Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  During his splendid reign Hiero not only attracted to his court such men as this and many others besides, but he exerted also the great powers which had fallen to his lot in improving and beautifying his capital and it was largely due to his initiative that Syracuse soon afterwards became one of the most beautiful cities of the world. It was to be the privilege of others, notably of Dionysius the Elder and of Hiero the Second, to bring the work to full perfection, but the first and greatest merit is due to the first Hiero. To the end he was successful in all he understood, and victorious in every war. When Theron, the friend of Gelon, died at last after reigning sixteen years, his son Thrasydaeus succeeded him in the tyranny. Ambitious as he was cruel, and in all other respects different from his father, he conceived the idea of conquering Syracuse, and raised an army of twenty thousand men, almost all of whom were Greeks. But Hiero was before him, though he had to march his troops over a hundred miles through a difficult country, and Thrasydaeus, instead of invading his enemy’s dominions, was forced to give battle within his own on the banks of the river Akragas. Hiero’s army slew four thousand and put the rest to flight, including the young tyrant himself, who escaped to Megara in the hope of being received in a friendly manner; but the inhabitants feared him, for his name was associated with every sort of barbarity, and when they had taken counsel they put him to death. After that Hiero was supreme while he lived.

  He died after reigning eleven years, probably in the city of Aetna, of which it is doubtful whether any trace remains. He had founded it himself, notwithstanding certain authorities which insist that it was only built after his death, and in the latter years of his life he probably preferred it as a residence during the cold weather, for it was situated on the southern slope of the volcano, partly protected from the east winds which, in the winter season, are the only drawback of the climate of Syracuse.

  The first great development of art, as well as of literature, in Sicily dates from the victory of Himera which terminated the first Carthaginian invasion. It was between 480 B.C. and 409 B.C. that the great temples of Selinus, of Segesta, and of Akragas were built, edifices which surpassed in size and solidity almost every building of the sort in the Greek world. The architecture was most magnificent; the art of sculpture, however, was still in its archaic infancy, and the large fragments of uncouthly sculptured metopes preserved in the museum at Palermo must have contrasted strangely, when whole and in their places, with the splendid proportions and finished workmanship of the temples they adorned. These stand, or lie in fragments, throughout the island from end to end, witnesses of an age of faith, of strength, and of warfare; of a primitive warfare that was but wholesale hand to hand strife, of physical strength deified and worshipped as the main requisite for victory, of a material faith which was little better than a glorified generalization of man’s animal instincts and of nature’s common phenomena. We modern men are more easily surprised by such monuments of material power than by the far more wonderful results which purely spiritual and ethic influences have brought about in more recent days. It seems more extraordinary to us that human hands should ever have piled one upon another the enormous masses of stone that composed the temples of Selinus, than that whole nations should have fought to the death for half a dozen more or less vague articles of religious belief.

  There is nothing in Europe like the ruins of Selinus. Side by side, the one stone upon another, as they fell at the earthquake shock, the remains of four temples lie in the dust, within the city, and the still more gigantic fragments of three others lie without the ruined walls. At first sight the confusion looks so terrific that the whole seems as if it might have fallen from the sky to the world, from the homes of the gods to destruction on earth — as if Zeus might have hurled a city at mankind, to fall on Sicily in a wild wreck of senseless stone. Blocks that are Cyclopean lie like jackstraws one upon another, sections of columns •twenty-eight feet round are tossed together upon the ground like leaves from a basket, and fragments of cornice •fifteen feet long lie across them more stand half upright, or lean against the enormous steps. No words can explain to the mind the involuntary shock which the senses feel at the first sight of it all. One touches the stones in wonder, comparing one’s small human stature with their mass, and the intellect strains hopelessly to recall their original position; one climbs in and out among them, sometimes mounting, sometimes descending, as one might pick one’s way through an enormous quarry, scarcely understanding that the blocks one touches have all been hewn into shape by human hands and that the hills from which men brought them are but an outline in the distance. But as one reaches the highest fragment within the Acropolis, the plan of the whole begins to stand out from the confusion; the columns have all fallen in ranks, and in the same direction, and from the height one may count the round drums of stone which once composed each erect pillar. There is method in the ruin and a sort of natural order in the destruction. No earthly hands, bent on blotting out the glory of Selinus, could have done such work, neither the crowbar and lever of the Carthaginian, nor the giant-powder of the modern engineer. Nature herself did the deed. In the morning the seven temples of Selinus were standing whole and perfect against the pale and dazzling sky; at noonday the air grew sultry and full of a yellow glare, the sea lay still as liquid lead, and the sleeping beast in the field woke suddenly in terror of something far below, that could be felt rather than heard; an hour and more went by, and then the long, low sound that is like no other came up from the depths of the world, and the broad land heaved like the tidal swell of the ocean, once, twice, and thrice, and was still, and a great cloud of white dust hung where the seven temples had stood. As they fell, so they lie and will lie for all time, a very image of the abomination of desolation.

