Tyrant

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  ‘There’s nothing that escapes you.’

  ‘It doesn’t take much. Once you know, all you have to do is keep count.’ As she said these words, she loosed the belt of her gown and let it slip off. Doris’s nude body was radiant in her proud, harmonious femininity.

  ‘You are terrible,’ said Dionysius, letting his eyes run over his bride’s sensual curves. The lantern cast a golden halo on her pure white skin.

  She drew close and embraced him, her breasts close to his face.

  Dionysius kissed her passionately and dragged her to the bed. ‘But afterwards,’ he said, ‘I’ll be going to sleep with Aristomache.’

  ‘The Celts have taken Rome!’ exclaimed Philistus, entering Dio-nysius’s apartment at a near run.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s true! The Romans tried to make a stand, but they had such a fright as soon as they saw the attackers that they took to their heels. Many jumped into the river, others fled to the allied cities nearby.’

  ‘How did you find this out?’

  ‘The Etruscan merchants from Cuma told me that they had learned about it from their compatriots in Tarquinia. It was a disaster. The city was sacked, the senators who decided to stay behind were massacred. The acropolis held out for a while, but then they were forced to surrender, and to pay a high ransom to win back their freedom.’

  Dionysius turned to Aksal. ‘Have you heard what your brothers are up to? They have burned down one of the most powerful Etruscan cities of the Tyrrhenian.’

  ‘No one can resist us,’ the Celt commented laconically.

  ‘I’m starting to believe that myself. What I’d like to do is send you up that way one day with Philistus, to see if any of them would like to combat in my service.’

  ‘If you command, Aksal go.’

  ‘Good. But by Zeus, I’ve been saying for years that someone should teach this creature a little Greek!’

  ‘The truth is,’ replied Philistus, ‘that no teacher has lasted more than a few minutes. I’m afraid you’ll have to keep him as he is. It’s not a man of letters you want, after all; you need a beast who will keep everyone else at bay. He’s perfect, I’d say.’

  ‘What do we know about these Celts?’ asked Dionysius. ‘We’ve spoken about this already, but I suppose you must know more by now.’

  ‘Not much, really. They live in the north, divided into tribes commanded by chieftains. Some say they are the Hyperboreans spoken of in myth. Others say they descend from the union of a certain princess Galata with Heracles upon his return from Spain with the oxen of Geryon.’

  ‘Fables . . .’ commented Dionysius.

  ‘They live in fortified villages, they venerate Apollo, Ares and Hephaestus as we do, they practise human sacrifice, they stand by their word and they always tell the truth . . .’

  ‘They’re barbarians, in other words,’ concluded Dionysius.

  ‘What did you expect? You’ve had a sample here for years.’

  ‘For what I have in mind, the more barbaric they are the better. But I would like you to start thinking about something . . . If I ever manage to recruit a good number of them, you’ll have to see whether there isn’t a version of some myth that connects them to Sicily.’

  ‘I would say decidedly not.’

  ‘Well then you’ll invent one. People who are transferred to foreign lands need to find something familiar.’

  ‘These Celts are highly unstable, and they’ve already made their way very far south. Be on your guard.’

  ‘My friend, there is nothing and no one who will be able to threaten us when I’ve accomplished my plan. I will draw a wall from the Ionian to the Tyrrhenian and my fleet will dominate the Straits unopposed. Syracuse will be the greatest city in the world and the mighty of this earth will have to reckon with us and contend our friendship.’

  ‘So now you’ll attack Rhegium.’

  ‘They have assailed my Locrian family and allies . . .’

  ‘Who had provoked them into it.’

  ‘That is immaterial.’

  ‘You have considered, I hope, that Rhegium is part of the League that unites most of the Greeks of Italy. If one city is attacked, the others are bound to come to her aid.’

  ‘I know. And I know what I’ll do. You will remain here to command the Ortygia fortress.’

  Philistus nodded slightly, quite embarrassed by the honour bestowed upon him.

  ‘Leptines will have as always the supreme command of the fleet. Do you know where he is now?’

  ‘Where do you think? He’s on the Boubaris having the rowlocks, figurehead, stern ornaments and mastheads polished. There’s no wife he could love as much as he does that ship.’

