, king of Hama.

The valley came to be called Urhilina during the ninth century B.C. It was described as Niya in an Egyptian account of an expedition by Amenhotep. It was known as Pharanke (or Pharneke) during a period of Persian influence under the Al Furs Empire during the fifth century B.C. When Eskandar al-Makdouni (Alexander the Great) occupied Syria after the battle of Issus in 333 B.C. he named it Pella, in memory of his Macedonian birthplace. He, like all the others, perceived the potential in the lovely setting.

According to Strabo, "there was an acropolis, mostly well-defended, for it is a well-fortified hill in a hollow plain. The Orontes makes it like a peninsula, as does a large lake lying round it which discharges itself into wide marshes and exceedingly large meadows for oxen and horses. And thus the city is securely located…and it enjoys an extensive and blessed land through which the Orontes flows and dependent towns occur frequently in it."

The original site of Seleucos' acropolis - by this time called Apamea, Afamia, Euphemia or Femie -- was atop the eastern slope of the hill that rises above what later came to be the Ottoman khan, and until the sixteenth century when it was called Al-Madiq, or Al Naher al-Makhloub, it was still referred to as the Apamea Citadel.

Seleucos expanded his new Apamea in 331 B.C., down the western face of the Alzawieh Mountain until it spilled across the plain, to an eventual urban plan of 250 hectares, with agora, theater, temples, baths, palaces, villas, fountains, public buildings and, joining them all, the spectacular colonnaded Cardo Maximus, that stretches to a vanishing point among the green fields and the red poppies in the distance.

Because Numenius of Apamea was born here, the city became the center of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy, indulged during the reign of Iamblichos. This late second century B.C. Greek philosopher who with Maximus of Tyre was responsible for the transition from Platonist idealism to Neoplatonic synthesis, managed to bridge the Hellenistic, Persian and Jewish intellectual systems, to reaffirm, in his words, that "matter and God are inherently separate". In other times this might have seemed a heresy of sorts, but philosophers in Apamea were treated with infinite indulgence. "Matter," he insisted, "was evil and negative, a hindrance to the spirit." So it was a dual figure, a demigod or Demiurge, he said, who was responsible for the Creation. None of this deterred Poseidonius of Apamea (135-50 B.C.). The celebrated Greek philosopher, astronomer and mathematician, a student of Panaetius, developed a new Stoic tradition of ethics and carried it to Rhodes, where it flourished until his death. Oppianus of Apamea also brought fame to the city with his poetry, prose and drama.

Apamea's jurisdiction ultimately grew until it filled the entire valley, finally encompassing an area as large as 600 square kilometers. About one hundred years after the founding of the Hellenistic city, however, under constant threat of Persian invasion, its urban core came to be enclosed by trapezoidal walls, with well over fifty towers, all now ruined, and four monumental gates, around the six kilometers of the city perimeter.

Apamea was especially propitious as a military base, with its rich pastureland for the horses and elephants, and the school for the training of the war elephants brought, along with their mahouts, or handlers, from India. It seems Seleucos had personally traded them for land he was in any case ill-equipped to administer, territories that straddled the legendary Gandhara region in what today lies along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The elephants were in fact revered. An elephant adorned one of Apamea's coins, and the best and bravest of the great beasts, for distinction in battle, was awarded a silver "Medal of Merit".

Apamea's military role continued into the Roman era, that began with the conquest of Syria by Pompey (64-63 B.C.), and the designation of the Syrian Province. In the first century B.C. the satirical poet "Juvenal" (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) wrote: "The Syrian Orontes now flows into the Tiber, bringing its language and customs." Though an earthquake practically leveled Apamea in 115 A.D., because of its cultural, commercial and military importance Hadrian, by this time emperor, ordered it rebuilt.

Apamea served as the winter quarters for the Second Legion. Inscribed in Latin in memory of the soldiers of the Parthian unit formed by Septimus Severus were one hundred and ten headstones, discovered by archaeologists in one of the eastern towers. A peace agreement between Rome and Persia in 162 A.D., however, required the slaughter of the elephant battalion, a very unpopular demand.