  The sculptured fragments have been almost all removed to the great museum in Palermo; they seem to have represented battles between goddesses and giants, and, while the treatment is of archaic simplicity, there are, here and there, a few figures in which the rising genius of sculpture foreshadows the great things it was soon to do. On the whole they almost reach the artistic level of the fragments from Aegina, and we may fairly take it for granted that this was the state of art throughout Sicily towards the end of the seventy years which elapsed between the two Carthaginian invasions. Of the same period is the great temple of Athene at Syracuse, crowning the island of Ortygia. Enclosed within high walls, it has been converted to the uses of a cathedral, but the columns of the temple stand intact within, and it is easy to fancy it as it was. High on its seaward side Athene’s burnished shield was hung up of old to catch the rays of the noonday sun, a beacon to ships at sea; for mariners who were departing on a voyage used to go up thither before they weighed anchor, and when they had made offerings to the goddess they received from the priests little earthen vessels containing flowers and grains of incense; and when the burnished shield was lost to their view as they sailed away, they consigned the little jar and its contents to the sea with a final prayer for their safe return.

  In widest contrast to the ruins of Selinus and to the church-temple at Ortygia, is the still almost perfect temple of Segesta. At the western extremity of the island a lonely valley leads from the deep Gulf of Castellamareº upwards to the mountains. Climbing the narrow path, the traveller looks in vain for ancient ruin or modern habitation until he pauses for breath upon the shoulder of a hill, and suddenly he sees over against him the faultless outline of one of the most beautiful temples in the world. Dark and symmetrical, it stands alone upon the waste, vividly perfect against the sky that is bright with the reflection from the sea beyond. Of all its forty Doric columns, only one is very slightly injured. Nothing more strangely impressive can be imagined, nothing more solid and more silently grand, more nobly done. It is as if the visible spirit of the Greeks had chosen that wild solitude for its last abiding-place.

  Yet of all the cities of Sicily, Segesta was the least Greek, if, indeed, it can be said to have been Greek at all. There is a sort of roman
tic uncertainty about its origin which was particularly attractive to the Romans, and they admitted the claim of the Segestans to Trojan descent as noble as that of Aeneas himself. It is certain that from very early times Segesta was in closer and more friendly relations with the Phoenicians than any other colony, and it was this circumstance which twice almost caused Segesta to be the ruin of all Greek Sicily: the first time when, finding itself isolated from the other Greek cities and hated by them owing to its former attachment to Phoenician interests, it sent out ambassadors to Athens and provoked the ill-fated Athenian expedition in which Alcibiades played so strange a part; the second, when it appealed to Carthage for help against Selinus and brought on directly another Carthaginian invasion.

  But before describing those great events which took place when Sicily’s power and influence were at their height, it is necessary to glance at the record of Hiero’s successors, since Syracuse had, under him, become the commanding power of the island, and the chief centre of its civilization. Though Hiero was one of the great rulers, and, on the whole, a wise one, it must not be forgotten that he had in reality usurped the sovereignty which Gelon had intended to transmit to his own son, and had held it in spite of the other members of his own family, by the means usually adopted by usurpers. He employed numerous spies, both men and women, to detect his enemies, and he exiled or destroyed the latter without the slightest hesitation. At his death, he left one brother living, the eldest of all and the least gifted, Thrasybulus by name. He also believed that he was destined to the kingship, and he attempted to withhold it from his nephew as his brother had done; but he had neither the strength of character nor the talent which the latter had possessed, and he oppressed the people beyond endurance. The Syracusans had borne the exactions of Hiero, the victorious, the generous, the adorner of the city, the terror of their foes; they soon lost patience with his mean and miserly successor.

