Vistas in Sicily Part 7

[Ill.u.s.tration: "In those days coin-makers were artists of the foremost rank, and signed their works."]

The first of the Greek settlers brought their home legends with them to Sicily, where they found a friendly soil, attaining their fullest perfection in the sympathetic hands of the Latin poets. Some of the most beautiful weave through the story of Syracuse, and the most delightful walk in the city--one you will want to take often--leads you straight along the edge of the Great Harbor, on a wide, tamarind-bordered esplanade, with the town wall rising behind, to the picturesque, papyrus-fringed little pool accounted for by one especially gracious tale, and called the Fountain of Arethusa.

Long centuries ago--so runs this immemorial fable--there bubbled up out of the beach of the Great Harbor a crystal spring. And close by, in the briny waters themselves, another little fount gushed forth, pure and sweet. The airy Greek fancy could not pa.s.s by so remarkable a coincidence, and the Syracusans quickly came to believe that the twin springs were the gentle nymph Arethusa, the well-beloved of Artemis (Diana), and her river-G.o.d lover Alpheus; that Arethusa, too impetuously wooed by Alpheus on the island of Ortygia in Old Greece, had been graciously changed by Artemis into a spring, and taking the long, dark journey under the Ionian Sea, had escaped to the sunlight again in the newer Ortygia in Sicily; that Alpheus, not faint-hearted, had changed himself to her own watery shape, and following hard and fast, had missed her by the merest trifle only, bubbling up in a second spring in the waters of the harbor close beside his beloved. But Poseidon of the sea was mightier than nymph or river-G.o.d. Shaking his mighty bed one day, he burst open the wall about fair Arethusa.--To-day her water is salt, not sweet, and no more does her lover Alpheus bubble up beside her in the Bay.

IX

THE HARBOR AND THE ANAPO

Another of the beautiful legends with which the history of Syracuse is deeply interwoven is the story of Kyana--Cyane--and Aidoneus or Pluto.

To run it to earth take a stout green and blue rowboat across the Porto Grande, about two kilometers wide, to the river Anapo. The snapping breeze blows briskly, and the boat tumbles about in lively fas.h.i.+on upon the sparkling sapphire, past the big motionless yachts at anchor and the slow-curtseying sailing craft coming into the docks from the _saline_ or saltworks in the marsh below the river.

What a contrast between the harbor of to-day and that of twenty-three or four centuries ago, when not another city in the world could boast so great a port, so populous a harbor! Here swam the merchant fleets of all Sicily, of Greece, of Phnicia, the navy of haughty Syracuse, the innumerable small boats that darted about between s.h.i.+p and sh.o.r.e--and remember, too, that these were sailing craft,--every one sea spiders with oars for legs in windless weather. Around the curving line of the sh.o.r.e for three miles the s.h.i.+ps docked, from island tip to rivermouth.

Fringing the bay were sloping beaches where they careened and calked and tarred their galleys with slave labor. s.h.i.+pyards, a.r.s.enals, and merchants' warehouses lined its sh.o.r.es. All the activities of a great maritime people hummed about this bay with its margin of city. And all the city's splendor, all her power, sprang from the harbor, and from her control of the waters, exactly as England, two thousand years later, began to rise to her present eminence by virtue of her position and her skill in deep waters.

Only a little imagination is required to picture the salt-boats of the twentieth century as the short, clumsy triremes which on that memorable September 1, 413 B. C., brought about the dramatic climax of the war between Athens and Syracuse. The Athenians' fleet bottled up in the Great Harbor by a line of chained-together galleys and merchant hulks anch.o.r.ed from the tip of Ortygia to the promontory of Plemmyrion a mile south, prepared to force its way out.

All Syracuse and both armies lined the sh.o.r.es, stood up on the seats of the distant Theater, crowded the housetops to encourage the fighters with their cheering and shouts. The rival commanders made their usual orations, exhorting the crews to acquit themselves as men and patriots.

Out into the Bay rowed the fleets--Grote tells the story vividly: "Inside this narrow basin, rather more than five English miles in circuit, one hundred and eighty-six s.h.i.+ps of war, each manned by more than two hundred men, were about to join battle--in the presence of countless ma.s.ses around, near enough both to see and to hear; the most picturesque battle probably in history, without smoke or other impediments to vision, and in the clear atmosphere of Sicily."