  ‘Then let him know that I will be his guest for all the operations at sea.’

  Dionysius drew up in front of Rhegium towards the end of the summer of that year with a powerful army: twenty thousand men, one thousand horses and one hundred and twenty battleships, including thirty quinqueremes. They set ashore east of the city and set about sacking and devastating the territory. It wasn’t long before the League responded. Sixty ships from Croton entered the Straits to bring help to the threatened city, but Leptines had been vigilant, and his entire fleet fell upon the squadron while they were still at sea.

  The Crotonians, seeing the crushing superiority of their enemy, sought escape landward and tried to beach their ships in order to protect them. The Rhegines came to their aid in great numbers.

  Leptines came so close that his keels almost touched bottom. He had harpoons thrown in an attempt to secure the Crotonian ships and tow them offshore. A bizarre tug of war ensued between the Crotonian crews on land as they tried to hold their ships back by anchoring them to the ground using ropes and stakes, and the Syracusans who were trying to pull them out to sea by dint of their oars.

  The grotesque contest was interrupted by the explosion of a storm announced by a sudden gust of Boreas which hit the Syracusan galleys broadsides, sending them into a frightful roll. Leptines gave the signal to desist and withdraw to the harbour of Messana, but the wind continued to pick up with every passing moment, the waves swelled and boiled with foam and the threatening roar of thunder could be heard in the distance. The commanders ordered the ships to strike sail and dismast, but more than a few had been surprised with their sails to the wind and were overturned. The shipwrecked crews had no choice but to swim towards the Italian coast, where they were immediately captured and imprisoned by the Rhegines.

  The rest of the fleet fought bravely against the gale for hours and hours. When the Boubaris entered the harbour of Messana last of all at midnight, many of her oars were broken and her hold was full of water.

  The weather was against them so late in the season, and Dionysius was forced to return to Syracuse, furious over the reverse.

  He locked himself up in the barracks at Ortygia at length, and would not be approached even by his closest friends, who knew better than to pester him and sat back to wait until the storm had passed. Then, one day, he summoned Philistus. ‘I need you,’ he began as soon as his friend had entered.

  Philistus took a sidelong look. Dionysius had dark circles under his eyes, surely a sign that he wasn’t sleeping, and his face was ashen. ‘Here I am,’ he answered.

  ‘You must leave for a diplomatic mission. You have to stipulate an alliance for me.’

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘The Lucanians. I have to bring Rhegium to her knees, along with the entire Italian League, if necessary. And I intend to conclude everything by the end of this year. The Olympics will be held next year and my plans must be accomplished by then. I will present myself as . . .’

  ‘The Lucanians?’ Philistus interrupted him. ‘Did I hear you well? You want to ally with the barbarians against a Greek city? Do you realize what you are saying?’

  ‘I know full well what I’m saying. And don’t annoy me with this foolish nationalism. The Spartans entered into an alliance with the Persians against the Athenians in order t
o win the Great War, and the Rhegines themselves were allied with Carthage against us at the time of Gelon . . .’

  ‘But when the Persians tried to assert their dominion over the Greek cities of Asia, King Agesilaus of Sparta landed in Anatolia and attacked them at full strength . . . Dionysius, all of this is relative. It’s the change in you that is terrible, that saddens me and pains me. What has happened to the young hero I once knew? The champion of the poor against the aristocrats? The intrepid combatant, the defender of the Greeks, the implacable enemy of the Carthaginians. The avenger of Selinus and Himera?’

  ‘I’m right here, in front of you!’ shouted Dionysius. ‘Wasn’t I fighting the barbarians until just a few months ago? Isn’t my body still aching from the wounds I received at Tauromenium? Haven’t I served my homeland, my city? Haven’t I made her greater and stronger, more feared and respected? The Athenians court us, and so do the Spartans: we are envied for our wealth and our power and just who has achieved this? Answer me, by Zeus! Who achieved all this?’

