The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Next-door Selinus was the westernmost of the Greek settlements. Perhaps the most astonishing sight to greet today’s visitor are the imploded ruins of a giant temple just outside the ancient urban centre. The vast field of debris testifies to the planned scale of this monument, so large that it was never finished. Italian archaeologists found more evidence for the riches of the settlers here.

  A Greek inscription once adorning an interior doorway of the temple records how the men of Selinus thanked the gods for a victory in an unknown war with an offering incorporating sixty talents of gold. If a talent in Selinus was a measure of weight roughly the same as an Athenian talent, this would have been the equivalent of over a ton’s worth of the precious metal.

  The Greek temples in Sicily ostentatiously reflect religious practices shared by the settlers with the homeland. A museum in the modern town of Castelvetrano near the site of Selinus displays a strip of lead telling a similar story about the religious ideas of the settlers here, although it reveals religious thinking of a different kind. The metal is inscribed, incised rather, and the Ancient Greek is hard to read and in fact indecipherable in places. In the 1980s this find from the ancient site was housed in the Getty Museum at Malibu. Realizing the importance of the inscription for the history of Greek religion, in 1991 the museum voluntarily returned the tablet to Italy.

  In the most interesting lines the lead strip prescribes how murderers can be purified from vengeful demons who act on behalf of the wronged victim – ghosts in other words. To appease these revenants, haunted individuals had to revere them with animal sacrifices, then use salt to mark a boundary round the altar, sprinkle water and step away. Since we are in Greek Sicily, political strife might have caused the internal violence which seems to have troubled Selinus in this way. More surprising is the matter-of-fact belief in ghosts in an official document as this clearly was, promulgated by the civic body. The kind of ritual behaviour prescribed here would not be out of place in one of the English author Dennis Wheatley’s fantasy novels about the modern occult.

  That said, the religious beliefs and practices look Greek. The people of Selinus still upheld their Greek religious culture at this time – some five generations after migrants founded the city in the late 600s BC. Prominent in the inscription is the cultic surname ‘Meilichius’. Despite its Greekness, some experts believe that in its origins this cultic surname conceals an association with Molek, a divinity of the ancient Levant who appears in the Bible as the Moloch of the Canaanites. The matter cannot be gone into here, although – as it happens – the people of Selinus had as neighbours in western Sicily not only other Greek settlers and indigenous people but also communities of the Levantine population dubbed Phoinikes, Phoenicians, by the ancient Greeks.

  West of Selinus the modern autostrada in this part of Sicily stops some 20 miles before a pungent zone of salt-beds fringing a placid coastal lagoon. The small island of just over a hundred acres in the middle of the lagoon is ancient Motya. The site offered the Phoenicians just the sort of offshore protection they favoured for their trading settlements. For their merchantmen plying the western Mediterranean, sailing via Motya reduced the time they had to spend risking the open sea. The enclave that Phoenicians founded here around 700 BC grew in size to the point that the population eventually had to cram itself into tower blocks several stories high. The place came to resemble, if not Manhattan, then, as one historian has suggested, an Italian city of the Renaissance.

  In the 500s BC, the shadow of a very different Phoenician enclave had started to fall over Sicily. From high ground in the west of the island it is possible to see the tip of Cape Bon in Tunisia, some 90 miles south. Before Phoenicians established themselves at Motya they had already settled a peninsula just to the west of this cape, in what is now the Bay of Tunis. Greeks called this place ‘Karchedon’. Romans later knew it as ‘Carthago’, its population as ‘Poeni’, or Punes. By the mid-500s BC the Carthaginians were becoming a force to be reckoned with in this part of the Mediterranean.

  The seafaring peoples of the Levant were interested in trade, not empire-building. Despite modern denials, their Carthaginian offshoot, however, does seem to have wanted to dominate territory as well as shipping routes. Writers in Roman times recorded the Carthaginian invasion and conquest of ‘a portion’ of Sicily as early as the mid-500s BC. These later traditions of Carthaginian aggression should not be accepted uncritically. As will be seen in a later chapter, the Romans went on to fight three epic wars against Carthage. A ‘national’ enemy with a long history of military aggression suited the Roman narrative.