  Sicily was ripe for a revolution, and the democratic spirit was abroad; the fall of the tyrant of Akragas had prepared the way, and the despots of the minor cities governed in hourly fear of ruin. Syracuse was mistress of the island, and indirectly of Southern Italy; it was certain that if she freed herself from her master, the rest of the country would follow.

  But Thrasybulus was strong in mercenary troops and ships, and the numerous relations and adherents of his family stood by him to a man; a memorable struggle began, of which the result was long doubtful and which showed for the first time the extraordinary strength which the older parts of the city possessed, both by natural position and artificial fortification.

  Syracuse overlooks an extensive natural harbour, •two miles long and a mile across, free from rocks or shoals, and so completely enclosed by the mainland and the island of Ortygia that the entrance is but little over a thousand yards wide, opening due east. The island is divided from the mainland by what is nothing more than a narrow canal; it extends from the entrance northward, and north of it Gelon had walled off from the mainland a strip of land •about two and a half miles long, of which the sea-line consists of low cliffs that offer no landing worth the name, and no shelter from any wind all the way round by east, from north to south. This strip of land received the name Achradina, a word for which there seems to be no satisfactory derivation, unless it comes from ‘achrades’, the wild pear trees, which still abound in this part of Sicily. A modern Sicilian writer suggests that the word might be made to mean ‘the height of the cape.’ The city of Gelon consisted of Achradina and Ortygia, both strongly fortified. At the time of the revolution against Thrasybulus, the suburb Tyche, ‘good Fortune,’ was without the walls, on the west, and the larger suburb Neapolis, ‘the new city,’ extended to the Lysimeleian swamp that open upon the bay. In later years the whole of the great harbour was surrounded by buildings.

  Thrasybulus shut himself up within the walls with about fifteen thousand men who bore arms. The population of the city consisted largely of those persons to whom Gelon had given rights of citizenship, whom he had collected about him, and who had remained there under Hiero. In the general revolution these made common cause with the genuine Syracusans of old stock, and, with the latter, occupied the suburbs, making fruitless attempts to drive the tyrant from his position. They soon saw that success was impossible, for by means of his ships he kept his communications open by sea and was able to provision the city at his pleasure. The people then turned to the other Sicilian cities for assistance, renouncing their supremacy over the island by doing so. Those to whom they appealed asked nothing better than to help in destroying the power under which they had fretted so long. Gela, Akragas, Selinus, and Himera joined the Syracusans, sending both men and ships. Thrasybulus attacked the ships first, but lost a part of his own, and the remainder were soon blockaded in the harbour; his attempts to sally out by land were equally unsuccessful, the enemy closed in upon him on every side, he was in danger of famine, and he sued for his life, asking only that he might be allowed to leave the country unmolested. The men who had him in their power had been oppressed by him, robbed by him, and it is more than probable that some of them had been tortured by him; but they magnanimously granted his request, he was allowed to depart unmolested, and he ended his days peacefully in Locri. His fall was the signal for a general rising against the tyrants, and in a few months all the south was in the hands of a jubilant democracy.

  The Syracusans set up a gigantic statue to Zeus and instituted the Festival and Games of Freedom, during which four hundred and fifty oxen were to be sacrificed every year to make a feast for the people, and for this purpose they built an altar a tenth of a sea mile long and over sixty feet wide — a Gargantuan expression of gratitude to the gods in the present and the future, which suggests that under Thrasybulus they had never enjoyed a feast, and had rarely had enough. But the revolution was not yet over, for the new democracy took measures to exclude from the higher public offices all those burghers who owed their citizenship to Gelon, Hiero, or Thrasybulus, and a long struggle ensued, during which the offended party held Achradina and Ortygia as the last tyrant had done. With the help of the Sicelians, the old burghers triumphed at last, however, got possession of the walled city, and drove out their adversaries.

