Temple of Zeus. Cyrene. Libya.

Cyrene – The Athens Of Africa

BySteven Sklifas

Temples, myths, philosophers, and the mystery of silphium in the green highlands of ancient Libya

Cyrene occupies one of the most unexpected settings of the ancient Mediterranean. Rather than standing beside the sea, it lies high in the fertile uplands of the Jebel Akhdar, Libya’s Green Mountain, approximately 13 kilometres inland and around 600 metres above sea level.

Temples, theatres, baths, colonnades, streets and tombs extend across the ridges and slopes, preserving nearly a thousand years of Greek and Roman history. UNESCO describes Cyrene as one of the principal cities of the Hellenic world, but such words cannot fully convey the wonder of encountering so much classical architecture in the green highlands of North Africa.

Before Cyrene entered history, it entered mythology.

Sancturay of Apollo. Cyrene. Libya.
Cyrene. Libya. Overview of the Sanctuary of Apollo which is dominated by the Temple of Apollo. The sanctuary is beautifully situated 600 meters high, overlooking the Green Mountain plateau and 13 km inland from the Mediterranean Sea.

The poet Pindar tells of Cyrene, a Thessalian princess and huntress who preferred the forests and mountains to the conventional life expected of women. She guarded her father’s herds on Mount Pelion and confronted wild animals with remarkable courage. Apollo first saw her wrestling a lion and was captivated by her strength.

In the myth, the god carried Cyrene across the Mediterranean to Libya, where she became the divine namesake of the city and gave birth to Aristaeus. Their son would become associated with beekeeping, shepherding, olive cultivation, medicinal plants, and the knowledge of rural life. It is a fitting story for a city whose fortune would depend so greatly upon the fertility and natural abundance of the surrounding land.

Cyrene’s historical foundation story possesses its own atmosphere of legend.

According to Herodotus, the people of Thera-modern Santorini, endured seven years without rain. They repeatedly consulted Apollo’s oracle at Delphi and were commanded to establish a settlement in Libya. Their chosen leader was Battus, who, in one strand of the tradition, had originally gone to Delphi seeking help for a speech impediment. Instead of answering his question, the Pythia addressed him as a future king and instructed him to lead a colony across the sea.

The settlers made several uncertain beginnings, first on the island of Platea and later at Aziris on the Libyan mainland. Eventually, local Libyan guides led them towards the well-watered plateau of the Jebel Akhdar. When they reached the Fountain of Apollo, the guides announced that this was the place where “the sky is pierced,” a poetic description of a region where rain fell more generously than across much of the surrounding country.

Ancient Roman ruins with tall stone columns and scattered remnants of structures, set against a backdrop of trees and cloudy skies.
Cyrene. Libya. View at the Sanctuary of Apollo, including the remains of three successive buildings. Builders constructed the original temple during the 6th century and then rebuilt it again in the 4th century BCE. After the Jewish revolt in AD 115-117, they restored the temple for the third and last time.

There, around 631 BCE, the settlers founded Cyrene. Apollo therefore stood at both beginnings of the city: as the god whose oracle directed the migration from Thera and as the divine lover of the huntress whose name the new settlement carried.

The Greek settlers did not arrive in an empty landscape. Indigenous Libyan communities already knew the country, its water sources, and its seasonal rhythms. Herodotus preserves memories of local people acting as guides and neighbours, although relations would also include rivalry, territorial conflict, exchange, and cooperation.

Cyrene prospered rapidly and became the foremost city of Cyrenaica. Its wealth came from grain, horses, olive oil and other products of the fertile plateau, but one plant became inseparable from its identity.

Silphium grew wild in the region and was prized throughout the ancient Mediterranean as a seasoning and medicine. Its distinctive form appeared so frequently on Cyrene’s coins that it became an emblem of the city itself. Yet the plant eventually disappeared from the historical record, and its precise botanical identity remains uncertain. Whether lost through over-harvesting, environmental change, or a combination of pressures, silphium remains one of antiquity’s most intriguing botanical mysteries.

The landscape still explains why the settlers chose this place. Springs emerge from the limestone slopes, and the most sacred of them formed the centre of the Sanctuary of Apollo below the upper city.

Ruins of an ancient structure featuring two statues draped in robes, surrounded by stone walls and archways.
Cyrene. Libya. View of the circular sanctuary of Demeter and Kore with marble figures that depict the deities and their followers. Demeter is the goddess of grain, and Kore is her daughter. The Sanctuary was the scene of a riotous woman only annual celebration. Cyrene, economy depended heavily on the production of grain.

Cyrene was famous around the whole Ancient Greek world for its intellectual pursuits and philosophy school and became known as the ‘Athens of Africa’.

The sanctuary spread across a series of natural and constructed terraces at the foot of the acropolis. Over the centuries it grew to include the temples of Apollo and Artemis, fountains, porticoes, a theatre, and the great Roman baths built under Trajan and restored by Hadrian. Its sacred history began with the foundation of Cyrene in the seventh century BC and continued through the Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman eras.

The mythology of the city was even carved into its architecture. The marble decoration of the fourth-century BCE Temple of Apollo depicted the legendary arrival of the Greeks and the sacred union between Apollo and the nymph Cyrene. Here, myth was not merely told in poetry. It was built into the sanctuary itself.

Moving through the terraces of the Sanctuary of Apollo, I was struck by the relationship between architecture, water and landscape. The temples did not seem imposed upon their surroundings. They grew from the sacred springs and slopes that had first drawn people to the site.

