Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Then he regained his liberty by a most extraordinary train of circumstances. Before Cambyses died of his wound in Ecbatana, Oroetes, the governor of Sardis and satrap of Western Asia, who had long cherished a private quarrel with Polycrates of Samos, enticed him to land in Lydia as his guest, and then crucified him with circumstances of hideous cruelty. But Darius sent a single ambassador who came to the court of Sardis and read to Oroetes the king’s commands, and the last command was that the satrap’s own guards should smite off his head. And so they did, for Darius’ name was great, and they hated Oroetes. The ambassador took back with him as slaves many of the friends and servants of the dead man, among whom was a very cunning physician of Crotona, who became the friend of Pythagoras in Babylon. One day Darius sprained his foot, and when his own physicians could do nothing for him, some one brought the skilled captive, who cured the king at once. So the king asked him what reward he desired, and he begged that he might return to his home. Darius yielded so far as to permit him to visit Crotona, if he would promise to come back, and not trusting him, he sent with him a Persian guard, and several men of learning, bidding them to write a description of the coast as they sailed, and he gave them a fine ship and many supplies. But it came to pass that as they sailed to Crotona they were driven into Tarentum under stress of weather, and the Tarentines took them all prisoners with their goods, and when the physician had told his story they let him go free and he returned to Crotona. Now there was at Crotona a rich man exiled from Tarentum. And learning what had happened, he sent thither, and ransomed the Persian captives and their ship, and sent them all back to Darius, asking two things; namely, that the King would use his power to make the Tarentines receive him again and also that he would set free the wise man Pythagoras whom Cambyses had taken captive in Egypt; this he asked at the request of the physician. Then Darius, being glad to receive his Persians safely again, promised both things, and the second, at least, he performed, for Pythagoras was set at liberty; and he came to Samos in time to see his father and his mother alive, and also Hermodamas his first teacher, who had helped him to escape in the days of Polycrates. But he stayed not long in his home, for he desired to work among men and to turn his learning to their good, and his thoughts went out westward to the great Greek colonies of Italy, so that at last he followed the instinct of his soul and took ship and came to Crotona and founded the Pythagorean brotherhood, which was mystic, philosophical, and aristocratic, after the model of this Egyptian priesthood from which Pythagoras had got his wisdom.

  Hallam says somewhere that mankind has generally required some ceremonial follies to keep alive the wholesome spirit of association. It is hard to say now how many of the curious rules of life adopted by the Pythagorean brotherhood should be traced to this motive, and many of these contain more wisdom than appears in them at first sight. The brethren abstained from eating flesh, as most mystics have done, but they were as careful never to eat beans; they believed in the transmigration and immortality of souls, yet they prohibited the use of woollen grave-clothes; they had an elaborate system of degrees and initiations, they possessed most of the existing wisdom of their time, and they nevertheless followed rules for making a fire which seem utterly childish. Yet an inquiry into the origin and reason of some of these practices, if the facts could be sufficiently known, would throw a brilliant light upon the domestic customs of the early Greeks, and might not impossibly explain some of the peculiar superstitions of the south, such as that, for instance, with forbids a man to lay his hat upon a bed, or the universal southern belief that if a woman drinks from a new earthen jar, before a man has drunk from it, the water kept in it will ever afterwards taste of mould. In considering some of the extraordinary beliefs current among the Italians and Sicilians, it has often occurred to me that they may have had their origin in the fables about the Pythagorean brothers, to whom strange powers were imputed, of whom extraordinary tales were told, and some of whose visible practices may have been ignorantly imitated by the people in very early times.

