Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Then, when Gelon saw the column of smoke rising up from the enemy’s camp, he knew that his stratagem had succeeded, for he was ready and on the watch; and he marched down with all his fifty thousand men, and with all the Himeran soldiers also, and in that great day the Greeks slew of the Carthaginians outright one hundred and fifty thousand, and wounded many more; and the rest fled as they might, leaving all behind them. Hamilcar also perished, and some say that he died a strange death; for it is told that all day, while the battle ebbed and flowed in a tide of blood, he stood before the great altar in the midst of his camp, sacrificing human offerings to the gods, that by some miracle they might turn and save him from destruction; but when it was towards evening, and he saw that all was lost, he spread out his arms and prayed to the setting sun, and threw himself into the flames upon the altar, the last and noblest burnt-offering of his own sacrifice.

  The few who fled intrenched themselves upon a mountain west of Himera, whither Gelon pursued them, and they were soon obliged to abandon their position for lack of water. Hastening to the shore with the Greeks in hot pursuit, they found the few vessels which had escaped the flames, launched them as best they could, and put to sea; yet the unappeased gods pursued them to the end, for the vessels were overladen and overwhelmed in the stormy waters of the Malta channel. Three thousand and two hundred ships had sailed from the harbour of Carthage with more than three hundred thousand men, to make the conquest of Sicily; a single skiff returned with scarce a dozen survivors to tell the tale.

  Then the Carthaginians feared lest Gelon, having felt his strength and their weakness, should cross the water with his victorious Greeks to blot out their city and name, and take the rich coasts of Africa for his spoil, and so complete the circle of Greek possession round the central basin of the Mediterranean Sea. For, as some say, it was on the very day of Hamilcar’s destruction that Xerxes was disgracefully beaten at Salamis; and if that be not so, it was at least soon afterwards; and the allied attempt of Persia and of Carthage to crush out the Greek power had utterly failed. Therefore the Carthaginians sent ambassadors to Gelon, who was now the greatest ruler in Sicily, to sue for peace on such terms as he could be induced to grant. But it is said that Damarete, Gelon’s wife, advised him not to set the price of peace too high, lest at some future time he should need Carthaginian help for himself. He therefore exacted only three conditions; namely, that the Phoenicians should desist from offering human sacrifices in Sicily; that they should pay two thousand talents as indemnity for the cost of the war; and that they should build two temples to the memory of the peace; the one in Carthage, and the other at their expense in Syracuse. When the Carthaginians heard of such easy terms, they were overjoyed, and because they attributed their good fortune to Damarete, they presented her with a golden garland of one hundred talents’ value, which may have been equal only to about seventy-five ounces of pure gold, if the Sicilian talent is meant, but if the Attic talent was the measure, the worth of the garland would have been near twenty-five thousand pounds sterling.

  The power of Gelon grew vastly after these things, which happened about thirty years after Rome had become a republic, and more than two hundred years before Rome’s first war with Carthage. He was the first great ruler, for he brought under his dominion not only all Sicily but also a part of the mainland, and there is every reason to believe that he made Crotona and Rhegium, with all their possessions, tributary to him. In the first years of his lordship, he called a great meeting of the Syracusan people, and of all those to whom he had given the right of citizenship, bidding them come fully armed; but he himself, now that he trusted them, came alone and without armour or weapons, and stood up in their midst, and gave a true account of his actions in the war and afterwards. Then the people cried out and cheered, calling him their saviour, their benefactor, and their king; and so was, and he changed not till he died, for he was a brave and just man, and a glory to the Hellenic name. He died of a dropsy when he had ruled only seven years, and the Syracusans built him a tomb with nine towers; but long afterwards the Carthaginians destroyed the sepulchre, and at last Agathocles pulled down the towers in envy of Gelon’s greatness, so that nothing remains to mark the spot to‑day.

  It is easy and generally unprofitable to construct imaginary history from the starting-point of an event which might have occurred, but did not. Yet one may ask not unreasonably what would have taken place if Gelon had followed up the victory of Himera by crossing over to Africa and destroying Carthage at once and forever. That he could have done so there is little doubt. At that time Carthage had few fighting men of her own, but was accustomed to raise mercenaries for her wars, and her whole army, consisting of a third of a million men, had just been utterly destroyed. Gelon had fifty thousand trained Greeks, he controlled vast wealth, and he had the prestige of victory. If he had pushed the war, the issue could hardly have been doubtful; Carthage would have sunk to the level of a province of Sicily, and two hundred years later Rome would not have had to fight the Punic Wars. But Gelon was a victor, a patriot, a wise ruler; he had not the instinct of the conqueror, and Carthage was left to recover from her defeat and to grow strong again within a few years. Yet what Gelon did contributed more directly to the growth of the beautiful civilization which blossomed in the reign of Hiero the First, and bore fruit long afterwards, than a career of foreign conquest could have done.

