Abingdonian 2018

8 The Abingdonian Classics Trip Last October the annual Classics Trip took us to Provence in the south of France, so named because from the second century BC it was a province of the Roman Empire. Its conquest is famously described in Caesar’s On the Conquest of Gaul – the Roman name for modern France and other neighbouring parts of Europe. We were able to see the extent to which the Romans reshaped the environment for the local inhabitants not only by building important roads, bridges and aqueducts, but also by taking care of other aspects of people’s lives with magnificent temples, amphitheatres and triumphal arches. We visited Nîmes, Vaison-la-Romaine, Orange, Marseilles, Avignon, and stayed in Arles. My favourite monument from the whole trip was the spectacular Pont du Gard, an aqueduct near Nîmes, for which we had a memorable tour guide who informed us on many occasions that it is misleadingly called a bridge (‘pont’). It is considered to be so spectacular because it has three levels of arches, the top one carrying the channel of water running from the source to Nîmes for its 50,000 inhabitants, a distance of 31 miles even though a direct route would be only 12 miles. This was an engineering feat because they had to maintain a gentle, downhill gradient consistently along the entire aqueduct. Equally impressive was the theatre at Orange which is the best preserved of any Roman theatre having the stage wall and a statue of Emperor Augustus. These are both extremely large-scale monuments: the theatre stage wall was 103 metres long and 37 metres high, and the building is still used today.