Magic in Aegean Turkey

It's the magic I'm after, sitting in Kaunos, near Dalyan on the Turkish Aegean coast. I don't know too much about antiquity, but I have read The Iliad and The Odyssey, I have watched Jason and the Argonauts and I have a weakness for the imaginative if deluded way in which the ancients perceived the world.

I watch as the goats meander though the amphitheatre, mature olive trees poking up through the seating area, and wonder what  stories were performed here? Or was the entertainment more unfortunate gladiators ending their days being torn apart by the lions and bears that used to inhabit the surrounding hills?

I consider the ships that must have come through, the trading activity of ancient barefooted peoples whose lives were acted out here. Early peoples, in this case the Carians and Lycians, purchasing new never-seen-before unlikely goods from foreign shores. Or was it more ordinary than that - only the basic requirements of life changing hands? Likely both.

Then there is the Zeus temple where offerings of wine and the fleshy hind leg of a bull maybe gave people confidence to live their lives to full? Or was it primarily to allay their fears of storms, earthquakes, sickness and famine? Were lives spent at a leisurely pace? There is a gymnasium here. Or were lives short, brutish and uncomfortable? Apparently the town was riven with malaria and the people looked green. I don't know, and the archaeologists are largely guessing.

The silent echo of the past, the questions, the wind through the Zeus temple, the theatre with its distant sea view, the wild tortoises, the late afternoon sun: and I have nothing else pressing me this day - that, it seems, is magic enough.