  With the exception of Alexander, whose character was more Asiatic than Hellenic, no Greek appears to have conceived the idea of direct lordship over many states. The ruler of the dominant state controlled the rest, much as the German emperors controlled the Holy Roman Empire, leaving to each country its own ruler and its own laws, but without the tradition upon which the Holy Roman Empire rested, and from which it derived its authority. From the days of Gelon, Syracuse became the chief despotism in Sicily, and led the rest in civilization as well as in war; but the other tyrants continued to rule, each in his own place, both in the island and on the mainland, with very considerable authority; and Gelon’s brother and successor Hiero, who usurped the power from Gelon’s young heir, whose guardian he was jointly with another, had to sustain no insignificant struggle with Theron of Akragas, who had been Gelon’s friend, and with Anaxilas of Rhegium, before he established his right to stand first among the despots of his day. Then, indeed, he pushed his influence northward on the mainland, and vanquished the Etruscans who had attacked Greek Cumae, planting colonies in the island of Ischia and elsewhere, some of which afterwards moved away, being terrified by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, while others remained. So all the south became a harmonious, well-governed confederation of Greek states, a little empire — a great one for those days — under the guidance of Hiero.

  But he having attained to greatness, not being by any means satisfied with the honour and glory achieved by his brother Gelon, nor being by nature of such simple and soldierly tastes, began to make his reign memorable for something higher and more enduring than conquest. Already the greatest ruler, he began to fill his court with the greatest men of the world, and to make Syracuse worthy, in beauty and grandeur, to be his home and theirs.

  The Olympic Games held together all Greeks, throughout the civilized world, by a common bond; to be a winner was not only to win fame, sometimes undying — much glory was also shed upon the contestant’s native city. Nor were the games only for those trained athletes who ran long races on the measured course, who wrestled desperately in the dust, or fought even to the death for the boxer’s prize, or leapt with weights, or strove in mere feats of strength without skill; besides these were the chariot races, to which all the tyrants of the Greek states sent both chariots and priceless horses, vying with each other in the splendid show; and in these races the prize belonged not to him who drove, but to the owner of the steeds. Countless coins of exquisite design bear witness to the value the princes set upon a successful race, for it is now believed that these coins were only minted for such as had been winners; and has been pointe
d out by specialists, there are coins of Messina, Catania, Leontini, Syracuse, Akragas, and many other cities, some even with Phoenician inscriptions from Panormus, all of which have on the reverse the biga, triga, or quadriga, often with a figure of Victory flying in the air above the horses’ heads. That racing with chariots was an almost universal sport throughout the Greek states we know, and the fact explains the immense importance attached to the great contests of Olympia, of Delphi, of the Isthmus of Corinth, and of Nemea. But their greatest value to the world lay in the fact that they gave opportunities of inspiration to the poets of the time, whose odes to the victors earned a greater immortality of their own, and enriched posterity with some of the most beautiful masterpieces of verse that have ever been produced.

  The Greeks of Sicily and of the Italian mainland rivaled the rest and often outdid them in the number of winners they sent to Greece, and while Crotona surpassed all other cities in the foot races and in wrestling and boxing, Sicily was more often first with her chariots and horses. That was a sort of contest in which only the richest could compete, and more than once Hiero himself carried off the palm. Then in the train of Olympic victories came the Olympic poets, and Simonides of Ceos, and Bacchylides his nephew, and Pindar himself, all came to Sicily and spent years in Syracuse, being three lyric poets of strangely different genius, but reckoned almost equal in fame while they lived. We know something of the character of each. We can call up from the depth of five and twenty centuries the still living memory of Simonides, who enjoys the singular distinction of having for discovered that poetry is a marketable production of genius, for it is recorded that he was the first poet who not only received remuneration, but exacted payment for his verses, and he must therefore be looked upon as the direct literary ancestor of the modern author. Worldly, gifted, tactful and extravagant, he used to say that his poetry filled two chests, the one with thanks and the other with gold, but that when in need, he had always found the first empty. Once, when Anaxilas of Rhegium won the mule race at Olympia, — for there were mule races too, — he offered Simonides a sum of money to write an ode to him as victor. The poet thought the price too small and answered that he would not demean his genius by writing of mules. The tyrant determined to have what he wanted, increased his offer to a sum which he knew that the poet would not refuse, but wondered how the latter would extricate himself from the dilemma he had created by his first refusal. Simonides was equal to the occasion. His address to the mules began, ‘All hail, ye daughters of wind-swift mares’ — and the poem contained no further allusion to the hybrids. At another time he observed that it must be better to be rich than to be wise, since he always saw wise men knocking at rich men’s doors. Filled with amazing vitality and love of large, age seemed to take no hold upon him; at eighty he was the winner of a poetic contest and led the Cyclic Chorus in Athens, which means that he not only composed the song and sang it, but danced round the altar with the chorus of fifty youths who sang with him; and this was in Athens, the very home of satire, where to be ridiculous for an instant was to be ruined forever. He lived to the age of ninety, and we do not hear that his faculties lost their vigour nor his genius its charm.

