City
Apamia
Qalaat al-Madiq
Listen to the story
Apamia on the Orontes took its name from Apama, wife of the Macedonian king Seleucus Nicator, who enlarged and fortified the city; earlier it had been called Pella. It lay on a peninsula between the river and a lake. The Greek geographer Strabo tells of nearby pastures where Seleucus kept thirty thousand mares and five hundred elephants. Later it became the capital of the province of Syria Secunda, and its colonnaded street had about eighteen hundred columns. The ruins lie at Qalaat al-Madiq in Syria. The distance onward to Teumeuse is written in an odd form for twenty-eight, perhaps a copyist's slip.