At the first onset the impetuous Athenian attack, headed for the barrier, broke through the Syracusan defense, and the Athenians were shouting with triumph as they began to cut the hawsers fastening together the blockading hulks, when the Syracusan triremes closed in on them from all sides, and the action at once became general and desperate. s.h.i.+p crashed against s.h.i.+p, and vessels once lashed together rarely separated. Though Syracuse could throw only seventy-six triremes of the line against the hundred and ten heavy Athenians, she reinforced her vessels with a perfect cloud of mosquito craft that hovered, stinging and galling, about the equal antagonists. In a measure the action demonstrated the efficiency and value of the small, swift cruiser or torpedoboat of later times, to which the light craft may be considered a.n.a.logous, never daring to do more than shoot and run, and shoot and run again.

Thucydides makes the peaceful harbor ring and echo again with the surging of the dramatic chorus of citizens and armies urging on the fight:

"And the great noises of many triremes fallen foul of one another both amazed the seamen and prevented them from hearing what their leaders directed; for they directed thick and loud on both sides, not only as naval art required, but also from sheer eagerness, the Athenians crying out to their fleet to force the pa.s.sage ... and the Syracusans to theirs how honorable a thing it would be to hinder their escape, and by this victory to improve every man the honor of his country.... While the conflict raged on the water, the land forces had a struggle and sided with them in their affections.... For the fight being near, and not all of them looking upon one and the same part, he that saw his own side prevail took heart and fell to calling upon the G.o.ds that they deprive them not of safety; and they that saw their friends have the worse, not only lamented but shrieked outright.... And one might hear in one and the same army, as long as the fight upon the water was doubtful, at one and the same time, lamentations, shouts that they won, that they lost, and whatever else a people in great danger is forced differently to utter."

Every one of the Athenian fleet and twenty-six Syracusans had gone ash.o.r.e or foundered, only fifty vessels being left afloat, when the fight ended. Vainly did the Athenian generals plead with their men to fight again next day with those s.h.i.+ps which could be hauled off the beach and made seaworthy; but so terrific had been the chaos, so utterly broken was the spirit of the Attic fleet, that the men refused to go aboard again, and the retreat was soon begun.

Forty thousand men, "like the emigrant population of a city, wandered laden with their baggage away from the coast into a country hostile to them, without any definite goal for the journey, without sufficient supplies of food, without confidence in their ultimate preservation, tortured by fear, lost in speechless or stolid despair, or raging in savage fury against men and G.o.ds; ... but most terrible of all was it to leave on the desolate sh.o.r.e the many wounded and sick, who raised their voices in loud lamentation as their relatives and tent-fellows departed, or clung to the skirts of their garments, and let themselves be dragged along for a brief distance, till they sank prostrate to the ground."[A]

[A] History of Greece, iii, 402; Dr. Ernst Curtius.

For days they struggled on, followed, hara.s.sed and headed off by the victorious Syracusans and their Lacedaemonian allies, at last surrendering from sheer mental and physical exhaustion, though they knew full well the inevitable result--slavery for every soldier, an ignominious death for every general, the ruin of their country as a world power of the first rank.

Something of all this runs through one's mind as the rowboat approaches the low, glistening line of sh.o.r.e, with the wide, clean mouth of the Anapo in its center. For some distance before we actually enter the river, its pale green current cuts a furrow sharply through the heavier salt brine of the Bay. And it is fresh, not salt, long after it leaves the protection of its native banks. Into its brawling current pull the boatmen, expatiating volubly, not upon the scenery as one would naturally expect, but upon the virtues of their particular craft and the value of their time!

No doubt these boatmen are fair types of the rugged island sailors who so n.o.bly acquitted themselves twenty-three hundred years ago on the sparkling bay. Their deep, expressive eyes, and finely chiseled faces, full of Greek lines, amply confirm the historians' story of their descent. Indeed, a majority of the Syracusans are of the cla.s.sic Greek type, with little or nothing about them to suggest the later influence of alien races.

Perhaps an hundred yards inside the mouth of the stream, beside a bridge, always stands a bevy of laundresses, stout-hearted, thick-thighed women with ma.s.sive shoulders and muscular waists, their skirts carefully tucked up above their knees. Around their bare legs the icy water swirls in smart ripples, yet they toil there for hours together, seeming not to mind the cold in the slightest, though a few old crones on the bank testify mutely in their deformed hands and rheumatic feet to the power of the river G.o.ds who thus repay the profanation of their pellucid stream.

Piled in baskets upon the sh.o.r.e and lying in bluish wet lumps upon black rocks are the clothes; and the linen is stout indeed that resists the battering those furious workers give it--a heavy club, a powerful right arm, a rough bare stone in running water which contains not a little sand and never a trace of soap. Indeed, the more pieces one's linen comes home in, the more certain he may be that he has a good laundress!

