employés in wayside stations, for as we stopped the combination
telegraph operator, baggage smasher, ticket agent and general utility
man ran out to the locomotive and tapped the brass faucet in the tender
for a drink. There is a big water-wheel a few miles farther on, arranged
exactly like an Egyptian _sakiyeh_, and no doubt a survival of the
Moorish wheel installed in that very well centuries ago. The apparatus
is very simple. A horizontal wheel is geared loosely into a vertical one
by big, clumsy wooden teeth. Over it projects an arm to which some
patient draft animal is hitched. A long grass rope carrying an endless
series of pottery jars or buckets completes the outfit by running over
the vertical wheel, and all the water that does not splash back into the
well flows into an irrigating pool and the ditches. The mule who worked
this particular wheel acted as if he too were a Moorish survival,
unaccustomed to modern inventions. Anyway, he tried to bolt when the
engine shrieked. His plunging blindfold gallop sent the water flying in
all directions, giving his peasant master a much-needed bath and earning
the poor beast a beating, the blows of which could be distinctly heard
as the train sped on. Around a curve Mt. Ætna appears again in all its
majesty, filling up the entire background, looming more than twice as
large as familiar Vesuvius. Its lower slopes are green and the upper
reaches snow covered, split like a sore lip, with dark curves, queer
bumps and sharp little corners of uplifted skin. Above them poises the
soft black, slightly indented cone, canopied by a ridiculous tuft of
cottony smoke no bigger than a handful at such a distance.
Agnone is a hedge of yellow daisies, a deep pasture full of reddish
brown kine, a farmhouse of stone with thatched shelters for the animals
in the midst of rich cultivated lands. A mile away gleams the sea, a
dull turquoise green flecked with windy ripples and dotted here and yon
with white--“Silver sails come out of the west.” The tall timothy on
both sides of the track, and other fields planted with oats and spiky
cactus, seem mere picturesque settings for countless fiery poppies.
Sheep by the hundred bolt in terror from the wild shrieks of the
locomotive, preferring to run straight ahead on the track as long as
they can possibly keep out of the way of the engine. Bold headlands here
and there lower their stubborn crests for a few yards to give the flying
train instantaneous vistas of wet sand gleaming far below, like blades
of golden sickles edged with silver filigree.
In rapid succession these rugged scenes slip behind, and we run along
the shore past salt farms and their windmills; then a boldly jutting
island, brave with forts and churches, rising out of the sea like
Venice--Augusta the picturesque, modern survivor of Xiphonia, scene of
many a fierce battle and bloody conquest.
Augusta was founded in a most picturesque way by Emperor Frederick II.
The town of Centuripe up in the hills, having roused the imperial ire by
its sedition, was effectually razed. Then Frederick punished its people
still further by driving them all into this spot and commanding them to
stay there and be good. Perhaps its stormy birth in a measure accounts
for Augusta’s stormy history. The most spectacular affair it ever
witnessed was the tremendous naval duel between the fleets of France and
Holland in 1676, when Admiral Duquesne defeated the Dutch Admiral De
Ruyter, who afterward died of his wounds in nearby Syracuse. Following
the coast closely, we flit swiftly past the Hyblæan Hills, eager to stop
for some of their historic honey, but relentlessly carried onward by the
insensate iron horse, that knows not nor cares for the sweets that rival
the product of Hymettus.
All the way from Augusta the track borders the shore of the Bay of
Megara, where anchored Nicias, Alcibiades and Lamachus, the Athenian
generals who came to attack Syracuse in 415 B. C. with a fleet so vast
that men paled merely to see it whiten the horizon. But to-day, instead
of the tents and sails of invading hosts, you see evaporating-tanks and
windmills, and snowy piles of salt dotting the rugged shore in serried
ranks. Rushing across the neck of the promontory of Thapsus--now called
Magnisi--we skirt Trogilus Bay, where the conquering fleet of Marcellus
the Roman lay two centuries after the Athenian _débâcle_, cross the old
Dionysian wall, sweep around the bold headland, and stop at Syracuse.