  The society founded by Pythagoras was as much a secret one as that of the modern Japanese Buddhists, and lovers of esoteric philosophy will find many points of close resemblance in the two religions, if the doctrine of the Greek philosopher deserves the name of religion, which he would undoubtedly have applied to it, if an equivalent word had existed in the Greek language. It taught that the soul is immortal, that the aim of man should be a virtuous life on earth and a state of peace hereafter, and that goodness, if not the fear of God, is the beginning of wisdom. Yet it limited by the strictest tests the number of those who were admitted to a full knowledge of its secrets, and its visited every betrayal with merciless severity; it professed to be a religion for the few, it was necessarily hieratic if not aristocratic, and it was fatally disposed by its exclusiveness to identify itself with a political party. It drew into itself, or its founder gathered round him, the noblest youth of Grecian Italy, at a time when the power of the democracy was increasing at an enormous rate; and in the first real conflict which took place its adherents died devoted deaths at the hands of a bloodthirsty proletariat, as more than one aristocracy has perished since. They had advised, directed, and morally ruled the people, and their general, the heroic Milo, had returned from a victorious war with Sybaris, once all-powerful, but then fast sinking to an inglorious decadence by degrees of aesthetic idleness and unmeasured luxury. They brought home great spoils to Crotona, and in the division, one Kylon, a brutal fellow whom the Pythagoreans had refused to receive on account of his evil life, stirred up a riot against them. In the house of Milo they made their last stand, and there most of them were slain; but a few escaped, and Pythagoras came to his end in Metapontum, and the brotherhoods were done away with forever. Their existence had endured twenty years; had it lasted longer they would have been led from their natural political sphere, by the dangerous paths of political expediency, down to the moral disgrace of a political necessity, which is wholly unreconcilable with any true philosophy, and they would have left behind them the tradition of a once pure faith degraded to the basest uses and expedients of politics. But they died in a whole and clean belief, and from their ashes arose something new, which was not the Pythagorean religion, but the Pythagorean philosophy; their leader left a name little less than saintly, he bequeathed the accumulated wisdom of the world to his surviving followers, and he left his memory to the veneration of mankind.

  I have dwelt at great length upon his story because it combines in a wonderful degree the elements of fable, romance, and history, and is therefore a fitting link between myth and truth. I am aware that almost every incident in the tale has been held up to ridicule by some one scholar, but there is not one in which many others have not firmly believed. When learned authorities disagree, it is the right of the student of romantic history to choose from the confusion of discords those possible combinations which seem most harmonious. It is not his province to dissect the nerve of truth from the dead body of tradition, but rather by touch and thought and sympathy to make the old times live again in imagination. Therefore the godlike figure of this Pythagoras belongs among the Rulers of the South, as with the legends of his miracles, and the reality of his wisdom, with his profound learning, his untiring activity, and his unswerving belief in the soul’s life to come, with his love of man and his love of beauty, his faith, his hope, and his almost Christian charity, he represented in its best conditions the highest type of the Aryan or Indo-Germanic people. It matters little that scholars should quarrel over the theories of numbers ascribed to him, that the one should deny his captivity in Babylon and the other his long residence in Egypt, that Bentley should tear the traditions of him to pieces, that Roeth should glorify him almost to sainthood, or that Ritter should make a laudable but ineffectual attempt to find a golden mean of sense between the extremes; the fact remains that he lived and laboured, that he dreamt of a world of brotherhoods in which all good was to be in common, and from which all evil was to be excluded, that
when he was gone he left a philosophy behind him without which, as a beginning, it would be hard to imagine an Aristotle, a Socrates, or a Plato, and that both to his fellow-men and to those that came after him his name meant all that was best, whether possible or unattainable, in the struggle of inward civilization against outward darkness.

  The place where Sybaris stood among gardens of roses and groves of fruit trees is a desolate plain, where not one hewn stone is to be seen above the storm-ploughed soil, and rotting trunks of trees and rain-bleached branches strew the sterile drift. There the soft Sybarites made it unlawful to rear a crowing cock in the city, or for braziers, smiths, and carpenters to work at their trades, lest any harsh sound should grate upon their delicate hearing; there even the children were clad in purple robes, and their hair was curled and braided with gold; there the idle reared witty dwarfs to jest for them, and bred little Maltese dogs with silky hair; and the five thousand horsemen of their cavalry rode in procession, wearing saffron-coloured robes over their corslets, and the people lived in luxuries beyond imagination, and in pleasures without a name, till Milo and the stern men of Crotona came and destroyed them all, and turned the waters of the river upon the city and swept it utterly away. The winter floods roar down the river bed where Sybaris was, and the spring freshets pile up brushwood and sand upon the barren stones, while overhead the southern hawk makes wide circles above the universal desolation, and his mournful note falls fitfully upon the lonely air. But Crotona flourished long and greatly, and its possessions extended from sea to sea; it has left in history the names of countless winners of the Olympic Games, and the reputation of its men and women for matchless strength and beauty; and though not a stone of its buildings remains in sight, yet there is a sort of logical satisfaction in knowing that the ancient ruins which were standing in the last century were finally destroyed in order that the stones might be used to build the mole of a safe harbour. For Crotona never disappeared from existence as Sybaris did, and where the ancient stronghold of Milo was reared upon a bold mass of seagirt rock, another fortress, strong in the middle ages, rebuilt by Charles the Fifth and still unruined, reflects its dark outline in the sea.