From the time a boat comes within hail until it disappears under the bridge beyond there is little was.h.i.+ng done, the amiable amphibians evidently preferring to watch than to wash. Indeed, the only way to get a picture of them in action, is to threaten to pa.s.s by without paying toll unless they work. And then what was.h.i.+ng it is! Not far beyond the laundresses is the open plain on the left of the stream, where two mutilated pillars, some ten minutes' or so walk back from the bank, are all that is left of the temple of Zeus Olympus. The temple was built about the beginning of the sixth century, and King Gelon covered the statue of Zeus in it with a robe of pure gold which he made of the precious metal taken from the defeated Carthaginians at Himera; but about a century later Dionysius I took away the robe to convert it to his own purposes, telling the people, with grim humor, that it was "too cold in winter and too heavy for summer."

In the Cyane brook the men work slowly along, poling, pulling by the gra.s.ses, halting in little nooks in the banks to let down-coming boats slip by, rowing when they can. The limpid stream twists. .h.i.ther and yon through soft tinted fields alive with brilliant flowers. Here and there weeping willows, splendid old hairy trees, lean over the water and trail their long green tresses upon its quivering mirror. Exquisite papyrus plants, sylphlike shoots, top-heavy with the weight of their huge feather-dustery plumes, in places line both banks thickly for yards, or stand isolated in stately clumps ten, fifteen, eighteen feet high. Their presence is accounted for by two distinct traditions--one that they were brought in the ninth century by the invading Arabs. This is probably true, but there is no poetry about it. The other and prettier story tells of a gracious Pharaoh a thousand years earlier who, charmed by the reports of King Hieron's lovely and gentle queen, Philistis, sent her as his choicest gift the loveliest thing dark Egypt could produce.

Whichever story suits your fancy best--believe it!

Whether they have lived in Sicily for ten centuries or twenty, the reeds still spring in slender, graceful stalks of tender green, without leaf or gnarl, from the moist earth, nodding their powder-puff heads lazily over the sparkling water and dreaming--if plants ever dream--of their sun-steeped home of eld beside placid Father Nile. Nowhere else in the world to-day does this paper-reed of the ancient Pharaohs grow wild; and here it strikes a strange exotic note among the harmonies of European flower and field.

Clear as crystal and blue as the heavens is the circular pool from which the brook springs. Through its cold, pellucid azure splendid gray mullet and other fish--guardians of the sacred spring, perchance--dart or idle about among mimosa-like aquatic plants plainly visible twenty or thirty feet below. It is poetic water, full of s.h.i.+fting lights and nuances of color--now a silvery, glancing mirror, now soft gray and translucent, now pure azure and thin as rain-washed air; but always beautiful, always dimpling to the sun. And what more poetic than its story?

When Pluto--again to give the Greek legend in the Latinized form preferred by the present day Sicilians--carried off Proserpina from the sh.o.r.es of Lake Pergusa, one of her attendant nymphs, Cyane, followed weeping after the black chariot until, in this mead of Syracuse, the King of Darkness turned, pa.s.sed his scepter before her face, and the poor nymph dissolved into a pool of tears, the Pool of Cyane. But so potent was her grief that her tears, through all the centuries since, have continued to flow; and they still bubble up, a living spring beneath the limpid waters of the little blue mere, "To witness if I lie."

Going back down-stream, the boatmen give an astonis.h.i.+ng exhibition of how to "protect" Government property. So jealously does the Italian Government guard its precious papyrus plants that each boat must stop at a station where customs guards keep watch to see that no visitor carries away more than one single stalk. The boatmen know this perfectly, yet when a fine clump of the reeds provokes the pa.s.sengers to ecstasy they amiably stop and cut as many as they have pa.s.sengers--and some for good measure--without a word about the regulations. When nearing the guard-float, however, they throw all the extra stalks overboard, explaining the rules to the bewilderment of the incensed or amused travelers. The absurdity of "protecting" the papyrus from destruction by throwing it away strikes an American sense of humor very hard. Perhaps a little stiff fining of the boatmen for cutting too many pieces would have a more salutary effect! But the "height of the ridiculous" is reached by the guards themselves. Looking us gravely over, they inquired if _La Signora_ and I were _sposati_. I admitted it, and they shook their heads.

"Throw away _your_ stalk," they said together to me. "A married couple is only one!"

