by John Keahey
“Thurii was said by some to contain Herodotus’s grave, indicating perhaps that he remained there until his death, sometime after 430 (B.C.E.); but another city, Pella in Macedonia, also claimed his remains, so he may have left the golden west to return to the Greek mainland.”
* * *
In Gissing’s time, remains of Sybaris/Thurii/Copia had not yet been found. Historians generally agree that in 510 B.C.E. the enemies from Kroton (called Cotrone at the time of Gissing’s visit in the late 1800s, and changed to Crotone in 1928) razed the city by breaching retaining walls built by the original settlers to hold back the Crati just west of where the waterway emptied into the sea. The deluge completely flooded Sybaris and obliterated one of Magna Graecia’s most magnificent cities after a mere 210 years of life.
Then, sixty-six years later, in 444 B.C.E., on the orders of Pericles of Athens, the southern Italian Greeks re-established the city, naming it Thurii. A few years after Rome’s war with Hannibal two centuries later, Rome began building in 193 B.C.E. what it named Copia, using as building blocks the remains of the two earlier Greek towns. After Copia was abandoned, its remains were buried to a depth of at least twenty feet by more than two thousand years’ accumulation of alluvial mud and silt.
For more than one hundred years, modern archaeologists had speculated about where Sybaris/Thurii/Copia lay, but major excavations did not begin until the mid-twentieth century, some six decades after Gissing’s visit.
Chapter 9
Searching for Sybaris
The tiny modern-day hamlet Sibari is where, in late 1897 during a brief train layover en route to Taranto, Gissing enjoyed lunch after his early morning departure from Cosenza. He likely munched bread and drank wine just a few miles from where the archaeological dig at Sybaris/Thurii/Copia would begin in earnest more than a half century later. When leaving Taranto and heading days later toward Cotrone (today Crotone), his train passed within shouting distance of where the three ancient cities, the last two built from their predecessors’ stones, are today being unearthed.
I wanted to visit these digs and see what Gissing had been unable, but yearned, to see. Driving north toward Sibari across miles and miles of flat, coastal plain, I realized that S106, a two-lane modern highway, was cutting through the middle of an archaeological dig. Excavations revealing stone foundations spread out on both sides of the highway. Ahead, to the north, a road turned west into the archaeological park. I went in, parked, and started walking toward the dig, my camera strapped around my neck.
A voice stopped me. “É chiuso!” It’s closed. “There is too much water. It is dangerous,” said a man who was leaning out of the doorway of a long, one-story wooden building. I walked toward him, saying I needed photographs for a book. “If the pictures are to be published you need special permission. Go to the museum,” he said, pointing north up the road.
For a brief moment, I contemplated just going back to S106, taking pictures as any tourist would from a turnoff. But something told me to play it straight. “Mille grazie,” Thank you, I said to the earnest young man.
The museum, just off S106, east toward the Ionian Sea, is a modern structure that is one of the finest museums of its type. Its lighting is a major departure from that found in musty, centuries-old buildings that traditionally house ancient artifacts, and its display spaces are flexible. Many different types of exhibits can be set up, changed, and moved easily.
I walked inside and paid my four-thousand-lira (about two dollars and forty cents) entrance fee and asked who I needed to talk to for permission to take photographs of the archaeological site. The attendant shook his head. Written permission must be gotten from some official in some distant city. I felt defeat coming on, but decided to tour the museum while pondering whether to take the pictures from the road as I originally planned.
Then, just as I was walking up a ramp to the first exhibit room, a delightful woman, short in stature with a pixie-like haircut and sparkling eyes, approached. “May I help you?” she asked in perfect English, spoken with a distinct British accent.
I explained my mission. She smiled and said, “I will give you a tour even though the park is closed today. You can take all the photos you want!”