  A deserted corner of Italy now, Crotona is a land of farmers ignorant of all but farming, and it is hard to feel that it was once the heart of Greek strength, and beauty, and civilization in the west, and that where a single column rises in lonely beauty almost from the water’s edge, at Capo Colonne, the great philosopher once lingered in the shade of Lacinian Hera’s temple; that the picture of Lacedaemonian Helen hung upon the wall within, painted by Zeuxis from the five most lovely maidens of the city, and that the Greeks of all southern Italy came up thither every year in splendid procession, bearing gifts and offerings to the goddess and her shrine.

  It is generally said that the influence of Pythagoras and of the brotherhoods, which was dominant on the mainland and left distinct traces of itself there after the catastrophe in which the disciples and their master perished, had little influence upon Sicily. Some say indeed that a tyrant of Centoripa, one Simichus, became an adept and divided all his possessions between his sisters and his subjects, and others assert that the people of Akragas, and Tauromenium, and Himera threw off the yoke of their several tyrannies at last, not as common revolutionaries, but as true believers in the Pythagorean doctrines of individual freedom and common possessions; but these stories are gravely doubted, and Holm has shown that more than one wise despot was also accounted a Pythagorean. Yet to one who knows the south well, there is a striking resemblance between the organization of the original brotherhood, with its rigid tests of worthiness, its countless secret signs and pass words and peculiar practices, and its bloody vengeance upon unfaithfulness, and the rules and ordinances of secret societies that have ruled the south in later days. Were there no traces of such freemasonry among the slaves who twice rose against the Romans in Sicily and who seem to have connected themselves in some imaginative way with an Eastern tradition? Or among the people who destroyed Charles of Anjou’s Frenchmen in the Sicilian Vespers? Or is the evil Camorra of Naples to‑day wholly different from a brotherhood, so far as the laws that bind together its members are concerned, though the object be crime instead of good? Or, to go one step higher, is the modern Mafia of Sicily, which so strangely combines a mistaken idea of patriotism, or at least of independence, with the most nefarious notions of general lawlessness, so wholly different in its forms from the brotherhoods, as not to be perhaps a degenerate descendant of them? Answer the question as one will, the south has always been the natural home of wide-spread and secret unions of determined men for one end; and whereas in recent history political parties have made use of them and have risen to power by their help, no party and no government has ever been able to fight them to an issue nor to stamp them out.

  The Greeks were an imaginative and a boastful people, prone to think well of themselves, like most highly gifted races, and it requires much good will to believe all the stories their historians have left us of their superhuman endurance and courage; but it is an undeniable proof of their extraordinary vitality and strength that they withstood victoriously the simultaneous attempts of two great powers to crush them out of existence at a very critical moment in their career. About the year 480 B.C. Xerxes and Carthage, apparently acting in concert, advanced from the east and west with vast armaments and enormous preparations, in the clear intention of annihilating the whole Greek nation in a single campaign. Xerxes came with all Persia and the north of India at his back; Carthage sent Hamilcar and three hundred thousand men.