X

SYRACUSE, THE PENTAPOLIS

Never make the blunder of trying to study the Greater City when any of the big "tourist yachts" are in port. You will know soon enough when they are--cloop! cloop! cloop! go the hoofs under your windows long before you have thought of breakfast. An endless string of carriages plods out of the island full of gesticulating, noisy, Baedekering enthusiasts who make up in cheery adjectives what they lack in knowledge. When they are back at evening, white with dust and happily weary, and the launches have taken them all on board the white floating palaces, Syracuse sighs and sleeps again. Once more it is safe to venture out. Once more cabs can be had at decent rates. And once more the timid ghosts of Greek and Roman days come to the gentle call.

Ortygia, the island, was once connected with the mainland by a mole of cut stone, and afterward separated and attached and separated again as the whims and dangers of the different periods dictated. Now it is both connected and detached. Between island and sh.o.r.e is the citadel, separated from both by little ca.n.a.ls crossed by stout bridges, and capable of defense in time of necessity. All the dust of a whole rainless season seems to concentrate upon the dusty road leading from the island across the bridges, by the citadel, past the rows of s.h.i.+pping that fill the docks on either side of the mole, and so on through the deserted square which was once the Agora of Syracuse.

Every Greek city had its _agora_, or marketplace, as every Roman city had its forum. Besides being the market, where food and commodities of every other sort were sold the _agora_ was the a.s.sembling place of the city, the central exchange for news and views. You must use your imagination to-day to reconstruct the _agora_, to people it again with the dark faces and flowing robes of the Greeks of old, to hear the clank of weapons and armor as a Tyrant's bodyguard pa.s.ses through the unsmiling crowd: for the _agora_, now, is only a bare, open square, through the middle of which a naked red column thrusts upward. A kindlier fate has overtaken the Roman Palaestra near by--a gymnasium and auditorium where the youth of Latinized Syracuse used to polish their muscles and wits alike. One exquisite bit of it remains--the little semi-circular lecture hall, in which clear water covers the pit, and mirrors back the delicate maidenhair peeping from the cracks and joints between the marble seats in its gleaming horseshoe. What schoolboy debating societies met here, and who were the "exchange professors" who held forth in this choice hall where now waterbugs and tiny lizards alone give sign of life?

Not far from town the road runs into pleasant farming country, followed by orchards of almonds, lemons, and citrons. Farther up the slopes of Neapolis and Epipolai straggle great rocky groves of uncanny, fantastically shaped old olives, the most disreputable-looking tenants of the soil imaginable. They are whorled like an oak, k.n.o.bbed like an apple tree, split full of holes, leaning at all angles; and, most curious of all, some appear to be nothing but half-sh.e.l.ls of bark, only half of each half-sh.e.l.l having any visible contact with the roots. How they live and bear fruit at all in such astonis.h.i.+ngly rocky fields is a mystery, yet they are proverbially prolific. They seem ghosts of dead Syracuse, phantoms of the citizens who once, in the pride of their strength and glory, trod the streets of the great pentapolis of Epipolai, Neapolis, Tyche, Achradina and Ortygia--Syracuse all.

Fewer than thirty-two thousand inhabitants exist now in the city, where more than half a million once looked down upon the great argosies afloat in their twin harbors. And the hills where Gelon and the Hierons, Agathocles and Timoleon flourished, where Theocritus and Archimedes were born and toiled, lie apart, dotted with scattered limestone ruins where hawk and bat, tourist and guide are the only living things to disturb this city of silence.

About the Outer City, as the four mainland boroughs were called, Dionysius I--a brilliant soldier who by treachery and intrigue succeeded in raising himself to the tyranny early in the fifth century--spent seventeen years in constructing an enormous wall. Sixty thousand workmen with six thousand yoke of oxen constructed nearly three and a half miles in twenty days, a task whose herculean labor cannot be appreciated until the enormous blocks and the difficult formation of the country have been studied. Of the sixteen miles originally built, rather more than ten are still standing to testify to the solidity of the tyrant's work.

On the westernmost point of Epipolai, the highest part of the city, Dionysius built his great fort of Euryelus, now completely ruined. Words cannot make clear the fort's size and strength. It is only at Syracuse, standing among the crumbling piles, that one can grasp the value and vastness of Dionysius's greatest work. Its five ma.s.sive towers and deep moats, carved out of the living rock, make it hard to understand how it was ever captured. Nevertheless, two hundred years later the Romans under Marcellus did it, though not so much by storm as by treason. This siege was the work of an army, the brilliant defense of the city the triumph of a single engineer--brave old Archimedes, who worked such marvels that not a man could be seen upon the walls. Away back in the good old King Hieron's time, he had pierced them for both near and distant shooting, and brought to perfection every imaginable weapon and military engine. Plutarch says he had huge claws with which he picked up galleys bodily and smashed them like eggs against the walls; ballistas and catapults and crossbows for heavy and light artillery; hooks like cranes' bills; and certain devices for picking up s.h.i.+ps and whirling them around in the air like huge pinwheels till their crews were all spilled out or dead. So greatly did the Romans come to dread his uncanny machines that they finally refused to approach those silent, apparently unoccupied walls at all, and the city had to be taken some other way than by storm.