  ‘You, of course, but also your brother Leptines, who has risked his life a thousand times to follow your orders, and Iolaus as well, who has never abandoned you and has always believed in you, and Doricus, murdered in his tent, and Biton, executed at Motya, and me. Yes! Me as well! I who have sworn to follow you to Hades, if necessary. But don’t ask this of me, Dionysius, don’t ask me to stipulate an alliance with the barbarians against the Greeks. It’s against me, it’s against what I believe in. And it’s against you as well, can’t you see that? Your autocracy is already a scandal for the Greeks. It’s been tolerated until now because you appear as a champion of Hellenism against the barbarians. But if you ally with the Lucanians to attack Rhegium and the Italian League, they will turn and spit at you. You will become a monster in their eyes!’

  ‘So be it! I have no need for their consideration.’

  ‘Yes you do. No one can live without the esteem of their fellow men, remember that!’

  Dionysius, who had been pacing back and forth across the floor of the fencing hall, stopped all at once in the middle of the room and shot a troubled look at Philistus. ‘I can do this myself. Winning is what’s important. If I am successful, I will be acclaimed and everyone will need me. And I will win, with or without your help. I’m waiting for your answer.’

  ‘Without,’ replied Philistus. ‘You’ll win, if you can, without my help.’

  ‘Fine. Now I know who I can count on. Farewell.’

  Philistus dropped his head, then looked at him for an instant with a pained expression. ‘Farewell, Dionysius,’ he replied. And started for the door.

  ‘Wait.’

  Philistus turned, as if he hoped Dionysius’s mind might still be changed.

  ‘Leptines must know nothing, for the moment. Do I have your word?’

  ‘My word? It’s been a long time since you believed in words or oaths.’

  ‘In my friends’ words, I do,’ he replied in a softer voice.

  ‘You have my word,’ said Philistus, and left.

  27

  THE TREATY OF alliance that Philistus refused to negotiate was nonetheless concluded by a Messanian emissary on behalf of Dionysius. The following summer, the Lucanians sent a marauding force to Thurii, a Greek colony founded half a century earlier at the spot in which Sybaris had been destroyed. Meanwhile, Leptines had been deployed with the fleet in the Tyrrhenian sea near Laos. Dionysius had told him to wait there for allied troops coming from the east, over the mountains; together they would trap the forces of the League that had invaded the territory of their friend Locri.

  The Thurians reacted with great resolve to the Lucanian attack and when they saw the marauders retreating towards the mountains they chased after them, instead of waiting for the bulk of the League’s army who were marching in from Croton.

  They climbed the Carax valley until they reached the ridge of the mountains and, finding no one to hinder their way, continued down the other side in the direction of Laos, which was located on the coast. But when they arrived at the brief plain between the mountains and the sea they met with a bitter surprise. The Lucanians were not ahead of them, but at their backs. There were tens of thousands of them, the entire might of all of their tribes put together, and they were hurtling downhill shouting and shaking their arms. The Thurians realized they were completely entrapped and drew up into a phalanx, prepared to resist to the death. But the numerical superiority of the enemy was so great that the battle was transformed into a bloodbath.

  A group of about four thousand warriors managed to withdraw to a hilltop, where they continued to drive back the barbarian assaults. One thousand more, completely surrounded on the beach without a chance of saving themselves, suddenly saw a Greek fleet appear behind them. They tossed aside their weapons and swam out to the ships.

  It was not the Rhegine fleet, as they had hoped, but the Syracusan fleet, arriving just in time to close off the trap from the sea. But at the sight of those wretches bleeding and floundering in the water, trying desperately to reach safety, Leptines gave a start. He realized that it was a barbarian army massacring the Greeks of Thurii on the beach, and in his mind’s eye he saw the horrible scene of the Carthaginian crews at Catane stringing up his sailors as they tried to swim to the coast. He yelled, with all the breath he had: ‘Save those men! Hurry!’

  His officers were shocked. ‘But hegemon, those are our enemies . . .’

  ‘They’re Greeks, by Heracles. Save them, pull them up, I said!’

  The order was signalled to Iolaus, in charge of the right wing, and to the rest of the squadron, whose officers had no doubts about misinterpreting the command when they saw the flagship hoisting aboard all the survivors they could find.

  As soon as he had set foot on the Boubaris, a Thurian officer asked to see the commander. He was taken to the bow, where Leptines was posted.

  The man was disfigured by the blows he had taken and by the immense strain of the crossing. He was trembling and he could barely get out a word.