  That said, one Greek historian knew of a battle between Carthaginians and the Greeks of Selinus, when many soldiers on the Greek side fell before the city’s walls. This undated event may well belong to the 500s BC. As we shall see in a later chapter, when the Carthaginians made a treaty with a fledgling Italian power at this time (508 BC), the wording – preserved by an ancient writer – mentioned ‘the part of Sicily which the Carthaginians control’. By the time of this agreement with the Romans, Carthage saw the western part of the island as firmly under its hegemony.

  In the archaeological museum at Delphi the visitor can see one of the greatest works of Greek sculpture. I once stood in front of this bronze statue with an artist friend who was viewing it for the first time. He was completely lost in admiration for the sculptor’s extraordinary attention to such details as the veins in the feet, and the serene beauty somehow imparted to the young man’s face, complete with individual metal eyelashes.

  The super-rich patron who gifted this figure of a charioteer was a Greek from Sicily who wanted to mark the victory of his team in the four-horse chariot race, highlight of Apollo’s four-yearly games at Delphi. The Greek inscription on the base of the monument preserves the donor’s name. He turns out to belong to the most powerful family in Sicily in the 480s and 470s BC.

  For a generation four brothers ruled like a dynasty over a web of alliances knitting together the Greek settlements of the island. The dominant sibling, Gelon, first seized power as a military dictator or tyrant in Gela. He went on to capture the Greek city of Syracuse on the east coast, which he then made his main base, assigning the rule of Gela to a brother. In the generations before Gelon the Corinthian settlers at Syracuse had already made themselves masters of a large hinterland and divided it up into parcels from which the local aristocrats took their collective name, ‘sharers in land plots’. The site also made an excellent natural port. From here a coast-hugging route linked shipping with the sole of Italy and the dash across open sea between what is now Puglia and the offshore islands of western Greece.

  The regal behaviour of these brothers extended to dynastic marriages with other Sicilian tyrants, as well as spending their wealth to build an ambitious image of cultural excellence which they projected onto a larger Greek stage, as the Delphic Charioteer shows. In turn these tyrants attracted to Sicily significant cultural figures from the Greek world to the east.

  The whole interlude makes clear the continuing cultural orientation towards the Greek motherland of the aristocratic class in the Sicilian Greek settlements from which this family was sprung. It also shows how the aristocratic culture of Greek Sicily could compete on something like equal terms with that of Greeks elsewhere at this time, especially when political power and cultural leadership on the island became concentrated on an ambitious tyrant and his court.

  How innovative Archaic Sicily’s Greek culture was, as opposed to having a reputation for spending from a deep purse that naturally attracted Greeks in search of patronage, is a large and difficult question that could make the subject of a book itself. Here it is possible only to paint a few brushstrokes. What one can say is that Greek culture in Sicily certainly had its moments.

  In the sixth century BC home-grown wordsmiths included a Greek poet, one Stesichorus. He wrote long poems retelling Greek myths in an original way and his influence is suspected on the mythical plots of the far more famous Athe
nian playwrights of the following century, Aeschylus and Euripides. Like these authors of tragedies, Greek writers of comic plays were poets who (as with Shakespeare) composed dialogue in lines of scanning verse. In the fourth century BC the Athenian philosopher Plato hailed another elusive Sicilian writer as the ‘chief poet of comedy’. This Epicharmus (the ‘ch’ pronounced as in chorus) is also a suspected influence on Athenian comic theatre of the fifth century BC, discussed in a later chapter.

  In the visual arts, just to take Greek temples, no Sicilian example has satisfied modern aesthetes as the Parthenon does. The ancient Greeks themselves marvelled far more at the size than the architectural refinement of their temples, and here Greek Sicily certainly did compete. The temple of Olympian Zeus begun by the Greeks of Acragas in the late 500s BC was praised by a writer from the mainland three centuries later as ‘in plan and size second to no other in Hellas’. This concedes not only its superiority in size but also in design.

