by John Keahey
Finally, the beleaguered Senate opened negotiations. Alaric’s ransom to free the city eventually reached the payment of five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand robes of silk, three thousand pieces of fine scarlet cloth, and three thousand pounds of pepper. The Visigoths took these riches, went a short distance north to what is now Tuscany, and later turned south, hoping to reach Sicily and launch an attack on North Africa.
After overpowering towns en route to Sicily but abandoning an unsuccessful siege at Naples, Alaric and his army reached Rhegium (modern Reggio di Calabria), in Italy’s toe. There, ships lay at anchor to carry the Visigoths to Sicily. But a storm hit, wrecking the ships in the strait. Alaric was forced to backtrack. Bury speculates that Alaric may have wanted to return to Naples, capture the city, and raise a fleet there. But when Alaric once again passed Cosenza on his return north, he died “before the end of the year (C.E. 410).”
The Visigoth chieftain likely was bitten by the wrong mosquito and contracted malaria as so many tens of thousands of southern Italians have done over the centuries.
* * *
The rest of the story is the intriguing part. It fascinated Gissing, who began his trip into Magna Graecia to see Greek cities but adjusted this itinerary to explore Alaric’s fabled place of burial. The story also fascinates historians and archaeologists, who would like to explore the Visigoth’s river-drenched tomb, if ever it could be found. While ancient writings describe what happened, no one knows precisely where it happened. If the myths are true, a gigantic booty of Rome’s treasure awaits its discoverer, along with Alaric’s bones.
The legends report that when Alaric died, his army temporarily diverted the Busento River near where it joins the Crati at the base of Cosenza’s old town. They then buried him, along with gold and other Roman riches, in the muddy riverbed, and then restored the waters to their regular channel, forever obliterating the grave. Some sources say the soldiers then slaughtered the townspeople who helped, so no one could reveal the grave’s location. Gissing and others dispute this, saying the tomb was likely dug out of sight of the town, farther upstream, and therefore in secret.
* * *
I stood at the confluence of the two rivers. On the north bank of what I now knew to be the Crati, along a commercial sidewalk just a few hundred feet from its confluence with the Busento, stands a bust of a sixteenth-century Albanian prince. Its origin appears recent, and it has been defaced with dark red spray paint. People I spoke with indicate that no one really knows for sure the precise location of the confluence in Alaric’s time. It could be farther upstream or, perhaps, even farther downstream. And it would be difficult to determine the location of either river’s channel nearly one thousand six hundred years ago.
Today, both riverbeds are contained, against roaring spring floods, within concrete walls. The rivers can no longer meander at will as they did through geologic time. In ancient times, those river channels could have been anywhere through land now covered by twentieth-century buildings.
I had to gaze up the Busento—like Gissing, and the historians and archaeologists before and after him—toward its hidden source in the Grand Sila and speculate. Gissing saw women washing their clothes in the riverbeds. I saw plastic milk bottles bobbing in the shallow current, along with beat-up aluminum chairs, the rusted steel springs of a bed, and disintegrating pieces of cardboard boxes.
I walked to the first bridge that crosses the newly combined river Crati just below the present-day confluence and, with the centuries-old town at my back, looked northward along the Crati valley. My eyes could follow the river through the haze of modern Calabria for only a few miles as the river flowed toward the Ionian Sea. There, at its mouth, the ancient Greek city of Sybaris would be founded in 720 B.C.E., eleven hundred and thirty years before the fall of Rome and Alaric’s fatal illness.
Chapter 8
Where Spartacus Fell
Shaking off the early morning chill from my walk to Cosenza’s stazione, I descended by train from the town that native Bruttian tribesmen built millennia ago, snug against the slopes of the still snow-covered Grand Sila. Once under way, the train dropped down through a wide, rolling valley sculpted by the Crati and other rivers, all springing from Apennine slopes and draining this fertile land on their way to the Ionian Sea.