The Crati River once inundated this stone road in the heart of the Park of the Horse in the ancient Greek city of Sybaris, established in 720 B.C.E. and flooded by warriors from nearby Kroton in 510 B.C.E. This was the original Greek road, but archaeologists believe a second city, Thurii, was built at this site, followed by the later Roman city of Copia. The pipes on the left are attached to pumps that must operate around the clock to keep ground water from once again flooding the site. Photo by Paul Paolicelli
Isora Migliari described herself as a “technical assistant” at the excavations, where she has worked for the past eighteen years. Everything we were looking at, she said—stone foundations, paving stones for streets, a few pieces of columns scattered here and there, pieces of mosaic floors, an amphitheater—dated to the Roman-era town of Copia. If the predecessor Greek cities of Thurii or Sybaris, far underneath Copia, were ever to be uncovered, the Roman ruins would have to be destroyed. This is not something Italian archaeologists are prepared to do.
The major excavation at Copia is known as Parco del Cavallo, Park of the Horse. The name was applied because searchers found a set of stone hoofs and a tail, which suggest that a statue of a horse once stood there. It is not known if the statue was of Greek or Roman origin. But horses have a place in the early history of the site. The Greek founders of Sybaris were reputed to be magnificent horse trainers, supposedly training the animals to dance on hind feet to tunes played on reed pipes. This, if ancient writers are to be believed, helped lead to the undoing of Sybaris. The Krotonians knew about the dancing horses, so the legend goes, and when they fought the Sybarites, Kroton warriors blew songs through pipes, and the horses of the city’s defenders began to rear up and dance, making it impossible for the mounted Sybarites to fight and save the city.
Farther to the east and closer to the Ionian shoreline from the parco, workers have uncovered the remains of what could have been a structure at the Roman city’s wharf area. It is known as Casa Bianca, or White House, only because white stones used in buildings have been uncovered, said Signora Migliari. This site appears to be Roman, with no evidence of either Thurii or Sybaris underneath.
And about one mile north of Parco del Cavallo are the purely Greek ruins identified in modern times as Stombi, or Parco dei Tori, Park of the Bulls. Here, excavators found a small part of the original Sybaris, not impacted by later construction on top. According to a guidebook from the museum at Sibari, there is no evidence of Thurii or Copia at Stombi. But there are “the remains of houses, of the potters’ kilns, of the streets and of the everyday objects of the Sybarites.”
My friend archaeologist Baldassare Conticello, sitting in his Rome apartment prior to my visit south, shook his head when I asked him about the search for Sybaris. It may be impossible to determine the precise identity of this particular site, he said, because of the overwhelming problem for excavators of water, making the money spent there a subject of controversy.
“Sybaris is in the Ionian Sea,” he says, throwing his right hand upward in frustration. Then he explains: It is not the actual sea off the coast of modern-day Sibari he is referring to, but the “sea” under the shoreline, the water that begins filling up the excavations when shovels bite into the earth twenty feet down. He says electric pumps must operate almost continuously to keep the water under control.
“This is the most wasted money ever spent in this country,” he says, fuming over the cost of the electrical bill for the continuously running pumps. Indeed, during my visit the park was closed to the general public because of rain and a heavy buildup of groundwater within the excavated area. Several pumps with bright yellow pipes snaking through the area hummed steadily in the background as Signora Migliari showed me the broad stone road, built by the Greeks and used by Romans
to move people, wagons, and animals through Copia.
“Don’t step there,” she advised me as we neared low stone walls surrounding an area used by the Romans as a public bath. “The ground is saturated and you may fall through.” Into what? I thought to myself. The hidden depths of Thurii? Of Sybaris? What an experience that would be!
* * *
I had read Search for Sybaris, an account of a combined American-Italian dig at the site during the 1960s. This phase in the decades-long search for the city was pursued in part by archaeologists from the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. Written by Orville H. Bullitt, the now-out-of-print book is an account of the area’s history and how excavators, who were constantly besieged by water filling their excavations, had pinpointed the location of a city. Like the needle in the haystack, that city—in ancient times likely no more than two square miles in size—was found within a plain of four hundred square miles.
