Great Names in History

The last people to leave the town of Segóbriga had to pack up in a hurry and head for the fortified town of Uclés, eight miles away. There was no time to lose because the Moors were coming. The Moors would kill or enslave them all. The last anyone knew, the Arab army had taken Toledo itself and if Tariq, its commander, wanted to he could be in Segóbriga in a day.

Luckily for these last Segobrigenses the Moors had better things to do, better towns to attack and pillage. The old Roman town of Segóbriga was nothing anymore—just a hill full of unintelligible marble ruins. People now lived on the flat ground below the hill and just let the old town fill up with thistles and mud. No one had lived there for two hundred years and earth had filled the old marble rooms and covered or half-covered the baths and the temples. Shepherds brought their sheep there, children used it as a playground. It was full of rabbits. The little collection of huts where people lived now was of no interest to invaders.

What would bring the Moors to Segóbriga was the Christian basilica three hundred yards from its walls. That they would want to destroy. It was the seat of a diocese and the tomb of several of its bishops. There were no cathedrals in those days—where would the money to build them come from?—but this basilica was a beautiful temple, more splendid than any of the churches around. Segóbriga in the old days had been a showcase of fine marble buildings and there was a long tradition of good stonework. The pillars in the basilica, the capitals and other stone adornments, were carved with particular skill.

The bishop—call him Sefronius—was the leader of the little community. There were no civil authorities, no police force, no protection. The Christian King’s army had been annihilated at Guadalete a few weeks after the Arabs crossed over from Morocco. There was no one to defend the Segobrigenses and they huddled around the old bishop and prayed before setting out.

Sefronius came from an old Visigoth family. The Visigoths were the nobles of those times, not the native Spaniards. Two hundred and fifty years earlier they had come into Spain with fire and sword just like the Moors now, and had become its leaders. They were still the leaders in all the communities.

He ordered the people to take down the brass lamps and to hide the crucifix that hung above the altar. But there was no time to consider how to save things like the frescoes or the beautiful filigree carvings on the pillars and the altar.

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When the Moors galloped into Segobriga a few days later, they headed straight for the basilica and started smashing everything in sight. When they had finished, the building was just a shell. Their leader told them not to burn it down, in case he got orders to make a mosque of it. That was sometimes done. But he got no such orders and so the Moors used some of its good stones to build a watchtower on the acropolis of the old town.

Here is the floor plan of the basilica (46 meters long) as drawn from its ruins in about 1800 by a priest who was an amateur archaeologist.

He found at least four bishops’ tombs and copied the epitaph of this one.

The bishop was Sefronius, who died in 580. The epitaph speaks of “that enemy Death who snatched Sefronius from his people.” This tombstone is on display at the site of the basilica now in Segóbriga.

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Excavators slowly unearthed the mysterious mansion and the basilica of Carranque, Spain. Meanwhile, Dimas Fernandez-Galiano, the head archaeologist, worked in the National Library digging up information on Maternus Cynegius, its possible owner. He found some juicy facts.

In the Consularia Constantinopolitana, a kind of almanaque of imperial events, there was an obituary of Maternus Cynegius, Theodosius’ General Prefect. “He restored to all the provinces, affected by long years of ruin, their pristine state and travelled as far as Egypt, where he destroyed the idols of all the towns and cities. And it was from there, amid the general grief of the people that his body was brought to this city [Constantinople] and buried in the Church of the Apostles on the nineteenth of March, 388. After a year his bereaved widow Acantia disenterred his remains and took them on foot to Spain.”

The Church of the Apostles! What an honor! Only emperors were buried there. Why did his wife have him removed from such a prestigious grave? Why did she take him back to Spain? And where in Spain?

Dimas checked other sources. Libanius, a great enemy of Maternus, complained in his Pro Templis about his cruelty and lack of foresight in destroying the pagan temples of Egypt. “Cynegius was a slave to his terrible wife Acantia,” said Libanius. “She was a religious fanatic, a friend of radical monks. And she put her husband up to much of the evil that he did.” He hates Cynegius: “He was hostile to the very country where he was born….”

Maternus Cynegius was born in the Orient? He wasn’t a Spaniard? Then why did his wife go to the trouble—and some trouble! —of disenterring his body from the greatest tomb imaginable, and of carrying it thousands of miles “on foot” to Spain?

Dimas was worried. This was a real setback for his Maternus Cynegius theory. If Theodosius’ Prefect Maternus Cynegius wasn’t born in Spain and died in Syria, then he couldn’t be the owner of the villa in Carranque. There would be no reason for him to have anything to do with Spain.