  The museum at modern Agrigento includes a vast hall devoted to this extraordinary building and displays reassembled remnants of its most startling design feature. This was a series of naked male figures some 25 feet high, each so large that it had to be made up of lots of small blocks. Somehow these figures had been incorporated into the (long toppled) structure. However, such is their originality that modern archaeologists cannot agree on exactly where they might have gone.

  Before Gelon’s time there were no outside powers with designs on Sicily that risked checking the prosperity of its Greek incomers. Under Gelon, Sicilian Greeks for the first time faced an existential threat from a seaborne enemy. A dramatic find in the north of the island has brought this moment vividly to life. Early this century Italian archaeologists uncovered a series of mass graves of adult males, a total of at least sixty-five bodies, laid out respectfully in rows. They showed signs of violent wounds, including one skeleton with the blade of a spear still buried in its side.

  The small finds indicate a date in the early 400s BC. This made the Italians think of a great battle here in 480 BC. The site is about 25 miles east of Palermo, just off the autostrada. Here, on a bluff looking out to sea, migrant Greeks had established their only outpost in this part of the island. The battle of Himera, named after the Greek settlement, took place at the foot of this bluff, where the findspot of the mass graves must mark the scene of some of the most intense fighting.

  On one side of this battle was a large Carthaginian army that arrived by sea after sailing up the west coast of the island. The strategic concern of the Carthaginians seems to have been the expansionist tendencies in western Sicily of the Greek power bloc led by Gelon, whose father-in-law, the tyrant of Acragas, had seized control of Himera in 483 BC. On the other side was the army of this father-in-law, reinforced by a Syracusan army led by his kinsman. During a battle lasting all day, the Greeks burnt the Carthaginian ships drawn up on the nearby beach and routed the disheartened troops of the enemy, slaughtering or capturing them in great numbers. As a result, Carthage now shelved its ambitions in Sicily, for the time being.

  Gelon and his family were not slow to advertise to a larger Greek world their defeat of this assault on Greeks by a non-Greek power. At Delphi, once more, French archaeologists have found the base for a victory monument set up by Gelon. Ancient writers mention the offerings it supported: a golden tripod and statue of the Greek goddess of victory, resting, it seems, on a tall column.

  Allegedly on the same day, in the straits of Salamis near Athens, an allied Greek fleet won a decisive victory over a Persian armada led by the ‘Great King’, Xerxes. A year later, an allied Greek army defeated the remnants of this Persian invasion force at Plataea in central Greece. To mark this victory the allied Greeks also offered a golden tripod at Delphi, it too held high for all to see by a slender column. Gelon’s gift for self-publicity is one reason for thinking that he set up his own tripod after the mainlander offering. He wanted to offer a visual parallel between the Greek defeat of the Persians and his own great achievement, vanquishing the Carthaginians.

  Among Greeks, Gelon had an additional motive for talking up this achievement. According to the historian Herodotus, the Greek mainlanders had sent envoys to Gelon asking for armed assistance, against Xerxes, addressing him flatteringly as ‘lord of Sicily’. Supposedly Gelon replied that he was willing to help, but on condition that he took personal command of the allied Greek forces. This proved too much for the proud Spartans, and so the envoys left empty-handed.

  Herodotus goes on to tell another story that gives an insight into Gelon the hard-nosed political operator and shows why he might have gone on the ‘PR offensive’ in the wake of Persia’s defeat. When he heard that a Persian army had indeed crossed into Greece, Gelon sent three fast ships loaded with money to Delphi. Here they were to await the outcome of the invasion, with orders to bring the treasure back home if the Greeks won, but to gift it to the other side if the Persians were the victors. So much for the unity of Hellas.

  With the booty from Himera, including a captive labour force, Gelon’s family network embarked on a spree of new public works in the Greek cities of Sicily. For much of the ensuing fifth century BC the island’s inhabitants were left to themselves, until outsiders once again set covetous eyes on the island’s riches.

