Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  During the siege of Motye which followed, the inhabitants made a memorable defence, opposing the engines of the Greeks with every conceivable device, and sometimes setting them on fire; and when at last a breach was made in the walls, and Dionysius believed that the city was in his hands, he still had to carry on the siege from street to street and from house to house through many days and nights. When the last defence was broken down, the Greeks wreaked their vengeance in a wholesale slaughter, in which neither women nor children were spared, until Dionysius himself bade them take refuge in their temples. The Carthaginians who were taken alive were sold as slaves, but every Greek who was found on their side was crucified at once.

  Intending to follow up his victory, Dionysius at once moved upon Segesta, the city of all others in Sicily the most hateful to the Syracusans; but here, as if misfortune were attached to the mere name of the place, he suffered a considerable reverse almost before the siege had begun. Meanwhile the Carthaginians had set on foot for the third time a vast army of mercenaries, and we now hear for the first time that war chariots accompanied the host. Those that had left Carthage at the beginning of the first invasion had been lost at sea.

  Dionysius awaited him near Panormus, but only succeeded in destroying some fifty ships and about five thousand of his soldiers, the rest entering the harbour in safety. In a few days Himilcon had undone all that the Syracusans had accomplished; Eryx was won back, Motye was retaken, and the other Phoenician cities of the west found themselves free. In face of such an enemy Dionysius was reluctantly obliged to withdraw to Syracuse. Himilcon now marched eastward and seized Messina, whence the greater part of the population had already escaped. Out of two hundred who sprang into the sea and attempted to swim the straits fifty reached the Italian shore in safety. Himilcon saw the great difficulty of holding Messina and, lest it should be of use to his enemies, determined to destroy the city. The allies of Dionysius now began to desert him, but he did not lose heart; he fortified and provisioned the Syracusan towns and completed the fortifications of Syracuse, while Himilcon was marching down upon Naxos. At Catania he attacked the Carthaginian fleet in the hope of preventing it from effecting a junction with the land force, but suffered an overwhelming defeat in which he lost one hundred ships and twenty thousand men. Retreating upon Syracuse again, he prepared to make a final stand, while Himilcon advanced upon the city by land and encamped •a little more than a mile north of Epipolae.

  Seeing the enormous strength of the fortifications raised by Dionysius before the war began, Himilcon determined to starve the city to a surrender, and built three forts which commanded the southern side of the harbour. Meanwhile, however, reënforcements of ships arrived from Sparta, and the Syracusans, gathering courage, fell upon a detachment of vessels which were bringing corn to the Carthaginians; a naval engagement followed in which the Carthaginians were badly beaten and lost twenty-four ships.

  The position of Dionysius was dangerous, but not desperate, and before long the plague, which seems to have accompanied the Carthaginians wherever they went, came to his assistance. The men died at such a rate that it was impossible to bury the bodies, and the condition of Himilcon’s camp was too hideous to be described. Quick to take advantage of everything that could weaken his enemy, Dionysius now executed a general movement which terminated the war. On a night when there was no moon the Syracusan fleet got under way in the harbour, and Dionysius himself marched a large force round Epipolae to surprise the Carthaginian camp and one of Himilcon’s forts. He sent a thousand mercenaries against the camp, and a body of cavalry, instructing the latter to pretend flight as soon as the enemy came out. These mercenaries were men whom he distrusted, and he coolly sacrificed them for the sake of occupying the enemy on that side. He himself seized the fort on the Olympieum, and sent the cavalry down to take the next, which was near the shore. At daybreak the Greek ships surprised the Carthaginian fleet, and gained a complete victory over the vessels which were afloat. Dionysius himself set fire to forty ships that were on the beach, and a strong wind drove the flames out to the transports. In an indescribable confusion the whole sea force of the Carthaginians was destroyed before their eyes, while every kind of small craft, manned even by old men and boys, put out from the city to plunder the half-burned wrecks, and thousands of women and little children climbed the roofs of the city to watch the tragedy of fire and sword. By land the fighting lasted all the day, and at night Dionysius encamped by the Olympieum. All but forty of Himilcon’s ships were destroyed or crippled, and more than half his army of three hundred thousand men lay dead in the camp or on the field. He humbly treated for his life and safety, and at last for the sum of three hundred talents, which was perhaps all he had left to give, Dionysius suffered him to depart and to take with him, upon his forty ships, those of his soldiers who were Carthaginian citizens. When the Greeks entered the Carthaginian camp at last, it is told that they found within it the unburied bodies of a hundred and fifty thousand men. Thus ended the great Carthaginian expedition for the conquest of Sicily.