Don’t be disappointed in Syracuse by what you see of the dirty little
provincial town that yawns sleepily at you between the railroad station
and your hotel. Suspend judgment until you reach the Greek Theater, and
from the top row of seats carven into the eternal rock, look out over
the gracious panorama below. Beyond the sparsely settled vineyards and
groves covering what was once the Greater Syracuse, lies the city of
to-day on Ortygia, an oyster-shell full-heaped with pearls, in a
sapphire setting of twin harbors and glittering sands. The alchemy of
golden sunshine transmutes whitewashed tenements into Greek palaces,
fishing luggers into stately galleys of war, and prosaic modern peasants
into the soldiers and citizens of a happier and more stirring day. And
as you stand breathless with the wonder of it, history unfolds itself in
memory, with something at every step to drive that history home, be it
Sikel, Greek, Roman, Saracen or Norman. The ruins of the mighty fortress
atop the inland hill breathe of the Age of Tyrants, and to follow the
herculean walls of Dionysius around the deserted plateau fills one with
awe and wonder anew, for the work seemingly has been performed by a race
of giants. Below, yawning in the seacoast of Achradina, dim caverns
invite the explorer’s rowboat. There are the Street of Tombs to
search for relics--though most likely you will find only a few scattered
bones; the Castello Maniaces on the tip of Ortygia, full of Byzantine
memories; charming walks to and through the quarries, the famous
_Latomie_; the astonishing catacombs and the Anapo trip. A score of
other delightful excursions the visitor can take, providing he is not
driven forward by the exigencies of a cut-and-dried itinerary, that
wickedest and most specious of all excuses for not seeing enough of a
country really to enjoy it!
[Illustration: “From the top row of seats in the Greek Theater look out
over the gracious panorama below”--Syracuse.]
The mother colony was founded in 734 B. C. on the little island of
Ortygia, named for the quail the Greeks found there in great coveys.
From its very beginning the benignant gods smiled upon Syracuse, and it
prospered so rapidly that within seventy years it was founding colonies
of its own. Under the tyrant Gelon, son-in-law of the great and good
Theron of Akragas, and later practically co-ruler with him of all Greek
Sicily, the era of Hellenic supremacy began, with Syracuse in the van of
progress. Indeed, Syracuse was of such paramount importance that
sometimes its history is mistaken for the history of Sicily. Tyrants
good and bad rose and fell; democracy overthrew tyranny, and tyranny
overthrew democracy. Demagogues--the word means literally “popular
leaders”--rose to stir the people to action against the government or
the tyrant--and sometimes threatened to become tyrants themselves.
Seeing how easy it was to sway the rabble with hot words, men of every
class began to practice public speaking; no young man’s education was
complete without it; and oratory first became an art in Sicily.
From the island of Ortygia the city spread up the hilly mainland in four
new boroughs--Achradina, Tyche, Neapolis and Epipolai--making a mighty
pentapolis; a community which was not only the foremost of all the Greek
cities in the island, but much the greatest in physical extent of all
the Greek cities in the world, and for a time the greatest city of
Europe as well as of Greece. This naturally made Athens jealous, and in
415 B. C. the pent up force of Attic wrath loosed itself in a tremendous
blast against Syracuse. But Athens’ traditional enemy, Sparta, sent the
island city help, and the Athenian arms went down in one of the most
appalling defeats of all history. After this vivid chapter, governments
and tyrants rose and fell again as before, deliverers came and conquered
in the name of the people, and passed, and at last the young giant Rome
stepped in with brazen legionaries and put a period to the brilliant
story.
To-day, as in the beginning, the city is on Ortygia, the houses crowding
together behind the old walls like birds on a roost, and you wonder why,
when there was such ample space on the shore, the people huddled
together so. The streets, moreover, are amazingly shifty. On foot you
set out to explore the town and encircle it by keeping as close to the
walls as possible--a matter of a mere hour and a half, with plenty of
time to idle by the way. According to the maps this should be no great
feat, but try as you may, it seems impossible to lay a true course, and
becoming discouraged after slipping off one street four or five times,
you abandon yourself to the vagaries of these astonishing high and
byways--they fade into one another without sign or signal, they vanish
on front doorsteps, end after half a block in blind alleys, terminate in
bastions which lead one to suppose that the sea must be below on the
other side, only to turn up somewhere else in most mysterious fashion,
and not always running in the same direction as their beginning.
There is little that is up-to-date about Syracuse. To a great extent it
lives in medieval seclusion and its people are simple, genial folk so
wholly out of touch with the world that whatever is essential for
comfort or convenience is proper in public. On one street, for instance,
I saw the economical wife of a small shopkeeper wash her baby’s only
frock--a slim little red calico--and button it to dry over the bulgy
part of a lamppost, which looked choked and uneasy as the tiny slip
fluttered in the wind. Meantime the _piccola signorita_ disported
herself amiably in the street--and all her frolicking in the dust could
not hurt what she wore.