By the end of the third century Diocletian had divided Syria into five separate Roman provinces. The region, densely populated despite the gradual expiring of the local dynasties, remained prosperous, producing an abundance of corn and olives. "Syria is the granary of the empire," it was said in Rome, "and is just as rich in the literary and the artistic."

After the Edict of Constantine, Apamea was further enriched by a number of churches, and assumed as well an important role in the conversion of the local population. Perhaps the early Earth Mother cult lent itself to the worship of the Virgin Mother. Yet by virtue of these ramified roots, a number of other, singular, cults emerged.

St. Julian of Apamea, a third century bishop, appointed himself the most stalwart opponent of Montanism, an ecstatic prophetic movement named after its founder, Montanus (c. 170 A.D.). It was known until the fourth century as the "Phrygian heresy", from its place of origin and greatest source of support. Montanist prophets, in apparent anticipation of Sufism, claimed direct oracular revelations from God, in support of their teachings on the ecstatic nature of prophesying, on eschatology, and on asceticism.

Polychronius, from Antioch, was Bishop of Apamea until his death in 430, and according to his writings, struggled constantly against the inherent conflict "in the proliferation of new heresies, in which every man has his own theology." Introverted asceticism, he claimed, "vied with theatrical severities." He advised instead to till the fields, which he considered "an excellent prayer."

Markellos (Marcellus) of Apamea was a fourth century Cyprus-born bishop, who "pursued idol-worshippers", wrecking and burning their temples and altars. The "pagans" ultimately consigned him to the flames that, it was said, he himself had created, "by calling down divine intervention onto the Temple of Zeus Belos", and so, wrote the Christian historians of the day, "he died as a martyr for Christ." The controversy nevertheless continued, while the "pagans" argued that the Christians, in their veneration of the saints, were as much idol-worshipers as anyone else.

Apamea, with a high ranking among Syria's bishoprics, ultimately became a center for Monophysitism, an endless harangue on the Christian myth. Was Jesus human or divine? If he was human he suffered. Was this suffering warranted? And if he was divine, he was resurrected. Or was he? The adherence to a "one nature" Christology lured dogmatists for generations, while the debate ramified into dozens of sects. One of these, the Nestorians, proliferated throughout Byzantium and meantime the Eastern Christians -- Coptic, Jacobite, Armenian, Nubian and Ethiopian -opposed the brand of Christology expounded by the Council of Chalcedon. This led the Prophet, Mohammed himself, to debate the point, and thus the sacred Koran begins with an often-mistranslated phrase. The customary "There is no God but Allah…" is supposed to read: "There is no god but God". "Allah" in any case means "God" in Arabic, so instead of the redundancy the intention was a clarification: Jesus Christ is a prophet but he is not God. Only God is God. God may be called by any name, in any language, Yehovah, Mazda, Allah, but He is One, and One Alone.

Christian debate and disunity, surrounding the same subject, continued until the resurgence of the Persian invasions, in the sixth century A.D. Apamea resisted a siege by Chosroes I in 540 but succumbed in 573, until the emperor Heraclios recovered the city for the Byzantines, between 613 and 628, a condition he was able to maintain until the advent of Islam. With the Arab invasion, headed by Abi Obeida Ibn el-Jarah, Apamea preferred to surrender peacefully, in 638. The commercial importance of the site, however, and its strategic location, caused the Byzantines, in 975, to renew their struggle to regain it.

Apamea remained peaceably in Byzantine hands for eighteen years. Then in 1106 the city was overwhelmed by the Crusader Tancred, who brought it under the jurisdiction of the Principality of Antioch. Nur ad-din Mahmoud ibn Zanki, known through history as the great Nuradin -- one of the most compelling of all Muslin leaders, and mentor of Saladin who followed him -- took the citadel hill back from the crusaders in 1149.