The train and the historic Crati, both heading north, intersect ancient pathways across this narrow part of Italy. One such pathway runs near where the river turns northeastward toward Sibari, and near the point where the Esaro and Follone Rivers join to flow into the Coscile, which in turn flows into the Crati.
That ancient route, now followed in part by the A3 Autostrada, was in Roman times a section of the Via Popilia. The ancients from Copia to the east who turned south on that old road would end up in Rhegium, modern Reggio di Calabria, in Italy’s toe. If they turned north, they could connect with the Via Appia and Via Latina at Capua, north of Naples, both leading to Rome. Heading east from its intersection with the Popilia, the Appia initially ended at Tarentum—formerly the Greek city Taras established in the eighth century B.C.E. and now called Taranto—some one hundred sixty miles from Rome. The Appia later was extended past Tarentum to Brundisium, now Brindisi, on the Adriatic coast.
Probably the first people to use these ancient tracts three thousand or more years ago—long before the Romans paved and named them—were local tribes. They were on the land for centuries before Greek colonists, in the eighth century B.C.E., set foot on the coast of southern Italy, naming their western colonies Magna Graecia.
Seeing this much-used land, now covered by pastures of sheep and dotted with orange and lemon groves, provides perspective. As an American, and particularly as a western American, my concept of “old” had been the tiny log cabin—now held together by modern glue and on display for tourists—built by the first white settlers in my valley one hundred and fifty years ago. If I really want to reach into the pre-pioneer past of my region, I can look at the “old” Fremont and Anasazi ruins vacated in the southwestern United States as long ago as C.E. 1100, a time when pre-Renaissance painters were working in Italy. I live in a house, referred to as “old” by Americans, that was built in 1915, a blink of only eighty-five years!
I remembered my first Italian-language teacher in Siena, listening to me, her face holding a sardonic smile, as I proudly talked about how old my home was and how I was renovating it. She said, matter-of-factly, that her home just outside of Siena’s walls dated back to the twelfth century C.E. It had been renovated dozens of times in the intervening seven hundred years. And there was another teacher who, leading me up the steps to her Sienese office eighteen months later, casually mentioned that the three-foot-high vase in the entryway, with flowers tumbling from the top, was, probably, several hundred years old. “It has always been here,” she said, shrugging off questions about its origins.
* * *
Now, far away from Siena, I watch this historical stretch across the Apennine range between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas reveal itself through the window of my train compartment. In addition to the Bronze Age and Iron Age peoples who walked here, this area also was used heavily by early Greek colonists-turned-traders.
About 720 B.C.E., one group of Greeks built the city of Sybaris between the rivers Coscile (called the Sybaris River in ancient times) and Crati, at a point near where both flowed just hundreds of yards apart into the Ionian Sea. This city became famous in ancient times for its wealth and the hedonistic, gluttonous lifestyle of its citizens. It is this city’s ancient name that gives us the English word sybarite, used to describe someone who is a voluptuary or a sensualist.
Today’s Coscile has lost its Ionian mouth and now flows into the Crati some thirteen miles west of the ancient city of Sybaris’s recently discovered location. The archaeological dig is just southeast of modern Síbari along the main road, S106, that connects Taranto to the north and Reggio to the south.
Ancient writers say the trac
t westward from Sybaris to the Tyrrhenian Sea could be traveled with pack animals in just three days, allowing Sybarite traders to connect with Etruscan traders, who sailed south along the west coast from the region of modern Tuscany north of Rome. This trade took place in a series of colonies—Poseidonia, Skidros, and Laos. Poseidonia, now well preserved and known by its later Roman name Paestum, is part of a complex of ruins sixty miles south of Naples.
The pathway between Sybaris and its west-coast subcolonies crosses ground near where Spartacus fought and died in 71 B.C.E. Hollywood, in the Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus, had the gladiator, believed to be a former Roman army officer, dying instead on a cross near Rome. But his death, historians tell us, was likely on the battlefield near the Crati and in the midst of a plain traversed for thousands of years before his birth.