  At first sight one may wonder why Dionysius did not completely destroy the remains of Himilcon’s host, execute their general himself, and drive out the Phoenicians from the western part of the island; but a little reflection will show how much wiser that course was which he actually pursued. The strength of Carthage lay, not in a warlike population, but in the great wealth by which she commanded the service of numerous mercenaries, and although she had now suffered an extraordinary defeat, which was followed by something like a revolution, her losses were chiefly financial, while her resources were practically inexhaustible. By not driving her to extremities, Dionysius both practised wisdom and displayed magnanimity. Moreover, his real ambition was to be the ruler of the western Greeks rather than a mere conqueror of barbarous nations. By treachery or arms, indeed, he soon got the lordship of the Sicelian cities of the interior, but these were already so completely hellenized as to be practically Greek, and were so situated as to be necessary to him. His fortune, however, did not follow him everywhere, and in attempting to seize Tauromenium he once more suffered defeat, in spite of the most tremendous exertions. Climbing the steep ascent behind the modern town, on a dark winter’s night when it was bitter cold, he seized the castle, the ‘Castello’ of to‑day, and thence tried to storm the city; but the Sicelians drove him back into the darkness, slaying six hundred of his men; he himself fell, and barely escaping with his life rolled down the hill, bruised and bleeding, with no arms left but the cuirass on his body. But his defeats were always followed by victories. He crossed the straits and attacked Rhegium on the mainland; failing to take the strong place at once, he laid waste the country. When he took it at last it was by starving the garrison to a surrender. In their agony of hunger the people crept out from the beleaguered city and devoured the grass under the walls, but Dionysius turned cattle and sheep upon it, that cropped it close while his soldiers guarded them. When at last he had possession of a city half full of dead men, he allowed the rest to buy their freedom, and sold the poor for slaves, but he took evil vengeance upon their brave general Phyton, for he drowned his son, and told the unhappy father what he had done, then scourged him through the city, and drowned him also at last, with all the rest of his family.

  Thenceforward Dionysius ruled the south for twenty years, for Rhegium had been the last strong place that had held out against him. It was at this time, in the year 387, that the Greeks of Greece had practically abandoned the Greeks of Asia Minor to Persia, and Rome had not yet recovered from the invasion of the Gauls; the Greeks of Sicily alone, by the genius of a tyrant, held in check their strong enemies the Carthaginians, and were themselves united under Dionysius; and he, on his side, maintained a sort of friendly alliance with the Gauls, and had done his best to contribute to the humiliation of Greece. Yet, as the acute Holm truly says, he was the chief stay of Hellenism in the Mediterranean, and without him the Persian from the east might have met the Carthaginian from the west to br
ing about the total extinction of the Greek power. Little by little, by ceaseless war and untiring activity, he extended his dominion into Italy, and joined the Gauls in the destruction of the Etruscan power, even plundering Caere, •not thirty miles from Rome. On the Adriatic coast he was supreme, and if Tarentum still was independent in name it was his tributary in fact, and was forced to receive his colonists into its lands.

  So strong a despot might well have been free from little vanities; yet he wrote verses for public competition, and after proving himself a soldier of genius showed the whole world that he was a poet without talent. Fortunate in great undertakings and at the most critical moments of his life, he could not win a prize at Olympia, his horses ran away on the track, and the ship that brought home his representatives went to pieces on the Italian coast. His small undertakings failed, and his small talents betrayed him into fits of inordinate vanity, followed by disappointment out of all proportion with their cause. In this respect the man whom Publius Scipio called the bravest and keenest of his time was not superior to many other sovereigns and men of genius; for the man of genius looks upon his favourite minor talent as a prodigal son to whom all sins are forgiven, and it is perhaps only he whose chief gift is not beyond question, who dares not trust himself to play with a small accomplishment. Dionysius was great enough to have written even worse poetry than he probably produced.

  What he did for Syracuse was so great that after two thousand and three hundred years, the remains of his work belong to the greatest monuments of antiquity, and it is impossible to follow the wall of Epipolae, or to wander through the enchanted gardens of the vast quarries, without marvelling at the man who deepened the one and built the other.

  As is the case with many romantic characters in history, who lived in distracted times and appeared upon the stage of the world, like the gods in the plays of Aeschylus, to make order out of chaos by the mere miracle of their presence, a vast mass of fable and fantastic legend clings about the name of the elder Dionysius. He made prisons of the quarries, in which captives were kept so long that they married and had children and brought up a second generation of prisoners; and in order that he might know how they spoke of him he constructed the astounding acoustic cavern still called the Ear of Dionysius. He visited without mercy even the passing thought that an attempt upon his life might be possible; one of his favourite guards was executed for having dreamt that he murdered his master, on the singularly insufficient ground that before dreaming of such a deed he must have often thought of doing it. His own brother one day, when explaining to him the position of a fortress, borrowed a javelin from a guardsman in order to draw upon the sand with its point; the soldier was instantly executed having given up his weapon. Again, when playing ball, he laid aside his upper garment with his sword, giving them into the care of a favourite youth. One standing by said in jest that the sovereign seemed willing to trust his life to the lad, and the latter smiled at the words. Both were instantly put to death. It is said that he would never trust himself to the services of a barber, but that he used to make his own daughters clip his beard, or singe it with burning walnuts. In meetings of the people he would not speak from a platform, but built himself a stone tribune which was nothing less than a small tower. The legends say that he had his bed surrounded by a broad channel of deep water, crossing it on a plank which he drew after him; that he wore night and day an iron cuirass, and seldom was without weapons; that he employed an organized band of spies, both men and women, as the first Hiero had done; that neither his sons nor his brothers were allowed to approach him till his guards had changed every one of their garments, lest they should have some weapon concealed about them; and finally that he brought up his eldest son, who became Dionysius the second, in ignorance and solitude within the palace, allowing him no amusement nor occupation except carpentering. To him belongs the legend of the sword of Damocles, which has passed to proverbial use in successive ages, and the fable of Damon and Pythias belongs to his reign.

