I would recommend any student of the past to save up Leptis Magna to the last. As a sight, as an experience, there is nothing to equal it…It has splendor; it is as complete as any reasonable man could wish for; the restorers have been happily hampered by political convulsions and lack of funds; above all, you can walk in its ruins for days on end, as I have done, and see nobody…Still, I do not think the Libyans will make any serious attempt to develop it, as the word goes, for a long time to come. They are too absorbed in their newly discovered oil.
-Cities in the Sand, Aubrey Menen
Walking alone in the desert is wonderful. It’s like walking on the face of a clock that’s stopped.
-from the 1957 film Legend of the Lost, shot on location at Leptis Magna, starring John Wayne as a Latin sight-reading Saharan adventurer and Sophia Loren as a prostitute and pick pocket
Aubrey Menen approached Leptis from Tripoli in the west and John Wayne and Sophia Loren came up from Timbuktu in the south. All three had to wade through the sand to get there. I arrived by hired car and only had to wade through a few trinket sellers at the main gate. My time was just after one “political convulsion” and just before the next, the one that killed Qaddafi. Like them, I saw nobody while there- as if the Libyan clock had stopped long before me.
A few travel agencies had sqeezed their Leptis tours successfully between political convulsions, but not many. Only a happy few have recently passed under Roman Emperor Septimius Severus’ triumphal quadrifons arch at the intersection of the cardo and the decumanus maximus to walk the via colonnata to the palaestra, the baths, and the nymphaeum. War and mayhem have a way of impeding tourism, even of erasing history. And Menen was right about this and still is- for a long time to come Libyans will be absorbed by other things, even if Leptis’ native son Septimius, his hands bloodied from murdering family and friends, might teach today’s warlords why they should leave a few stones standing for those who come after.
Sophia embraces the Gorgon, from Legend of the Lost