Spartacus’s followers were taken to Capua—the site of the gladiatorial school north of Naples where he had been trained—and were crucified by the thousands, one after another, along the Via Appia between there and the southern gates of then Republican Rome.
Today at the former Greek subcolony of Poseidonia, now called Paestum, it is hard to imagine that these magnificent ruins were virtually unknown until the eighteenth century C.E. Margaret Guido, writing in Southern Italy: An Archaeological Guide, tells us that these “splendid Greek temples” for hundreds of years had been “hidden among trees and malarial swamps, which in the course of centuries developed around them. They may even have been partly standing in water.”
Today, we see the remains of a nearly complete Greek town, generally “unencumbered by modern building, though modified and added to in Roman times.”
Guido offers a clue as to why the Greeks flourished for so many centuries in a land that eventually became swampy and beset with malaria, driving its occupants elsewhere.
Since early ancient times, she notes, the trees that blanketed the region had been cut down. Rivers, such as the Sele, that flow near Poseidonia/Paestum became silted up with a sediment of rocks and mud brought down from the denuded hills, “and gradually the site became more and more infested with malaria.” This affliction has led to the deaths in southern Italy of tens of thousands over the centuries. Along with a continual flow of invaders, malaria forced people out of the coastal plains and into the high Calabrian and Basilicatan mountains, creating the hilltop fortresses tourists find so appealing.
Guido continues, “In medieval times a few Christians were still worshipping in the Temple of Ceres.… But soon after, the forests and swamps encroached and finally hid it for centuries.”
Uncovered at Paestum, which retains the name the Romans gave it when they refounded Greek Poseidonia in 273 B.C.E., are three temples. Two were shrouded in scaffolding in the late 1990s as preservationists worked to clean and preserve the structures. The oldest of these, the temple closest to the sea, dates back to the sixth century B.C.E., and was probably dedicated to the goddess Hera.
It seems that nearly every ancient Greek city had a temple dedicated to Hera, including the one at Paestum, and others at Metaponto and near Crotone, both towns on Gissing’s, and my, agenda. Little wonder. As the wife of Zeus, she was a major figure in the Greek pantheon of gods that dates back to the Mycenaeans, who dominated what became mainland Greece for several hundred years.
Authors of The Oxford Classical Dictionary note that “the most ancient and important temples were those of Hera. Her cults also spread at an early date to the colonies of the west, where later she became identified with the Roman Juno. Her sanctuaries at the Lacinian promontory [near Kroton/Cotrone/Crotone] and at [Paestum] were much frequented.”
Alongside Hera’s temple at Paestum is one dedicated to Neptune, likely built in 475 B.C.E. There also are foundations of buildings, old city streets, the outline of a forum dating to the later Roman times, an amphitheater cut through the middle by the modern road, and well-preserved walls that go back to the late Greek period or to the time when native tribes, in the late fifth century B.C.E., conquered the city and drove out the Greeks.
A short distance to the west is the Tyrrhenian Sea. There, when the city was known as Greek Poseidonia, and at the other ports, Etruscans arrived from the north to exchange their goods for Greek wares.
The Sybarites developed the overland route connecting Sybaris to Poseidonia, Skidros, and Laos. Historians today refer to this tract as the Sala Consilinum. It was developed, in part, so the traders could avoid a long, perilous, pirate-laden Mediterranean journey to the Tyrrhenian Sea that would have led them around Sicily, or through what is known as the Strait of Messina, where Italy’s toe nearly touches Sicily.
Two millennia later, the Panama Canal would serve a similar purpose in the Americas.
This was a sophisticated, symbiotic system of trade that began hundreds of years before the Romans shook off their kings, consolidated their hold on the hills that made up that ancient village, and became a republic. Centuries still remained before the armies of that republic would unify all of Italy, or the Roman Empire, much later, could comprehend domination of the Mediterranean world.
In fact, the late-eighth-century-B.C.E. establishment of the colony at Sybaris corresponds roughly with the time given for Romulus’s mythical founding of Rome. That date reflects how much more advanced the Greeks were as a western civilization than their eventual conquerors, the Romans. We have ancient writings that describe Sybaris; only myths hint at the establishment of Rome.