He left the library reading room and went down to the cafeteria to mull everything over. He couldn’t get the woman out of his mind—Acantia, the wife and religious fanatic….. Suddenly he had an idea: what if she were Spanish? What if after her husband’s death Acantia decided to leave the Orient which she perhaps hated as much as it hated her, and go back to good old Spain, along with her dead husband. To hell with the East and all its Byzantine hypocrisy!

Next he remembered the bedroom portrait of a lady. The mosaic on the bedroom floor of the villa in Carranque had as its center the picture of a woman. Could that have been Acantia?

At the entrance to the room, like a kind of welcome mat, were the words: Enjoy this room, Maternus. Could the entire mansion have been a gift from Acantia?

Meanwhile the excavators kept handing Dimas their puzzling findings. Take this one: The mansion was built on top of an older, much more modest, villa. It was constructed all at once according to one clear general plan, without regard to expense. There were mosaic floors in all the rooms, most of them with pictures of mythological scenes. At least two different teams of foreign craftsmen had worked at the same time to lay them. There was running water and a heating system (hypocaustum) for several of the rooms; a fountain with the beautiful image of Oceanus; a patio; an octagonal triclinium or dining room with heated walls and a high dome; servants’ quarters. The furniture was imported from the East. BUT THE HOUSE WAS NEVER INHABITED.

And it was becoming more and more obvious as the digging went on that the huge basilica, just four hundred yards away, was built at the same time as the mansion—AND AS PART OF THE SAME GENERAL PLAN.
The basilica was built solidly on great granite foundation stones. The walls were covered with costly marble imported from Asia Minor. A long colonnade led up to the door of the basilica and the columns bore inscriptions from Emperor Theodosius’ own Eastern quarries in Egypt and Greece.
The church was surrounded with graves, beginning in late Roman times. Burial seems to have been its purpose. It was a good guess that the whole complex was conceived as a mausoleum/cemetery for some great personage or saint. Who? Maternus Cynegius?

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There is nothing harder than old Roman concrete. Around the former empire you still see their walls and constructions of all kinds made of poured concrete.

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This is a Roman cistern from the town of Segóbriga, Spain. It has been standing in the open for two thousand years. Try to scratch it. Try to pick out one of the little stones.

Poured concrete was a Roman invention.

People had known about lime for a long time. They whitewashed their dirt walls to seal them from the rain. They still do that in much of Spain and Africa. And the Greeks mixed sand with the lime, trowelled it onto their walls, and painted it sometimes. It dried very hard and was even waterproof—perfect to seal the brick walls of cisterns.

Everyone also used the lime, sand, and water mixture to cement stones together for building. They continued to do that all through history until the nineteenth century. Look at what holds the big stones of a castle wall together: a thin layer of lime and sand. It is a wonderful glue.

At first the Romans used lime like everyone else. Then, at a time that must have been around the second century BC, they began to make walls by pouring the lime, sand, fine stones (aggregate), and water mixture into molds: concrete (they called it opus caementicium). Until then, they had made their walls by laying down two parallel rows of stones and then filling the space between them with rubble. That was fine until the rain or ground moisture got into the rubble and made it swell.
Someone now had the idea to strengthen the rubble pile by pouring the mixture of lime mortar on top of it. That strengthened it very well: the rubble became a hard mass and got harder and harder over weeks as it dried. If you took away the big stones on either side, the rubble kept its shape.

Pouring the mix into molds was an obvious next step. You could make a wall any thickness or shape you wanted to. When the concrete had dried, you simply kicked away the mold.
From then on, the Romans began building walls with poured concrete.

The most outstanding Roman building made of poured concrete is the Pantheon in Rome. It also happens to be one of the most beautiful works of architecture ever made.

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The dome is a virtuosistic creation of poured concrete. All the edges of the squares are still sharp after two thousand years and there are no little holes from air bubbles, difficult as that is to achieve with concrete.

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Just outside Toledo, near the river before it flows around the city, there is a small, delicate palace built by a Moorish king or governor in the eighth century.
He built it for his daughter, the Princess Galiana.
Its flowered gardens and walks with splashing fountains were as heavenly beautiful as only an Arab king could make them. There the princess strolled while young nobles, both Christian and Moorish, fought for her love.

When the Christian king Alfonso VI conquered Toledo three hundred years later, the soldiers who found the palace were awestruck by its beauty and elegance. There was nothing like it in all Christendom. Inside they found strange instruments, astrolabes and compasses, in gold and silver.

And an ingenious water clock.

The king ordered his philosopher-scientists to take it apart and discover its secret mechanism. They carefully dismantled the clock but were not able to understand how it worked.
And, what is worse, they couldn’t put it back together again.
Its creator, a sly Merlin, knew very well how to lock up his secret.

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