Not long afterward, in 1157, and again in 1170, catastrophic earthquakes shook northern Syria and destroyed Apamea, along with Hama, the nearby citadel of Shaizar, Homs (Emesa) and Antioch, among other key sites. Except for a small handful, the resolute who refused to abandon their homes, most of the population fled from the valley. Nuradin rebuilt the fortress on the citadel hill in 1158, a labor that continued during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods, still conserving the name of Apamea, but the city below was left in ruins, to be visited only by the occasional scholar or traveler, who might be inspired to produce monographs on its history or odes to its sweet, verdant beauty, the butterflies among the fallen columns, the dragonflies, the lizards and frogs.

In 1928 the Fondation Nationale de Recherce Scientifique of Bruselles began a series of archaeological studies, including mapping and excavations, which continued in 1930-8, 1947, 1965 and 1992. Their labors determined that the Greeks, making good use of the essentially flat valley floor, had adopted a grid pattern city plan. The main street, completed under Marcus Aurelius (161-180) stretched from the Antioch Gate at its north end for about two kilometers, straight as an arrow to the southern gate. As opposed to the colonnaded main street at Palmyra, to which the camel caravans had access, the avenue at Apamea was paved. Fifteen cross streets intersected it from east to west. Gigantic columns ten meters high lined the street on either side, each column placed at three meters from the other, in all 1200 columns. Porticoes, as to the Assembly Hall, were also decorated with columns, using a variety of design motifs. Most noteworthy is the spiral, or fluted design, for which the columns in Apamea are justifiably celebrated, but others were square or circular, topped by Hellenistic capitals, the architraves graced by sculptures of city leaders embraced by garlands in a delicate pattern of exquisite foliage.

The rectangular plaza, with its shops, shaded arcades and stalls in a concentration of all daily activities, was considered an essential element of city planning. The Apamea plaza - the forum or agora -- was located near the Cardo Maximus in the center of the city, and probably dates from Hadrian's reign (117-138). It measured 150 by 25 meters and was adorned with columns of varied design.

The theater was also a fundamental characteristic of any Hellenistic city, a custom inherited from Classical Greece that continued into the Roman era. Greek theaters were backed up against a hill - as opposed to the free-standing Roman theaters-and Apamea's, dating from the second century, was reinforced in the acropolis mound. It was nevertheless modified under the Romans, to become one of the largest on record, with a diameter of 135 meters. Its ruined state is attributed, more than to earthquake, to the fact of the stones being ransacked for the rebuilding of the citadel, which was itself destroyed by earthquake.

The stones were cannibalized again to build the Ottoman khan under order of Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century, to house merchants and pilgrims on their travels between Istanbul and Anadoul on the Antioch road. Located to the south of the Al-Madiq citadel, 226 meters above sea level, the square plaza measures 80 by 80 meters. A large courtyard in the center looks straight up at the citadel's colossal retaining walls, and was surrounded by a number of vaulted rooms, all confected of the recycled stone brought block by block down the hill. A small traveler's mosque, also from the Ottoman period, stands on a slope just above the khan, under the citadel walls.

Though grown shabby over the years, the khan was nonetheless rescued and rebuilt, and since 1982 has served very well, within its limitations and with poor lighting, as the on-site archaeological museum. It is especially famous for its extraordinary mosaics, too many, it seems, to display them all. Mosaic art, originated in Egypt and Mesopotamia, was eventually taken over by the Greeks, who lifted it to its apogee. This propitiated its continuation in the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine worlds, and by association, well into the art of the early Umayyad period. The desired painting was "quadriculated", that is, divided by a grid into small square units. Scraps of stone, usually marble, granite or alabaster (a young marble), of varied colors, were then assembled to reproduce the painting, in all its detail and nuances of light and shadow -definitely an art of its own - that lent itself to application as a flooring material, able to survive the treading of millions of footsteps. A masterpiece composition could contain as many as a million and a half stone fragments, averaging two to three millimeters square. The Apamea mosaics, by contrast with the pictorial compositions found elsewhere, for example, in Shahba or Antioch, tended to representations of nature: idyllic scenes of ducks and partridges, a large waterwheel, lions pursuing an oryx, a soldier leading his horse through an enchanted garden, a camel convoy, deer in the forest.