  Greek Sicily is the highlight in any account of early Greek settlement overseas. Historians do not rate the originality of the settler culture on the island that highly, but are impressed by the material remains. In the wealth to which they attest these remains outstrip any traces to be seen nowadays of other Greek outposts founded at this time, with the exception of what is now Libya.

  Here, on the fertile coastal strip some 130 miles east of Benghazi, at the place they called Cyrene, Dorian Greek immigrants from what is now the island of Santorini, ancient Thera, prospered and built their Greek-style temples, relatively untroubled, it seems, by the previous occupants of the land.

  In the end the Sicilian Greeks would be less fortunate at the hands of their neighbours and near-neighbours in North Africa and Italy. Three of these nearby societies would interact both with the Greeks and with each other in ways decisive for ancient Mediterranean civilization. It is time to look at this trio more closely.

  CHAPTER 6

  MEET THE (WESTERN) NEIGHBOURS

  Over in North Africa, the descendants of Phoenician migrants settled at Carthage developed into an advanced society. They had a written language and some kind of literature. The practical Romans rated highly enough one of their books, an agricultural manual, to commission a translation from the Phoenician into their own language, Latin. Apart from mainly short inscriptions, Carthaginian writings do not survive: the Carthaginians join other ancient cultures that have left no written account of themselves. Instead we are left with a kind of mirage, the Carthage of Greek and Roman writers.

  As seen, already in Archaic times western Greeks had cause to fear the Carthaginians. Not only did the Carthaginians not go away, but, over six or so centuries, their power grew, until it would menace Rome, as a later chapter will show. The stories of Greek and Roman writers have significantly shaped how the Carthaginians are remembered today.

  Because in the end the societies of Greece and Rome lived on until well into the Christian centuries, whereas the Romans annihilated the original Carthage in 146 BC, these stories might seem suspect as ‘victors’ history’. In the nineteenth century, the most controversial claim these classical authors made about the Carthaginians gave the French writer Gustave Flaubert the material for a fictitious moment in his novel set in ancient Carthage called Salambô, published in 1862.

  Presently a man who staggered, a man pale and hideous from terror, pushed forward a child; then could be distinguished between the hands of the Colossus a little black mass – it sank into the opening. The priests leaned over . . . and a new chant burst out, celebrating the joys of death and the renascence of eternity.

  Flaubert here imagines the sacrifice of the first of a batch
of children, ‘enveloped in black veils’. The colossus is the statue of a Phoenician divinity whom Greeks identified with the god in their own pantheon with a similar appetite for human infants, Cronus, who ate all his children except Zeus. Flaubert’s description seems to have been inspired by an ancient writer from Greek Sicily called Diodorus. This source recounts the pose of this Carthaginian statue, its hands extended and sloping downwards, ‘so that each of the children placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire’.

  Other Greek and Roman writers refer to this practice of the Carthaginians, which was evidently well known to their Mediterranean neighbours. Despite its sounding like so much hostile propaganda, the basic truthfulness of this ancient tradition is confirmed by the finds of archaeologists. In 1925, on the site of Carthage, they discovered a sacred enclosure with many stones inscribed with dedications in the Carthaginian version of Phoenician script and marking the location of ceramic urns containing the ashes of cremated infants. The bones of sheep and other animals, also recovered, suggest that the archaeologists had found in general the remains of sacrifices, not burials.

  There has been a lively modern debate about the finds from here and from another ten enclosures thought to be of this same type on Phoenician settlement sites in the Mediterranean, including Motya in Sicily. The case is strong for taking the burnt bones and the accompanying inscriptions mentioning ‘mlk’, a Phoenician word apparently meaning a sacrificial offering, as a corroboration of the tradition recorded by Greek and Roman writers.

  Judging from the inscriptions, those who made these offerings, mainly men but occasionally women, sacrificed a child of their own as a vow or in thanks to the divinity and perhaps only in an emergency. At Motya, Italian archaeologists have estimated from the cremated bones that in any year only a couple of sacrificed children were buried. As for the origin of the practice, migrating Phoenicians of the early Iron Age presumably brought it with them from the Levant. Here the Old Testament ascribes similar rites to the Canaanites and, indeed, to Abraham.