  One of the first results of the fall of the tyrants throughout Sicily was that the Sicelians reasserted themselves on the ground of having helped the burghers to obtain their freedom, and regained a large part of the lands which had been taken from them by the different Greek cities. When Hiero determined to transplant the population of Catania, to change its name to Aetna, and to fill it with more or less Doric citizens, he settled those whom he had expelled upon broad tracts of country taken from the Sicelians. These possessions now fell back to their original owners. The former inhabitants of Catania besieged it and drove out those who had supplanted them, and the latter established themselves in the new city on the southern slope of the mountain, which Hiero had called Aetna, while Catania resumed its original name. The same thing took place elsewhere, in all places, in fact, where Hiero had endeavoured to change the population in order to create one entirely devoted to his interests. As may well be imagined, the result of this second change was a considerable degree of confusion, to remedy which the various Sicilian commonwealths held a general meeting, at which they agreed that the rights of citizenship should nowhere belong to any but the original inhabitants of the towns and that all other persons, whether natives of other cities in the island, or Greek immigrants, or barbarians, should lose their acquired or usurped rights and depart forthwith. It does not appear, however, that they were driven into any cruel exile, and in the great majority of cases they received sufficient grants of land in other districts.

  When matters were thus settled in a preliminary manner, a period of peace and extraordinary prosperity began, which lasted nearly sixty years and which offers little of interest to the general reader, but which resulted in a vast development of art, literature, and general culture. Of course, men appeared from time to time whose persona
l influence rendered them dangerous to democracy. For their own safety the Syracusans introduced the law of petalism, corresponding almost exactly to the ostracism of the Athenians. Instead of the fragments of pottery used by the latter to vote the expulsion of a citizen, the Syracusans used the ‘petals,’ that is the leaves, of the olive tree, and the citizen for whom the greatest number of these were cast into the urns was obliged to exile himself from the city for five years, whereas the time of exile imposed by the Athenian ostracism was ten. As usual, however, the common people promptly made use of this method to get rid of every one with more than average intelligence, and the custom was abolished.

  An extraordinary and not altogether unromantic attempt on the part of the Sicelians to regain the principal power in the island produced the only wars fought in this period. Ducetius, who suddenly appears as the Sicelian king, succeeded in raising a considerable force with which he dislodged the inhabitants of the newly founded city of Aetna and seized several other important points; but the Syracusans, though not friendly with the sufferers, looked upon their defeat as a slight upon Greeks in general, and gathering their allies, soon drove Ducetius to desperate straits. Seeing himself lost, he conceived the strange idea of throwing himself upon the mercy of his enemies. Under cover of a dark night he rode alone across the intervening country, entered the city at dawn and took sanctuary upon the altar in the market-place; the people assembled in multitude from all parts of the city, and in the presence of a vast throng the vanquished king declared that he gave up his leadership and all his possessions to the Syracusans. Immediately a great discussion arose. Some were for making an end of him at once, but more generous counsels prevailed, and as in the great revolution the tyrant Thrasybulus had been allowed to go his way in peace and security, so also now the Syracusans voted that Ducetius should go free, on condition, however, that he would exile himself to Corinth and promise faithfully to remain there during the rest of his life. He swore the required oath and departed, but he found means to elude the obligation; for it was in the interest of Greece to weaken the Greek power in Sicily if possible, and an opportune oracle, doubtless inspired by Corinthian gold, bade Ducetius return to Sicily and found a peaceful colony upon the shore known as ‘the beautiful.’ With the full consent of the Corinthians, the Sicelian king, who was in their eyes no better than a barbarian, sailed away with many ships and a great body of armed Greeks, and actually became the founder and father of a flourishing Hellenic colony on the north coast, where he was practically beyond the reach of his former enemies. The strange result of this move was that the people of Akragas regarded it as a stratagem of the Syracusans, gathered an army, attacked the latter, and were badly beaten, while neither party molested Ducetius in his new city. He lived about eight years more and died a natural death. After the defeat of the forces of Akragas, Syracuse became once more the leading power in the island, not without exciting jealousy among the other cities and stirring up the envy of the Athenians by her extraordinary prosperity and magnificence.