Aeria the Evanescent

for Tina Jolas

There's a lost city in Provence named after air itself: Aeria. A polis to the Greeks, a civitas to the Romans, Aeria must have been of considerable size and located at an exceptional altitude. The Greek geographer, Strabo, mentioned it along with Avignon and Orange and described the site as something "altogether aerial, constructed on a raised promontory of its own."^[1]

How could such a sizable, protohistoric city (it was founded, apparently, by the Celts) simply disappear, one wonders? For Provençal historians it represents a major enigma and a source of unending polemic. Scarcely a year passes without the publication of some article, pamphlet, or documented field report offering "at long last, irrefutable evidence" as to Aeria's exact location. In reading these reports one comes to feel that Aeria might have been anywhere, everywhere, nowhere at once.^[2] There's hardly a single raised, windblown plateau evincing the least Iron Age vestige that hasn't been identified as that of the lost city. I have read over fifty such reports written in the past

two centuries and have managed to visit a considerable number of the sites proposed. The results, for the most part, have proved disappointing. Few of the purported "Aerias" even begin to fit the descriptions we've inherited from classical sources. What's more, it's the sources themselves that have been largely responsible for so much idle speculation. Brief, elusive, and highly ambivalent in their own right, they've undergone endless alterations at the hands of successive, often careless, medieval copyists. What, indeed, can they tell us today? Without falling into idle speculations of our own, what can we draw from these materials with any certitude whatsoever? How, in short, can we ourselves come to locate the City of Air?

We learn from Strabo that it lay somewhere between two rivers: the Durance to the south and the Isère to the north. A third river, the Rhone, would have constituted its furthest possible reach westward, while the Alpine foothills that of its potential limits eastward. Thus we can determine that this lost city lay within an area of somewhat less than a thousand square kilometers. We can reduce this figure even further: Aeria, according to Apollodorus, was Celtic,^[3] and lay, in Strabo's words, within the confederated land of the Cavares.^[4] These people occupied the fertile plains of the Rhone valley and its adjacent plateaus to the east. Rising up over those plains, Aeria must have been visible from a considerable distance and been immensely impressive for travelers such as the Greek chronicler Artemidorus. His mention of Aeria towards the end of the second century B.C. constitutes (along with Apollodorus's remark that Aeria was Celtic) our first topographical source. What else can be said with any certitude? We can safely postulate that Aeria lay somewhere north of Avignon and Orange, the two cities with which it is associated in Strabo's Geographica . Strabo almost certainly named these three cities in geographical order: from Avignon in the south to Aeria in the north. Beyond Aeria, he tells

us, begins a wooded region, rife with narrow mountain passes. This region extends the length of a full day's march (approximately thirty kilometers) to a town called Durio. Of Durio, however, we know absolutely nothing. Nor can we begin to speculate on the identity of the two rivers which, according to Strabo, circumscribed Durio before converging in a single current towards the Rhone itself.

From Durio onward, we've gone thoroughly astray. The location of the town, of the two all-determinate rivers within a shifting landscape of textual incertitude has left us totally at the mercy of hypotheses. Even reduced, now, to an area of less than three hundred square kilometers, we have any number of perched Iron Age oppida from which to choose. Some, of course, can be quickly dismissed because of their insufficient altitude; others, because their table-top summits could scarcely have enclosed a full protohistoric city; yet others, because their profile—even if raised, massive, commanding—couldn't possibly have laid within sight of a major Greek trade route such as Artemidorus must have taken, traveling northward from Marseilles to Lyon.

We've narrowed our possibilities, however; we've reduced our area of prospection to a relatively narrow band of earth running approximately parallel to the left bank of the Rhone and in a region somewhat to the north of Orange. Within this area, several protohistoric sites have been proposed. One of them, the oppidum of Barri, has received particular attention recently from some of Provence's most respected historians. Lying just north of the market town of Bollène, itself traversed by the Lez (potentially one of the two tributaries mentioned by Strabo), the oppidum satisfies a number of conditions that could eventually lead to its identification as Aeria. Rising in an abrupt, vertical cliff over the plains, it commands a spectacular view of the Rhone valley

beyond, as well as a controlling position over the ancient Greek trade route just beneath. Vast, rich in natural springs, and abounding in late Iron Age vestige, the site itself is eminently aerial. Wind-struck, it sits on its raised limestone podium, a good deal closer to the sky above than to the earth below.