  ‘Give him dry clothes,’ ordered Leptines. ‘Move, by Heracles, what are you waiting for?’

  ‘Hegemon,’ the man managed to blurt out. ‘What will you do with us?’

  Leptines looked at him and had no doubts. ‘You will be treated with the regard that all brave combatants deserve. And you will be . . . returned to your families.’

  The second officer looked at him in amazement; he felt as if he had ended up in the wrong place, or in the wrong war.

  His commander’s voice recalled him to duty: ‘We’ll go to shore now.’

  His second-in-command gave the order and, as the other ships continued in the rescue operation, the flagship approached the beach until her rostrum practically stuck into the sand. From the ship’s bow, Leptines had already had a nearly complete vision of the battlefield and he was disgusted. Before him lay the worst carnage he had ever seen in his whole life, a massacre of monstrous proportions. Cadavers lay in piles everywhere, the ground was completely soaked with blood, collecting in little trickles which reddened the waters of the sea. Ten, perhaps fifteen thousand men had been killed in a space of just one stadium, caught between the mountains and the sea, like animals in a slaughterhouse. Most of them had already been savagely maimed, plundered and stripped. Many had been hacked to pieces, the better to slip off their armour, great heaps of which were being accumulated at the edge of the field by the Lucanians.

  Leptines staggered through that horror as if he were living a nightmare: bodies of ephebic boys, just out of adolescence, the muscular bodies of mature men, all stiff in the pallor of death. The severed heads of bearded veterans stuck on to pikes regarded him with glassy eyes, their mouths open in a mute, grotesque laugh. There was an obsessive buzzing of flies, everywhere.

  All at once, the echo of the battle still raging at the top of the hill reached Leptines. He shouted to Iolaus, who had remained aboard ship, to send him an interpreter. He then made his way towards the spot where the tribal c
hieftains had gathered in anticipation of another massacre when this contest was over.

  He turned to the one who seemed to be the commander-in-chief. ‘I am Leptines, brother of Dionysius, lord of Syracuse and your ally. I ask you to put an end to this fighting. You’ve already won,’ he said. ‘Allow me to negotiate the surrender of those men.’

  ‘No,’ replied the chief. ‘We have been at war for a long time with this people, who have unrightfully occupied our territory. We want them exterminated.’

  ‘You’ll be much better off if you spare them. I’ll pay a ransom for each and every one of them. I’ll give you . . . twenty drachmas of silver a head. No, thirty . . . wait, a mina, there, I’ll give you a silver mina for each one of them. Do you accept?’

  Leptines’s second-in-command had arrived just in time to hear this proposal. He grabbed his arm: ‘Hegemon, do you know how much that will cost you? At least one hundred and fifty talents – it’s more than half of what we have on board! We need the money to pay for war expenses . . .’

  ‘This is a war expense,’ retorted Leptines. Turning towards the interpreter, he insisted: ‘Will you ask this goat whether he accepts my offer, blast it?’

  The interpreter translated and the chief nodded gravely, with condescension, as if conceding a great favour.

  ‘Finally!’ exclaimed Leptines. ‘Now tell him I have to reach the men on the hill.’

  The chief shouted out something and the bulk of the Lucanian warriors halted their attack, then started slowly to retreat. They finally allowed an opening for the Syracusan admiral to pass through. He made his way slowly up the slope until he found the four thousand Thurian warriors before him, exhausted, wounded, panting, parched, covered with bloody sweat. They looked at him in silent shock. The only sound to be heard was the suddenly deafening buzz of the cicadas on that sun-scorched hillside.

  Leptines spoke: ‘I am the supreme navarch of the Syracusan fleet and I am your enemy, but I had not been told that these barbarians had orders to totally wipe you out. The slaughter has been consummated now, there’s nothing to be done. But although I am your enemy, I am still a Greek. I speak your language and worship your gods, and I’ll do whatever I can to save you. I have offered a ransom for your lives and if you surrender I give you my word that no harm will be done to you. You will return to the families that await you. Your comrades who dived into the sea thinking that the Rhegine fleet had come to rescue them have been pulled to safety and cared for. They too will be allowed to return to the city.’