Bullitt also details how the archaeologists did this. They used new techniques and equipment, including the magnetometer, which records solid material, such as foundation stones and columns, as deep as twenty feet below the surface. Bullitt first imagined that these devices would locate the fabled grave of Alaric the Visigoth, buried in the riverbed of the Crati before it joined with the Busento at Cosenza.
But it was quickly determined, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that the search for Alaric, speculated about by Gissing in the 1890s and by me one hundred years later, was futile, given how much the town has been built up and how the river’s now rigid course repeatedly shifted in intervening centuries.
So the Pennsylvanians redirected their energies toward the northeast, to the search for Sybaris. The tie-in with Gissing was symbolic. He and they first started searching for Alaric, then moved toward Sybaris. All were connected by the silver thread of the Crati, which flows over Alaric’s bones, and whose waters were used to bury Sybaris fifty miles from where, centuries before, the Visigoth died.
What those researchers found in the 1960s, however, was not just Sybaris as they first thought, but the remains of the newer two cities, built on top. It took other Italian-led excavations to determine that, indeed, the three cities occupied the same space over the intervening centuries.
In Bullitt’s book, published in 1969, Pennsylvanian archaeologist Froelich C. Rainey, then the university’s museum director, wrote in the introduction: “We know now that Sybaris, like Pompeii, had the misfortune to be located where … two great plates of the earth’s thin surface collide to cause earthquakes and volcanoes.… Today the charred remains of Sybaris lie below a vast blanket of sterile clay sealed in the earth beneath a fertile plain. No wonder it has remained a mystery—no protruding columns, no mounds, no scattered fragments of pottery on the surface to give a clue. Its existence and destruction are hard facts.”
It would take archaeologists after the 1960s to tie together the other two cities and explain why Sybaris’s columns did not stick up out of the clay: They had become the building blocks of two other cities crumbled by eons of successive earthquakes.
Chapter 10
The Right to Work
The contemporary village of Sibari and its tiny train station had been renamed in the late 1800s from the distracting, unimaginative “Buffaloria.” Gissing rejoiced at this, happy that southern Italians, by grasping the Italian versions of ancient names, had finally recognized their Greek roots.
His destination was Taranto, known in antiquity as Taras when founded by the Greeks, and renamed Tarentum by conquering Romans. Taras was one of the earliest extensions of Greece’s eighth-century-B.C.E. effort to expand its growing, crowded population to Italy’s boot, a process driven by Greece’s merchant class, eager to spread commerce around the Mediterranean world. This exodus to Magna Graecia—and also to the east toward Ionia in modern-day southwestern Turkey—was the ancient equivalent of the impact of Europe’s “New World” that drew the English, Dutch, French, and Spanish to North America nearly two thousand years later.
The difference here, of course, is that the colonizing Greeks were eventually conquered by the Romans, who grew out of native tribes. These Greeks were either forced out of, or assimilated into, what has become the Italian culture. In North America, it was the other way around: Colonizing Europeans subjugated the original occupants, and European ancestors dominate American culture today.
Southern Italy, according to ancient writers, was viewed as a fertile, undeveloped paradise blanketed by forests and inhabited by groups of Italic tribes—apparently minor obstacles in the path of Greece’s early westward expansion.
* * *
Coming by train from inland, I first spotted the Ionian Sea just northeast of Sibari and south of Trebisacce. It quickly became the Gulf of Taranto as the train curved northwestward and the bluish gray waters turned deeper blue farther north. The yellow wildflowers were especially heavy here at this lower, warmer elevation. Four days later, when I would head in the opposite direction for a layover at Crotone, they would be double in volume, as spring’s warmth spread farther along the coast and into the shoreline’s foothills.
The Ionian Sea, while viewed as a separate body of water, is part of the Mediterranean. It is in this sea that the Mediterranean reaches its greatest depth, some sixteen thousand feet at a point off the western coast of Greece, just east of Italy’s heel.