  Of his cruelties, so far as concerns those of which there is historical evidence, it seems certain they were perpetrated from no bloodthirsty motive, but were necessary to his system of self-defence at a time when the murder of tyrants was so common as to seem natural and logical. Of temperate life and untiring industry, ambition was the only passion that could hold him. Long afterwards, during a drinking bout, Philip of Macedon asked the younger Dionysius how his father had found time to write poetry. “He used the time,” answered the son, “which happier men like you and me spend in drinking together.” Holm considers it a sign of his firm character that he lived in harmony with two wives at a time, dining daily with them both together, and indeed he seems to have lived peacefully with them and with his seven children. The great man’s only weakness seems to have been for his own verses, and when at last, doubtless for political reasons, the prize was awarded in Athens to his tragedy, the ‘Ransom of Hector,’ he only outlived that great and final satisfaction to his vanity by a few days. It is even told that in his delight, he, the most moderate of men, drank so deeply as to cause his death. Yet he encouraged joyous excesses among his subjects, as many another despot has done since, and there is evidence that while himself leading what may almost be called a moral life, he preferred for his amusement the society of rakes, gamesters, and spendthrifts. Though it is said that he rarely laughed, he made jests of the kind that seemed witty to historians, but which have either lost their savour by two thousand years of repetition, or offend our sense of fitness by vulgar blasphemy of the gods, to whom, though false in our view, he owed the respect which good taste concedes to all objects of devotion and civilized belief.

  Under him the Sicilian power reached its height, and we may make the sad reflection that in the past history of all great nations the acme of strength and culture has been attained under a despot, often under the first who has appeared after a long period of freedom. Dionysius ruled alone during thirty-eight years, one of the most extraordinary men of any age; he saved Hellenism from destruction in the central Mediterranean and he reduced chaos to order in founding a new and powerful state; but he destroyed freedom and the very meaning of it, root and branch.

  Heº was succeeded by the younger Dionysius, his eldest son, who began life at twenty-eight years of age as one of the most powerful sovereigns in the west, and ended it as a schoolmaster in Corinth. Few dynasties have been enduring, of which the founder was a conqueror, and Dionysius the Second exhibited all the faults and weaknesses which were to be expected in a youth who had been brought up without experience of the world, still less of government, whose chief occupation had been a manual art, and whose only amusements had consisted in unbridled excess. It was no wonder that he could not wield the power which had fallen to him as an inheritance, or that he should have been completely dominated by a man who, although himself not strong of purpose, was a tower of strength compared with such a weakling.

  This man was Dion, sometimes said to have been the father-in‑law of the young prince, but who was really his brother-in‑law; a Platonist, a mystic, and a dreamer, wise in his beginnings, devoted in his pursuit of an ideal, honourable, as some weak and good men are, with sudden lapses from the right that shock us the more because their right was so high; a man of sad and thoughtful disposition, who gradually degenerated from a noble beginning to a miserable end.

  He conceived the plan of inducing Plato himself to make a second visit to Syracuse, that his influence might save the young Dionysius from destruction, and teach him to make a fact of the Ideal State, and the great philosopher fancied that his own opportunity was come at last and yielded to the tyrant’s request. The aspect of the Syracusan court was changed, the sounds of revelry died away, the halls were strewn with sand that the master might draw geometrical figures upon them, and the scapegrace despot became as gentle and forgiving as an ideal Platonist should be. But he became as weak to the influence of his courtiers as he was docile to the new teachings of philosophy, and before long Dion
was banished to the Peloponnesus and afterwards to Athens, under the thin pretence of an embassy. For a time Plato remained with the tyrant, against his will perhaps, for Dionysius made him live in the castle on Ortygia and had him closely watched. But a small war in which Syracuse became engaged soon required the attention of the sovereign, and the philosopher was suffered to depart to Greece. Yet he was induced to return a third time, and chiefly through his friendship for the banished Dion; but though he was received magnificently and pressed with splendid gifts which he refused to accept, he was not able to obtain anything for his friend, whose great possessions were presently confiscated, while Plato soon found himself treated almost like a prisoner, if not worse; for he had been constantly advising Dionysius to give up his life-guard, and the soldiers who now watched him, being of that body, hated him and would gladly have murdered him. But a ship having been sent from Greece by Archytas, Plato’s friend, with orders to bring the philosopher home, he was allowed to sail without opposition. “I fear,” said the tyrant when they parted, “that you and your friends will speak ill of me when you get home.” “I trust,” answered Plato, smiling, “that we shall never be so much at a loss for a subject of conversation as to speak of you at all.”