Museum displays include as well the obelisks and columns from one of the towers in the wall, along with Greek and Latin obelisks, discovered in the necropolis outside the city's limits, adjacent to the wall. Sarcophaguses from the second century, intricately carved and mostly of local gypsum, describe the devotion of a mate to her spouse, skill in battle, wisdom in public administration. One such sarcophagus, with a crown carried by angels, was found on the Cardo Maximus. Since the necropolis had long since been plundered it was assumed by the Belgian archaeologists that the lovely marble sculpture had been reduced to serving as a deposit for rainwater. As for the tombs, they were constructed in layers in towers, or, on the contrary, were arranged in neat rows of crypts in a subterranean format, or hypogeum. Rock tombs were not unknown.

The richly decorated and harmoniously designed temples were the signature structures of the site; they bridged the Hellenistic regime into the Roman period. A grapevine motif adorned the Temple of Bacchus and was easily identified by the archaeological team. All that remains of the Temple of Zeus Belos, however, after Marcellus' destruction in 384-385 in his attempt to exorcize idolatry, are the foundation walls.

Public baths became especially fashionable during the Roman period and the custom spread throughout Syria. The central section (Tepidarium) and inner hot tubs (Caldarium) are all that survive but they are still visible to one side of the main street.

Aerial photogrammetry revealed the route of the water channels, and subsequent excavations were able to unearth and reassemble the square pillars that supported the arches of the aqueducts. A tunnel system further distributed water through limestone ducts, 90 centimeters in diameter, with an inside diameter of 45 centimeters. Pottery water pipes with a diameter of 25-30 centimeters, of the sort still in use inside the souks in Aleppo, branched out from the main channels. The water came from a number of sources, some as nearby as three kilometers, another that drained from the citadel hill and, eighty kilometers distant, the main source in Al-Salamieh or Salimiye, still in use today.

Domestic architecture was less spectacular than the public buildings and was generally uniform, actually quite rustic and unpretentious, with a stone façade and a modestly decorated portico, that led to a square inner courtyard. Reception and dining areas occupied the ground floor. The demand for housing grew as people gravitated to the city from the surrounding countryside. The palaces, on the other hand, in which the ruling class lived and entertained, were quite grand, and competed for the most elaborate mosaics.

The most important Christian ruin discovered to date, with its huge façade composed of three columns on the order of the Basilica to St. Simeon (Qalaat Samaan) near Aleppo, is the Cathedral, on a typically Byzantine cross plan, with rich ornamentation and a number of mosaics. An inscription confirms the consecration of an earlier church, or martyrium, as the cathedral -- destined to house a Holy Cross, later vanished -- in 535 A.D. The cross was reputed to have come from Jerusalem after the sacking and burning of the Holy Sepulchre, but this was never confirmed. A number of the Apamea churches were documented in Constantine's lists of 536, thus providing a clue to the excavations, in the badly damaged archaeological remains.

Many of the fallen columns have been set upright. Others remain tossed and broken in the grass. Buildings have collapsed. A part of Apamea's history is buried with the stones. But nothing can dim the perfume of the flowers or the hum of the bees in the wheat that grows for the farmers in the valley, who cultivate around the ruins. Cows graze where the elephants once fed, knee-deep in the rich fields. Goats carouse in the ruined churches. A motorcycle careens along the uneven stones of the Cardo Maximus. Two laughing children cling to their father as he bounces them along, sharing their glee. So ends the greed and the glory of an era unlike any other. Apamea today is no more than a moth or a cutworm, in the catalog of a lepidopterist.

Carol Miller is a sculptress and writer, devoted to her avid research of ancient cultures, from Mexico where she lives, or along her travels throughout the world. "Mari" is a chapter from a forthcoming book, soon to be available at Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. Among her titles are "The Winged Prophet, from Hermes to Quetzalcoatl", with Guadalupe Rivera Marin, a study in comparative mythology; and "Travels in the Maya World", "The Other Side of Yesterday, the China-Maya Connection" and "Training Juan Domingo: Mexico and Me", exerpts of which can be viewed at http://www.xlibris.com/CarolMiller.html