What is it with the Romans? Just when you think you have started to understand the extent of their extraordinary empire and achievements, you discover an enormous and magnificent new site that—embarrassingly—you have never even heard of. Jerash, roughly thirty miles north of Amman, is one of the best preserved and largest Roman cities in the Middle East. With Pompey's conquest of the region in 64 B.C., Gerasa, as the Romans called it, became part of the Roman province of Syria, and over the next two hundred years prospered and grew. You have only to look at the size of the Hippodrome, a huge, partly excavated chariot-racing track that was built to hold 15,000 spectators (the Circus Maximus, in Rome, held 250,000) to get some idea of the scale of this city. Trade with the Nabataeans—who built Jordan's legendary Petra—was the underpinning of the city's wealth, which only increased when the emperor Trajan annexed the Nabataean kingdom in A.D. 106. Gerasa was important enough for the emperor Hadrian to visit in A.D. 129, and rich enough to erect a monumental triumphal arch to welcome him.

"When it was built, Hadrian's arch was actually twice as high as what we are looking at now," Hugh said, waving his arms upward as we squinted into the sunlight, trying to imagine how such a thing could be possible. "And now I want to show you the only example that I know of an oval forum, or plaza." We followed our leader, passed the Hippodrome, where a couple of overweight and very sweaty Roman legionnaires wearing pleated skirts and plastic helmets were posing for pictures with giggling schoolgirls, and stepped into a graceful oval piazza surrounded by a curving swoop of Corinthian pillars. The original paving stones still covered the center, and as we walked up the main drag (otherwise known as the Cardo Maximus), I looked down and could see the deep grooves carved into the limestone by chariot wheels that had thundered past two thousand years ago.

On either side of the Cardo stood the remains of a series of small stone buildings, almost certainly shops; the supports of a butcher's counter were decorated with a cow, a sheep, and, oddly enough, a lion. (But then again, the Romans did enjoy lark's tongue, peacock pie, and honeyed dormouse, so why not a nice loin of lion?) Bread and circuses. The Hippodrome, the shops, and the market covered both those essential bases, but what of the spiritual and intellectual needs of the citizens of Gerasa? The Temple of Zeus, which dominates the south side of the oval forum, was being restored by a French team of archaeologists, so, sadly, we could not explore it, but the theater, built in the second century A.D., is still very much open for business. The semicircular auditorium is thirty-two rows high, and its acoustics are just as acute as they were when players declaimed the works of Plautus to a culture-hungry audience in this provincial backwater so far from the bright lights of Rome.