“I want a wife—a German wife.” The man sitting across from me was fairly handsome and tall with black hair. He had just finished telling me that he was 21 years old, and while serving in the Lebanese army, he had been wounded both in battles with Hezbollah and the Israelis. Of his nine school-day friends, he said three were dead. Now he wanted out of the army and Lebanon, and thought the only way was through a foreign wife. I had heard similar sentiments before, and a few days later a poor farmer approached me, offering his niece in marriage. The bankers I met in Beirut made no such offer, but most of them already had dual citizenship.

I had met the soldier in the Bekaa Valley, a stronghold of Hezbollah. All along the main road through the valley were posters of Sheikh Nasrallah beaming, or armed fighters superimposed over a map of Lebanon. It was a desperately poor part of the country. At one stop, several people surrounded the van, tapping on the doors and windows, begging. They included an old man with a cane, two women in burkhas, and children. My fellow passengers were all from the Middle East, and they sat stoically through it all while the driver waded through the beggars, gently pushing them aside as though he were treading water.

All of this was happening in the shadows of the massive ruins of the Roman temple complex at Baalbek. There, the architecture exploded in a mid-empire glory of experimentation and plasticity that would not be seen until the European Baroque. Yet the temples at Baalbek also satisfied the Roman passion for order, monumentality, and symmetry that made every major temple complex in the Roman world recognizable. The temples are so large that even from close up you have to look carefully to realize that the ant in the foreground is a human. Nowadays the stones blaze in the sun, gold and white, to the traveler’s bright pink. The granite columns brought from Egypt mostly lay in cracked shafts in the sand, more a victim of the earthquakes than any act of man. Standing there it’s astounding to consider that in a time when a letter took weeks to cross the Mediterranean, an Emperor in Rome decreed that Baalbek should have columns from Egypt, and it was done, that before there was electricity or gas, the inhabitants of Baalbek had running water and heating.

Stepping out from the Roman site, it is easy to wonder how far, if at all, people have come since then. One night after a day at the ruins, I watched from a roof terrace as all the lights in the modern city went out and the stars came out. The entire city stood still for forty minutes until the power came on again. This happened repeatedly.

And yet, less than an hour away was a monument to the modern Mediterranean: the glass and concrete towers of Beirut, where a late model Mercedes was commonplace, and European boutiques were easily found. Young women wore tight-fitting jeans with at most a brightly-colored headscarf. Thirty minutes north was the seaside town of Jounieh, where the bars were filled with Eastern European prostitutes and the men who were willing to pay for them. New residential skyscrapers are going up all over Beirut, some with windows within a dozen feet of their neighbors. Glass stores, office buildings, car showrooms, and petrol stations line the roads leading out of Beirut, and all along the coast four and five storey apartment blocks sprout from the hillsides, each elbowing their neighbor for the view of the Mediterranean. They are often served by roads with no sidewalk or lighting, and sometimes by unpaved roads. They are only reached by car or one of the legions of decades-old minibuses zipping along Lebanon’s roads. Even these areas lose power daily from about nine until six. Those who can afford to, buy generators. In the area around Beirut, the private sector seems to be hurtling ahead of the state, and the memory of a stable state seems entirely lost.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Beirut itself, for side by side with the gleaming glass towers of new Beirut were the crumbling, pocked concrete frames that once made up downtown Beirut. One such was next to my hotel, and I assumed it was abandoned, until I saw a plywood panel shift and a family came out, warily. The National Museum of Beirut has a display case with molten lumps of metal. The sign tells visitors that these were once priceless figurines between two and three thousand years old. Twenty years ago they were hit by artillery fire and destroyed.

In the ruins of Ancient Tyre I stood on what was once the city’s main street. On either side, a colonnade of granite shafts marched out to the perfectly blue sea. Before an earthquake dropped half the city into the sea, this had been a major trading port which prospered again under Roman rule, rebuilding its city with shaded streets, theatres, and one of the world’s largest Hippodromes. Lebanon’s bankers and merchants still travel the world, and bring their profits back home, but in Tyre the buildings are marked by Israeli shells, and the streets often pause for a convoy of UN vehicles. It is always a chancy business to predict the future, but in the ruins of Tyre, there may be a glimpse.