* * *
For my trip one hundred years after Gissing’s, the rain held off, and as the train and I trundled closer to sea level from the heart of interior Calabria, yellow spring flowers—millions of them that later, upon closer inspection, appeared to be broom plants, or genista—started appearing across the fertile river plain. The prospects for a sunny day increased as we went first northward, crossing over the ancient Ionian–Tyrrhenian tract, and then northeastward.
The train approached Sibari and the ruins of the ancient Greek colony Sybaris and its successor Greek colony of Thurii. Recent excavations at the site have identified a third and more recent city, the Roman town of Copia, built over the ruins of its predecessor Greek cities.
Thurii, settled more than six decades after Sybaris was destroyed by rivals from the nearby Greek colony of Kroton, was the last stronghold of the doomed Spartacus. Thurii also was where, nearly three hundred and fifty years before the rebel-slave leader’s time, the ancient world’s first western historian, Herodotus, died—about 425 B.C.E.
Some chafe at calling Herodotus a historian. To James Romm, who wrote an impressive study of the ancient writer, his life, times, and methods, Herodotus was moralist, storyteller, dramatist, student of human nature, perhaps even journalist. The book, titled simply Herodotus, is not a biography because nearly nothing is known about the man’s life, other than a few personal insights contained within Herodotus’s seminal work, the Histories.
We do know he lived through much of the fifth century B.C.E., about 485 to 425, and about three hundred years after Homer, who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. As Romm points out, that span of three centuries between the two writers is about the same span that separates writers today from John Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost. The ancients would have seen the same kind of difference between Homer’s and Herodotus’s styles that we see today between Milton’s complex form and Ernest Hemingway’s terse, direct prose.
Homer wrote in verse, the universal written art form of the time; Herodotus wrote prose, which Romm says was a little-used, or second-class, art form the Greeks referred to as “‘naked language’ (lacking the decorous ‘clothing’ supplied by meter) … [or as] ‘language that walks on foot’ (as opposed to riding in poetry’s winged chariot).”
Up to the time of Herodotus, poets recounted myths crediting the gods with controlling all events. With Herodotus, “no longer can the muse be invoked as guarantor of authenticity,” Romm tells us. Instead, Herodotus calls upon “human powers of investigation and reason” to replace the r
ole of the gods.
All we really know about Herodotus’s place of birth is the clue he gives us in his original opening line of the Histories: “This is the setting-forth of the research of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that the things arising from humankind may not be dulled by time, and that great and wondrous deeds displayed by both Greeks and barbarians may not lose their renown, as regards other things and through what cause they made war upon one another.” This quote is from the translation Romm used. Other translators convey those same opening remarks, but often with the sentence’s clauses in different order.
Halicarnassus was a Greek city on the southwest coast of Turkey, within the Greek colony of Ionia, colonized around the same time as southern Italy to the west. In a later edition of the Histories, produced in the fourth century B.C.E. and quoted by Aristotle, according to Romm, Herodotus identifies himself in that famous first sentence as being “of Thurii,” the Greek city rebuilt from the stones of Sybaris and later supplanted by Roman Copia. If true, these two scant geographical references mean he spent his youth “on the eastern perimeter of the Greek world and his maturity in the far west.”
Herodotus appears to be an extensive traveler, writing about events and describing sites that existed prior to his birth. But he rarely describes the journeys themselves. “It would be as though Marco Polo, in medieval Italy, had given his account of China without saying anything about the journey there or back!” Romm says. Of course, the critic writes, some scholars explain this dearth of travel description by accusing Herodotus, as Marco Polo has been accused, of “inventing most of all of his travels.”
Romm tells us that Herodotus migrated to Thurii when he was well into his forties, and that he likely had written most of his Histories by that time, although it is believed that he was still adding to it at the time of his death. But there still remains some question as to whether he died there: