bridge, always stands a bevy of laundresses, stout-hearted,
thick-thighed women with massive 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 gods who thus repay the
profanation of their pellucid stream.
Piled in baskets upon the shore 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 washing 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 pass by without paying
toll unless they work. And then what washing 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
grasses, halting in little nooks in the banks to let down-coming boats
slip by, rowing when they can. The limpid stream twists hither 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 shifting 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
shores 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, passed 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 astonishing 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 passengers to ecstasy they
amiably stop and cut as many as they have passengers--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 shore is the citadel,
separated from both by little canals 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 shipping
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 assembling 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 passes 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 Palæstra 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, knobbed like an
apple tree, split full of holes, leaning at all angles; and, most
curious of all, some appear to be nothing but half-shells of bark, only
half of each half-shell having any visible contact with the roots. How
they live and bear fruit at all in such astonishingly 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 massive 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 ships 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 shores, 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 Ætna, 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 _Caffè_, 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 _Caffè_ serves
“tea,” if you foolishly ask for it; but ink made from dried willow
leaves is even less refreshing 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”
in the theater, or with the splendid comedies of Aristophanes, demanded
actual death and real blood here in the larger arena, where to-day the
peaceful grasses and wild flowers innumerable spread their cloth of
green and gold and crimson in a winding sheet of eternal beauty about
the sanguinary old ruin. Here we met a young countryman of ours who
promptly announced that he was abroad studying languages, and that,
since paterfamilias “had a pull,” he was going to be a consul-general as
soon as he finished his linguistic labors and decided to which country
he wished to go.
A short distance beyond the amphitheater is the biggest altar in the
world--six hundred and six feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and six
feet high. King Hieron built it so that Syracuse might be able to
celebrate its Independence Day properly--its Fourth of July, if you
choose. When the last usurper had been gotten rid of, in what the
historians call the First Age of Tyrants, the festival of the Eleutheria
was instituted in honor of Zeus Eleutherios, the god of liberty; and it
is rather remarkable that Syracuse kept right on celebrating after the
democracy had ceased and the meaning of the festival had vanished. On
Hieron’s altar was made a sacrifice every year as big as the altar
itself. Think of butchering and partly burning up four hundred and fifty
oxen at once to make a holiday! But then, in those old days they were
open-handed devotees of their gods, and the whole city had a glorious
spree on such a gala occasion as the Eleutherian Feasts.
Across the road is the Latomia del Paradiso, one of the vast quarries
from which the stone that built Syracuse was hewn. Carved out of the
solid rock to a depth of perhaps an hundred and twenty-five feet, the
dripping, barren stonepit has mellowed with time; and Sicilian Nature,
with her usual prodigality, has transformed it into a riot of warm wild
color. Tradition makes Dionysius a suspicious monarch who constructed
cavern-prisons to find out what was going on among his political
prisoners. In the western wall of the Latomia is an S-shaped grotto
which has been capriciously chosen as one of these strange houses of
detention, and called the Ear of Dionysius. Whether it was really part
of the tyrant’s original plan or an accident in the quarrying, the fact
remains that a person at the upper end can hear even whispers from
below.
Alongside the Paradiso is another quarry, the Latomia di Santa Venerà, a
cultivated garden filled with even more profuse and brilliantly colored
vegetation than its beautiful neighbor. All through the quarries are
great columns, ledges, pinnacles and turrets, evidently harder portions
of the rock left by the quarrymen when they were taking out the stone.
Immediately to the west of the quarries is the Greek Theater, a vast
open playhouse, the largest in existence after those at Miletus and
Megalopolis. Though the superstructure of fifteen tiers of seats and the
stage have vanished, the auditorium is in very fair condition despite
its age, about twenty-four hundred years. In the greatest days of Greece
relatively little care was bestowed upon the design and decoration of
private dwellings, and not a sign remains of most of them. But the
theaters, the social centers of Greek-Sicilian life, remain; in part
because they were hewn out of the everlasting rock of the hills, and
partly because the Romans kept them in use and repair.
Here in the Syracusan Theater it was that the illustrious Pindar,
laureate of princes, sang his most fulsome odes to the glory of that
cruel and suspicious tyrant, the first Hieron, who is supposed to have
founded it. We wonder at the poet’s mood. Was it simply a question of so
much flattery for so much patronage, or what--? Two hundred years later
the second Hieron, the good king, restored and embellished the theater;
and upon fragments of the marble plating which covered the royal seats,
we find his name with the names of his wife, the Queen Philistis, and
Nereis, his daughter-in-law.
Philistis, with whom Hieron fell in love when he was only a rising young
army officer, has left us her portrait upon striking coins. And
certainly, if she was as sweet-faced and gentle as the artists have
pictured her in precious metal, we cannot wonder that her royal
lover-husband wished to perpetuate her beauty forever. Like the tyrant
Hieron, the King was a patron of the arts, and in his day Theocritus
invented and developed his pastoral odes and bucolics, which marked the
period in an artistic sense as clearly as Pindar’s poems marked the
earlier régime.
The theater saw more than one drama not of the pure stage, for here
eager multitudes watched the glorious combat in the Great Harbor, and
here later the “purest hero in the whole tale of Sicily” appeared before
his adopted countrymen. Noble by birth and nobler by deed, Timoleon of
Corinth, sent in 344 B. C. with an army in response to the plea of
Syracuse for aid against tyrants at home and barbarians from abroad,
reëstablished the republic, sent for his wife and children, and retiring
from public life, settled down to enjoy his later years near the people
he had liberated. But though sudden blindness smote the grand old
soldier-statesman, his faculties were unclouded to the last. Whenever
Syracuse had need of the cunning of his brain, the citizens brought him
in state, in a carriage, and led him to the stage of the theater, where
out of the fullness of his experience he advised them for the welfare of
Syracuse. Eight years only elapsed from his coming to his silent
departure across the Styx; and “So died and so was honored,” Freeman
tells us, “the man of the worthiest fame in the whole story of Sicily,
the man who thought it enough to deliver others and who sought nothing
for himself.”
And Timoleon was not only great--he was fortunate! To deliver a whole
people quickly and well, to be smitten with the black affliction of
blindness while still in the very zenith of his popularity--and so to
add the people’s pity and love to their admiration--and then soon to die
a beloved hero before the fickle public mind could forget him and the
fickle public tongue learn to slander and to curse his name, was the
highest fortune man could wish--though in all probability Timoleon
himself never realized how kind the gods were to him!
From the upper level of the Theater the most desolate street of Syracuse
climbs up the hill--the Street of Tombs, its burial vaults and niches
yawning and yearning for the bodies they once sheltered. For centuries
it has been the amiable custom, whenever the tomb of a great man is
lost, to ascribe to him the finest mausoleum in the vicinity. We know
positively that Timoleon was buried either in or very near the _agora_
of Syracuse. We know also that when Cicero was the quæstor of Sicily he
discovered the tomb of Archimedes outside the city, and identified it by
the geometrical diagram carved upon it to illustrate the master’s
favorite demonstration that the solid content of a sphere is equal to
two-thirds that of its circumscribing cylinder. Both mausolea have
disappeared, and two fine Roman-Doric tombs beside the road to Catania
have been arbitrarily identified with Timoleon and Archimedes,
regardless of the rights of their original occupants.
Amusing incidents often transpire from the fact that the Sicilian is
quite as eager to practice his halting English as we are to struggle
with Italian. An ancient long-bearded monk in a very dirty robe opened
the door of the church of San Giovanni Evangelista to us, and asked
quickly: “_Tedesco?_”
“No.”
“Ah--_Russky?_”
“No.”
“Hmph. _Inglese?_”
“No.”
“_Diavolo!_ But you speak a little English, don’t you?”
“A little,” I replied--in Italian.
The monk stared at me in disgust. “If you can, why don’t you? I speak it
whenever I get the chance.”