At last, after a year's siege, on the night of the Feast of Artemis, a party of Romans scaled the northern walls without resistance from the drunken guards, opened the gate, and the whole army marched in upon Epipolai. With the day, Marcellus stood there upon the heights and looked down over the fair city he had come so far to win. Stern man and able soldier though he was, this Roman had the soul of a poet, and as he looked, and mused upon all Syracuse had gone through before, all she would probably endure before he gained the inner city, he wept.

However, he did not have to fight his way--Ortygia was betrayed by a Spanish mercenary officer. The most tragic of the events that followed was the death of the greatest genius ever given to immortality by Sicily. The accounts differ in details. But it seems certain that Marcellus sent a soldier to summon Archimedes. The legionary found the aged scholar at work upon a mathematical problem, and when he asked for time to finish his demonstration, the blunderer misunderstood and killed him. Whether this be the exact truth or not, we know that Marcellus sincerely mourned his dead adversary.

In spite of the Roman commander's tears over the sufferings of Syracuse, when first he saw it, he did not scruple to take away all he could of its pictures and statues and other works of art to adorn his triumphal procession at home, while the public funds he seized for Rome. This plundering of unfortunate Syracuse did not by any means stop with Marcellus, but went on through centuries, the worst offender being Verres of infamous fame.

From the shattered walls of Fort Euryelus spreads a magnificent view, bounded only by the mists in the distance. North and south run the scalloped sh.o.r.es, fading into the dancing blue of the Mediterranean; south and eastward lies Ortygia, the sun sparkling upon its thousand facets of white walls and tiled roofs, while in the opposite direction, when the clouds lift, stands majestic aetna, still wearing his winter nightcap of snow. Straight west tower the hills, peak on peak, and the littoral blossoms with every scented fruit of the field.

Not far from the Fort is a little cottage marked _Caffe_, where the improvident, or those who have perfect digestions, may buy luncheon. But for the average person it is a good deal better to take along the sightseer's snack the hotel puts up without extra cost--if you are living _en pension_--and eat it on the back porch. The _Caffe_ serves "tea," if you foolishly ask for it; but ink made from dried willow leaves is even less refres.h.i.+ng than the thin red country wine. Tea making is a fine art Sicily has yet to learn. However, the view from the rear veranda down the steep slope to the Bay of Trogilus more than compensates for the trivial discomforts of poor tea and iron chairs.

Evidently the host is determined that his furniture shall not be numbered among the spoils of Sicily by the souvenir-hunting visitor.

How those ancient Greeks did build for futurity! Deep down under the rocky plateau, at the cost of no one knows how many lives or what money, they carved two enormous aqueducts that gave old Syracuse to drink from distant mountain streams. No dynamite helped them tear out the adamantine channel; no greasy rock-drills worked by steam chattered and thumped down there in the dark where now one hears without seeing it, the water which still gurgles contentedly on its way to the sea. It is all hand work, and one is filled with admiration akin to awe as the eye follows the low, square limestone copings that mark the course of one of them across hill and vale and field, over the heights of the Epipolai down toward the harbor.

Though Rome has left us comparatively few monuments in Sicily, they show clearly the difference between Greek and Roman ideals, in life as well as in art. The Greeks reared matchless temples and theaters never equaled for their purity and simplicity; the Romans, baths and amphitheaters whose floridness suggested display and luxury. The amphitheater of Syracuse is like all Roman amphitheaters, a vast elliptical arena--it measures two hundred and thirty-one feet long by one hundred and thirty-two wide--with an enormous cistern in the middle, to provide for flooding the ellipse for naval spectacles. The arena wall forms the side of a vaulted corridor with eight gates to give entrance and exit for fighters and beasts. Above all rise the seats in tiers, and in the arena you can pick out, upon shattered blocks of marble, several names of patricians who were "box-holders" in the grand tier.

Its very size bears witness to the degradation of Syracuse under the Roman rule, when the citizens, no longer satisfied with "stage deaths"