A number of counterarguments, however, have come to weaken such an attribution. Despite a maximal altitude of 312 meters, the oppidum itself only rises, in fact, 200 meters over the plains. Would this difference in altitude have been sufficient to support the epithet aerial ? Even more troubling, why would an entire city, a polis , have been located so close to yet another (in this instance, Orange)? Only twenty kilometers separate the two. In classical times, cities couldn't survive without an outlying pagus or canton, a richly cultivated farmland proportionate to the city's population. In this case, the pagus of one would have encroached on that of the other, and their respective sources of sustenance would have been inevitably compromised. What's more, the Celts traditionally founded their cities equidistant from one another. Indeed, the map of Celtic Gaul reads like a continuous network of evenly distributed communities often called, significantly enough, Médiolanum, "The City in the Middle." Here again, the oppidum of Barri is far too close to Orange to satisfy the conditions for such a practice of spatial distribution. Added to this, it must be noted that the oppidum isn't located in the territory of the Cavares, as Strabo specified, but that of the neighboring Tricastini.

Where are we then? Even if we've managed to reduce considerably the number of square kilometers in which Aeria might potentially be located, we're still adrift among hypotheses. Any number of perched, wind-struck oppida could still satisfy our altogether vague descriptions. As for myself, I've often wondered whether I've been searching, all the while, for a location or a locution : whether, that is, I've been looking for a place, an emplacement, a

specific irrefutable locus or—to the contrary—for a word. For a word that would designate, certainly, such a place, but only in the buoyancy, the effervescence of its own iteration. A word that might invoke, within its very vocable, so much stonework and quicklime and smoldering hearth. One, in short, that might incorporate—in its atmospheric particles—an all-impacted, earthbound existence.

Aeria, the Aerial, the City of Air. It would be a sterile exercise in academic philology to speculate on whether the founding radical, aer , originated in Celtic or Greek. Both languages, having common Indo-European origins, shared approximately the same signifier. It would be safe to assume, however, that the toponym itself arose out of the Celtic and underwent, as an adjective feminized to agree with its substantive, polis , a certain Hellenization. As an adjective we find it frequently employed in Greek literature. It appears in Aeschylus's Suppliants , for example, or in its Ionic variant, erea , in Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica . As toponym, however, it vanished from usage at exactly the same period as the topos it designated. As ever, the two—topos and toponym—would undergo a single inseparable fate. Neither Caesar nor Livy, for instance, mention Aeria in their descriptions of Gaul. If Pliny happens to include it in his list of Gallo-Roman communities within the recently established Provincia, he does so in qualifying the city an oppidum latinum .^[5] The term itself suggests that the raised Celtic stronghold had undergone pacification, subjugation: had found itself reduced to a protectorate under the all-powerful pax romana . Soon after, the toponym vanished altogether from contemporary historical record. Neither Mela in the first century A.D. nor Ptolemy in the second include it in the comprehensive geographies that each compiled.

Other towns in Provincia would vanish as well. Of the thirty that Pliny listed, eight would leave nothing more than a name totally detached, now, from

any verifiable location. Among those vanished communities, though, only Aeria would have qualified as polis, civitas : a city, opposed to a vicus , or simple township. Far more pertinent, only Aeria could lay claim to such an immensely evocative, if evanescent toponym. For it's the place name alone that draws us, over and over, onto the raised plateaus of Rhodian Provence, that keeps us searching in one site after another for the irrefutable evidence of some stray inscription, some carved, all-confirming epigraph. Who, after all, wouldn't wish to discover the City of Air? For centuries, erudites, country priests, local aristocrats, or simple curiosity-seekers have combed the region looking for that conclusive artifact wherein place (topographical), place name (toponymical) and vestige (archeological) would perfectly coincide. Many cried out success far too early. Writing in 194, Alexandre Chevalier would claim that "After so many centuries of vain research and laborious investigation, History [sic ] at long last has rediscovered the Antique City whose very existence had begun slipping into pure indifference."^[6] Far more perspicacious, the German pre-historian Ernest Herzog would write, "suum quisque locum invenit ."^[7] Herzog was suggesting, not without malice, that Aeria could be located anywhere one wished.

There's a danger, of course, in mystifying Aeria, in attributing hierographic powers to its place name. For certainly, it not only existed within a certain ascribable area, it left vestiges eloquent enough to allow for its eventual identification. In the meanwhile, however, its vocable continues to intrigue. For Aeria seems to exist free of the very floors and crypts and quarried vaults in which it once was rooted. In an age of reductive analysis and infallible detection, it continues to resist any classification whatsoever. Doing so, the very name of this elevated, windblown city exercises—we readily admit—a singular fascination. There's safety, we can't help feeling, in its indeterminate status. Its three

weightless syllables have somehow managed to escape (for the moment, at least) any ultimate attribution. Buoyant, suspended, eminently diffuse, the vocable alone, in eluding us, justifies our fascination. Escaping our own stultifying structures, it gives the imagination a late place in which to muse, meditate, linger, if for no more—indeed—than a passing moment.