Near the center of the city stands the Cathedral, a queer combination of
battlemented Moorish castle, ancient Greek temple and modern Christian
structure. Nearly thirteen centuries ago Bishop Zosimus of Syracuse
began the work of turning the ruined temple--built early in the sixth
century B. C.--into a Christian church, filling in the peristyle with a
solid wall in which some of the Doric columns are still visible. The
Saracen invaders turned it into a mosque in the year 878, and for two
centuries _muezzins_ chanted the names of Allah and Muhammad from its
walls. With the Norman conquest in the eleventh century the building
again became a Christian house of worship, and though the earthquake of
1693 destroyed a part of it, the damage was soon repaired and it has
ever since remained the diocesan church of Syracuse. Like many of the
often restored cathedrals of Meridional Italy, its interior is barren
and uninteresting, but its exterior, with Greek entablature and columns,
Saracenic frieze and battlements, and hideous Renaissance façade and
portico is unique among Christian churches.
There seems some doubt among the archæologists as to the deity worshiped
here in pagan days. It was formerly ascribed to Diana, but the
authorities now generally believe it was the shrine of Minerva, though
Cicero’s glowing description of the Temple of Minerva (Athena) places
that structure in a location apparently different from the site of the
present Duomo. The orator says he saw a temple on whose apex was “...a
great brazen shield overlaid with gold, which served as a landmark to
sailors on entering the port. The folding doors of ivory and gold were
also adorned with a marvelous golden head of Medusa.” Most of these
magnificent treasures were stolen. The Roman prætor Gaius Verres, a
gentleman with a highly cultivated taste in works of art, stripped
Syracuse--and all Sicily, in fact--absolutely bare of everything the
Roman armies had overlooked. And when at last he was brought to book for
his crimes, he fled into voluntary exile with his plunder rather than
face the scathing invective of Cicero.
The archæologists’ dubiety regarding the name of the temple has no room
in the minds of the street arabs, however, who vociferously proclaim it
the “_Tempio di Diana_,” and will not suffer you to leave until you have
paid for this volunteered information.
Diagonally across the Piazza Duomo is the externally unimposing Museum.
Its collection, however, is both interesting and intelligently arranged.
It covers the civilization of Sicily from the bone and flint implements
of the extinct prehistoric Sikels, through the transitional Greek period
of the metopes from Selinus, to the splendid coins and vases of the
city’s supremacy as an Hellenic center of culture and art. In fact, the
profile of Arethusa, on coins signed by Evanetus and Kimon, is
considered the most exquisite Greek head known to us. In those days
coin-makers were artists of the foremost rank, accustomed to signing
their work, like painters and sculptors, and these two, Evanetus and
Kimon, have left us a noble set of coins in which the Greek conception
of divinity appears at its best. The most beautiful marble is a Venus
Anadyomene, discovered in 1804, and preserved almost intact save for the
head and one arm.
Not very far away there are ruins of another and very remarkable Greek
temple, formerly called for Diana, but now generally considered to have
been dedicated to Apollo--the archæologists seem to have a grudge
against the virgin huntress! There is not much else that is Greek, but
as you wander through the narrow streets, scattered bits of mediæval
architecture appear in the most unexpected places, like the splendid
Sicilian-Gothic and Saracenic windows of the Montalto and Lanza palaces,
all the richer and more wonderful because of the surroundings from which
they look down upon the squalid streets and out-at-heel people. The
later Palazzo Municipale, or City Hall, is a fine example of the
architectural spirit of the seventeenth century, its type that of a
private palace, a baronial mansion rather than a public building.
During this period great attention was paid to ornamental ironwork for
decorative purposes upon the façades of buildings; and all about us are
delicate and satisfying window balconies, some of which plainly testify
to their Spanish origin.
[Illustration: “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 pass 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-god 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-god. 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 fashion 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 Phœnicia, the navy of haughty Syracuse, the
innumerable small boats that darted about between ship and shore--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
shore for three miles the ships docked, from island tip to rivermouth.
Fringing the bay were sloping beaches where they careened and calked and
tarred their galleys with slave labor. Shipyards, arsenals, and
merchants’ warehouses lined its shores. 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
anchored 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 shores, 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 ships of war, each manned by more
than two hundred men, were about to join battle--in the presence of
countless masses 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. Ship crashed against ship, 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 analogous, 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 passage ... 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 gods 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
ashore 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 ships 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 gods; ... but most terrible of all was it to
leave on the desolate shore 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, harassed and headed off by the
victorious Syracusans and their Lacedæmonian 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 shore, 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 nobly 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 classic Greek
type, with little or nothing about them to suggest the later influence
of alien races.