  At that time, except in Syracuse, despots ruled over the principal Greek cities of Sicily, Gela, Callipolis, Naxos, Leontini, and Zancle, the first of which had under Hippocrates acquired a sort of lordship over the rest; and he indeed attempted to conquer Syracuse also, but failed when on the point of success, and left the undertaking to his successor Gelon, the conqueror, and none could be compared with him excepting Theron of Akragas, who became his friend and gave him his daughter to wife; and Theron ruled through the midst of the land, from Akragas on the south to near Himera on the north, but the tyrant of Himera was his enemy and the friend of Anaxilas of Rhegium on the mainland. So there was war between the north and the south, and the south stood for a Greek Sicily and a Greek civilization, but the north was against both. But in Himera there was a division of parties, and the one asked help of Theron, who came and took the city and held it, while the tyrants of the north turned to the Phoenicians and to Carthage for aid. At that time the Phoenicians were powerful in Panormus and all the western parts of the island, so that the Carthaginians were sure of being well received with all their forces and supplies in cities belonging to their own people, whence they could fight their way by land to a general conquest.

  They saw that their opportunity was come at last, and they made great preparations during three years, and gathered together mercenaries from many lands, as was their custom in time of war, from Italy and Liguria and from Gaul and Spain and Corsica, and many from Africa, and weapons were made without number, and a vast provision was collected; then they set sail with two hundred galleys and three thousand transports, under Hamilcar, the son of Hanno, one of the two kings called Suffetes, a man of ancient Carthaginian lineage, though his mother was a Syracusan; and he was a devout person who neglected no service of the Phoenician gods, and continually sacrificed men and children to Ashtaroth on the altars of his house. Moreover, he had good surety that some of the most western Greek cities would help him, such as Selinus and others.

  He set sail, therefore, with a good heart and dreaming of great spoil. But immediately a great storm arose, and the ships that bore the cavalry with their horses, and the war chariots also, were filled and sank with all on board; so that when he reached Panormus he had only the mercenary foot soldiers, a great host of fighting men of all nations, wearing strange dresses and armed with many sorts of weapons. In the wide bay of Panormus, the “All-harbour,” where the Golden Shel
l stretches between the high mountain and the water’s edge, he landed his men, and repaired his ships; and thence he marched along the narrow foreshore against Himera, where Theron awaited him, not without fear, for great rumours went before the armament.

  The fleet sailed along close in shore, keeping the army in sight, and when they came to Himera and saw that the gates were shut against them, Hamilcar made two camps, the one for his land forces and the other for his ships, which he beached high and dry, surrounding them with a high stockade and a broad ditch. But the tents of the soldiers began from the enclosure and followed all the west side of the city and along the low heights to southward. When Theron saw how great a host was come against him, he was afraid, and he walled up the west gate of the city and sent messengers quickly and secretly to Gelon, the soldier king of Syracuse. But Hamilcar besieged the city, and when the defenders made sallies he drove them back with slaughter, making many of them prisoners; and the strange arms and wild dresses of the Carthaginian mercenaries frightened Theron’s men even before they came to close quarters. Nevertheless Hamilcar did not press the siege overmuch, and while he was wasting his days in small engagements, thinking himself sure of taking the city without loss, Gelon was crossing over through the mountains by forced marches, day and night, with fifty thousand men-at‑arms and five thousand horsemen, not mercenaries speaking many tongues and trained to many different kinds of warfare as Hamilcar’s men were, but all Greeks of the Sicilian cities under Gelon’s rule, well trained, speaking one tongue, and ready to die for their homes, their children, and their gods. They all encamped together and intrenched themselves in the plain to eastward of Himera, and Gelon began to harass the Carthaginians with his cavalry, for they had none, having lost both horses and men in the great storm. Then the face of things changed, and the Himerans took heart and opened the west gate again, tearing away the stones they had piled up, and Gelon took many prisoners and bethought him of some plan of striking a decisive blow. Now the Carthaginians had received promises of help from Selinus, the unfaithful city of the west, and the Selinuntians had agreed to send a body of horse to Hamilcar on a certain day which was also the feast of the Phoenicians; and a captive told his news to Gelon. He therefore waited until the feast day, and very early in the morning, before the sun was risen, he sent a chosen band of his own cavalry to the gate of Hamilcar’s camp, bidding them say that they were the Greek horsemen from Selinus whom Hamilcar expected. He, being deceived, bade the gates be opened and the riders went in; but they rode past him and his men without drawing rein till they came to the ships that were beached upon the sand, and they set them on fire before the Carthaginians well understood what they were doing, and then drew their swords and began to slay.