  Bacchylides, his nephew, was of different temper, though he affected to imitate the worldly wisdom of his uncle. Nothing he wrote has come down to us, but at one time Hiero esteemed him above Pindar, and the blot upon his character is his mean jealousy of the latter and his low instinct of flattery. The evil that he did lived after him, but his good verses perished, like those of Simonides.

  Last of the three, and unlike both, comes the greatest— ‘as the rain-fed river overflows its banks and rushes from the mountains, immeasurable, deep-mouthed Pindar rages and rushes on’ — the proud, the stern, the inspired, who ‘lived not for the world but for himself,’ scorning gold as Simonides loved it and despising flattery and backbiting alike. There must have been something about the man that imposed itself upon others, something not far from awe and much above the most sincere admiration — something that is in the Odes, which alone have come down to us, with a few fragments quoted by Athenaeus, something lofty, half divine, almost of the prophet; and all men recognized it and honoured the poet. Yet he would never make his home with Hiero, though he wrote four odes upon his victories, and in the end, being eighty years of age, he died in Argos, independent to the last, and leaving that rare and unrivalled fame which suggests neither comparison nor similarity with that of other men, the glory of those few who were not only first but last of their kind.

  To the court of Syracuse there came not only lyric poets; Aeschylus was a favourite with Hiero also, and Epicharmus, the father of comedy, whose rough humour shocks the instinctive reverence we feel even for false gods, when they were grand or beautiful, who in the ‘Marriage of Hebe’ represented mighty Jove squabbling for the best fish at the feast of the gods, and introduced the divine Muses as glibly chattering fishwives, offering their wares for sale; a man of most irrepressible wit and impertinent humour, even in his ninetieth year.

  Aeschylus was a younger and a stronger man. He may be called the father of tragedy as Epicharmus was of comedy. Rugged and vast of plan, his work is to that of Sophocles as a rock temple of India to a Gothic cathedral; dimly terrible with the unseen presence of fate, the horror of the final catastrophe overshadows the play from the first and speaks in every accent of predestined man and woman. The watchman sees evil coming from afar, the stamp of it is on Clytemnestra’s brow, Cassandra in frenzied prophecy foretells the master’s murder, and when it is accomplished, unseen, in the imagination of the horrified spectator, its effect is a hundred more times more terrible than if the king’s blood were shed upon the stage. The weapons of Aeschylus are huge, and unwieldy to a common hand; but in his strong grasp they have a masterly precision and an appalling directness. Before his time there were playwrights and actors, there were wandering companies of Sicilian mimes who played from town to town, changing the action and the lines of their half-improvised dramas to suit the circumstances in which they found themselves; and there were genuine theatres also in the great cities, where graver plays were performed. But Aeschylus first made the stage what it has remained more or less ever since, by introducing machinery and accessories never heard of before, a god appearing through a trap-door — the original ‘Deus ex machinâ,’ — to put an end to a situation which had no natural conclusion; and rich costumes were also his invention, and sounds produced behind the scenes suggestive of deeds too atrocious to be seen by the audience.

  Many tales are told to explain why the tragic poet left Greece. One writer says that he was dissatisfied with the honour he received in his own country; another, that during a great performance of one of his tragedies a platform broke down with its load, and that the poet feared the ridicule of the people; again, it is said that he left his home in anger, because in a contest of tragedy the young Sophocles obtained the prize against him, but the strangest reason of all is that the Athenians drove him out because their women were driven to frantic fear by the terrible chorus of the Furies, in his tragedy called the Eumenides. Whatever the cause may have been, and it seems useless to seek for a complicated one, he came twice to Sicily, and on the second visit, being nearly seventy years of age, he settled in the city of Gela, near which, as tradition says, he died a very extraordinary death. For it is said that an eagle, having taken a tortoise and meaning to drop it from a great height upon a rock, in order to break it and devour its flesh, looked down and saw the bald head of Aeschylus, who was walking in a meadow near the city; and taking it for a polished stone, the eagle dropped the tortoise directly upon it, whereby Aeschylus came to his end. The people of Gela buried him with great pomp, and raised a splendid monument to his memory.

  Besides his other inventions in connexion with the stage, Aeschylus was the inventor of the tragic trilogy, which in its true and original form consisted of three complete tragedies, of which the subjects were closely dependent each upon the other and in each of which
the unity of time, of place, and of action were maintained in the strictest manner. It had not entered the thoughts of Greek playwrights to give any play a greater scope of time than was required for its actual performance, by dividing it into acts, separated by an imaginary lapse of hours, days, or months; to produce such an illusion it seemed necessary to them to write as many different plays as the whole action required different times, and to present them on successive days in order that the spectators might the more easily imagine a longer interval of time to have passed. The modern play in three, four, or five acts is in substance a trilogy, a tetralogy, or a pentalogy on a small scale, and the Greeks would certainly not have admitted a Wagnerian trilogy to be a legitimate piece of play-writing.