Elsewhere, the immense Temple of Zeus revealed the scale of Cyrene’s ambition. Standing on the north-eastern hill of the city, it was Cyrene’s largest religious building and one of the most imposing Greek temples constructed in North Africa. Measuring approximately 68 metres by 30 metres, it was comparable in scale to the Parthenon and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

The original temple was severely damaged during the revolt of AD 115 and later reconstructed under Roman rule. It was brought down again by the earthquake of AD 365. Even in ruin, its massive columns, capitals, and fallen blocks retain something of the authority once intended for the king of the gods.

Panoramic view of ancient ruins on a hillside, surrounded by dry grass and distant valleys under a cloudy sky.
Cyrene. Libya. Cut into a cliff faces overlooking the Green Mountain plateau and all around Cyrene are thousands of tombs and individual sarcophagi that were built and used from the 6th century BCE by the Greeks, then added to by the Romans and Byzantines up to the 6th century AD. Some tombs which were quite spacious still contain traces of their distinctive Greek and Hellenistic facades. Unfortunately, robbers in Byzantine or early Islamic times robbed and damaged every visible tomb or sarcophagus. The Necropolis of Cyrene is one of the most extensive cemeteries in the ancient world and gives the most vivid impression of Cyrene’s Greek heritage.

Cyrene was not defined by temples alone. Its extensive remains include an agora, stoas, theatres, baths, residences, civic buildings and a vast necropolis. The ruins are distributed across different districts rather than gathered into a single monumental centre and exploring them becomes a physical journey through the changing life of the city.

Beyond the monumental heart of the city stretches Cyrene’s extraordinary necropolis, one of the largest surviving cemeteries of the ancient Greek world. Tombs cut into the limestone slopes line the ancient road that once descended towards Apollonia, while burial chambers, sarcophagi, and elaborate facades reveal how deeply the rituals of death were woven into the landscape surrounding the living city. The scale is remarkable; the necropolis extends for kilometres beyond the ancient urban centre, creating almost another city beyond the city itself.

Cyrene’s archaeological museum preserves another part of this story. Its collections include sculptures and thousands of objects recovered from the ancient city and surrounding tombs. In the troubled years following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, local archaeologists and residents took extraordinary measures to protect these antiquities, hiding smaller objects and guarding sculptures that could not be moved. The archaeological site survived, but illegal development and encroachment subsequently damaged parts of the necropolis, while Storm Daniel brought further destruction to Cyrene in 2023. The struggle to protect the city therefore continues long after the civilisation that created it disappeared.

A marble sculpture featuring three female figures standing close together in an ancient museum setting, surrounded by other sculptures and classical artefacts.
Cyrene. Libya. View at the museum of the beautiful sculpture known as the Three Graces. The sculpture represents the three daughters of Zeus, also known as the three Charities: Euphrosyne, Aglaea, and Thalia, who embodied beauty, charm, and joy. This Roman example, discovered in the Baths of Trajan, dates from Hadrian’s reign.

Its achievements also extended far beyond architecture.

Aristippus of Cyrene, a pupil of Socrates, became the most important early figure associated with the Cyrenaic school of philosophy. His daughter Arete was both his disciple and the teacher of her own son, helping to carry the school’s ideas into another generation at a time when the intellectual contributions of women were rarely recorded.

Arete was so highly esteemed that they had inscribed on her tomb a truly beautiful epitaph which declared: 

she was the splendour of Greece,
and possessed the beauty of Helen,
the virtue of Thirma, the pen of Aristippus,
the soul of Socrates and the tongue of Homer.

Cyrene was also the birthplace of Callimachus, the influential Hellenistic poet and scholar associated with the Library of Alexandria, and Eratosthenes, one of antiquity’s most remarkable minds.

Using the differing angles of the sun’s shadows at Alexandria and Syene, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of Earth with astonishing ingenuity. From a city whose origins were explained through gods, oracles, and sacred springs came a scholar who measured the planet through observation, reason, and geometry. It is easy to understand why Cyrene later became known as the Athens of Africa.

Cyrene passed into the Ptolemaic world following the age of Alexander and eventually came under Roman rule. It continued to flourish despite severe destruction during the revolt of AD 115, after which Hadrian undertook extensive rebuilding.

The great earthquake of AD 365 devastated the city and ended its position as a major ancient capital. Cyrene never fully recovered. Its population and influence declined, and by the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century, much of its former life had already fallen silent.

Ancient ruins featuring columns and stone structures surrounded by greenery and a cloudy sky.
Cyrene. Libya. Image of the Temple of Zeus, which dates originally from the 5th century BCE and its size is comparable to the Parthenon in Athens, Greece.

Yet silence at Cyrene does not feel like emptiness.

The city remains filled with stories: a huntress wrestling a lion on Mount Pelion; an island people following the command of an oracle; Libyan guides leading strangers towards a place where the sky was pierced; a vanished plant whose image survived on coins; and a scholar who looked at shadows and calculated the size of the world.

This is where the wonder of Cyrene resides. Myth, history, landscape, botany, and human curiosity do not exist separately here. They belong to the same place.

The city named for a woman who wrestled a lion became the birthplace of a man who measured the Earth. Their stories belong to a place shaped as much by the fertile landscape of the Green Mountain as by myth, philosophy, and scientific curiosity; a city where wonder and the pursuit of knowledge flourished together.

Click to view a selection of Cyrene images.

All images, text and content are copyright Steven Sklifas.