Interestingly, the Ionian Sea does not lap up against the portion of southwestern Turkey that had been known as Ionia. The Oxford Classical Dictionary speculates that the sea’s name originates from early Ionian Greek seafaring to the west. The Ionian’s waters touch western Greece, eastern Sicily, and the underside of Italy’s boot. A scholar friend points out that Turks refer to Greeks in general as “Ionians.”
I sat back as the train moved north along the coast, alone in my compartment like Gissing was in his, reflecting on time and place.
* * *
Southern Italy suffers from massive unemployment, as high as thirty-three percent in some provinces, and from domination by political and criminal factions more interested in putting into their pockets the billions of lire the nation has poured southward than in the region’s revitalization.
I felt the emotions and saw evidence in the form of angry graffiti that such struggles cause: Il lavoro è un diritto! (Work is a right!) was spray-painted in bright red on a brick wall along the tracks near a tiny train station perched on the edge of the Ionian Sea.
I saw the dark, foreboding look in the eyes of a young man who engaged me in an energetic conversation on a bus during a long ride into the countryside. Why are you here? he asked me repeatedly. This is not Rome. This is not Florence, he said, apparently wondering why a tourist would venture so far south from the regular Italian tourist centers. We are poor. Do you come to stare at us?
Then, when my northern Italian–trained ears could no longer follow his rapid-fire southern dialect and I would reply with growing insistence, “Non capisco, signore. Non capisco” (I do not understand), he would turn and in loud angry asides say to the bus driver, “Ricco americano! Ricco americano!” (Rich American!)
Eventually, I got off that bus with the young man’s angry words bouncing off my back. It was upsetting. But over the course of my visit, I began to gauge, at least a little bit, his frustration at living in a land where work and lire are scarce.
I thought of conversations I had in Rome, days before I began my southern journey: one snatched on a bus traveling between the Vatican and the train station. A young Italian air force officer, pointing to an obvious pickpocket on the crowded bus—the notorious Numero 64 that hauls mostly tourists, prey for pickpockets—winked. With my eye peeled toward the short, stocky thief nervously casing the people around him, I changed the subject. What about the South, I asked. Is it as poor as I hear? I knew the answer, of course. I wanted to see what the young man, obviously gainfully employed in the military, would say.
He identified himself as Valerio and said he was “from the North,”
adding that he held a typical northerner’s view of unemployment and poverty throughout the South.
“In the South it is always the same, no matter what you do,” he said in English. “[Southerners] are like that. It will never change.” I thought this unusual because I had seen the spray-painted plea for work. Wasn’t that a sign that southerners are willing to work?
Later, I recounted this discussion with Professor Baldassare Conticello. He was born in Palermo, so wouldn’t he, as a proud Sicilian, dispute the young air force officer’s position? The professore didn’t. He agreed.
“On one side, Italy is the fifth largest economic power. It all comes from the North; on the other [the South], we are a third world nation,” Professor Conticello said sadly. “The North is like Switzerland and the South is like Africa! The ‘Italian Problem,’ I think, cannot be solved.”
He continues: “We [in the South] have a sense of dignity and courage, but our limit is to be individualists and reactive to each other.” Problem-solving cooperation in the South is hard to come by, he says.
“We are able to discuss with excellent arguments, and for hours, about the beard of Mohammed, but we cannot organize a business!” Northern Italians, he says, “and now even foreigners, profit from our lack of concreteness, and have established a [modern-day recolonization] of southern Italy.”
Who is guilty? he asks. Those who do it to the southerners, or the southerners for letting it happen? He does not expect an answer to his question, nor does he offer one.
But the Italian government is trying, once again. In late 1998, the State, driven, says Conticello, by the Communists, created a public agency called Sviluppo Italia, Development Italy, that is designed to spark economic growth in the Mezzogiorno. In early 1999, the government named board members known for embracing market values, not politics, according to announcements I read in Italian newspapers.