On an island not far from the rocks where the mythical Sirens sang, grief overwhelmed the man. His son, a boy of about ten, had died. The year was 720 B.C., and funeral ceremonies had begun on this far-flung outpost of the Greek world.
Years earlier the man had left his home in Greece, fired by dreams of a fresh start in a rich land. He had sailed west in a cramped galley, disembarking on this island called Pithekoussai near the Bay of Naples. A rough-and-ready emporium, Pithekoussai teemed with not only Greeks but also Phoenician artisans and adventurers from across the Mediterranean. Laborers worked as smelters, processing ores from the iron-rich Etruscan lands to the north. Craftsmen shaped the metal into jewelry and other decorative goods to trade back to the Etruscans and nearby Italic peoples.
The man had married--perhaps the daughter of an Etruscan trading partner. He prospered. Then tragedy took his son.
He ordered a costly cremation, a rite normally reserved for adults. As flames roared around his son's body, the man bade him farewell. He picked up a favorite wine cup, drank deeply, then smashed the cup into the fire.
Twenty-seven centuries later I sit in a villa overlooking ancient Pithekoussai, now known as Ischia, talking of this long-ago anguish with Giorgio Buchner, an 80-year-old archaeologist. Buchner, who has excavated on the island since 1952, bases his tale of this ancient father on a grave in the valley below the villa.
"It is one of the richest graves we have," he says. "We found the boy's bones--and this." He opens a box. Inside is the very cup, pieced together again, that Buchner believes was flung by the grieving father. Three lines of poetry are inscribed across it. "Nestor had a fine drinking cup," Buchner translates, "but anyone who drinks from this cup will soon be struck with desire for fair-crowned Aphrodite."
Playful verses, they are reminiscent not of a funeral but of the parties called symposia that the father must have once enjoyed. They refer to King Nestor of Homer's Iliad.
"These words are among the earliest scraps of writing we know of in the Greek alphabet," says Buchner. "We don't know if the father himself wrote these verses, but they tell us that the people who lived here were cultivated. They knew the Homeric poems perhaps at the same time they were being written down."
I have come to Pithekoussai in search of such fragments. They represent the beginning of a great age of Greek emigration and exploration--a westward expansionary movement no less venturesome for ancient times than the settlement of the Americas would be two millennia later. I want to discover who these people were, what made them leave home, and what kind of new world they built.
Pithekoussai, founded around 770 B.C., was the first of those Greek settlements. A few decades later, colonies were established on Sicily. More sprouted all along the coast of southern Italy, a region called Magna Graecia, or Great Greece, by Latin historians.
The western lands were fertile, and their prosperous soils helped create great cities. On Sicily, Syracuse eventually reached a population that rivaled Athens's in size and power. Likewise, the city of Sybaris grew so rich that its name remains a synonym for voluptuous luxury.
The western Greeks flaunted their success. They built huge temples that outshone most of those back home. Passionate about athletics, they dominated the Olympic Games for many years. They commissioned a number of the great artworks of antiquity. Even after they were overwhelmed by Roman armies around 210 B.C., the western Greeks lived on in Italy. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, the citizens of Naples still spoke Greek.
This westward expansion invigorated the Greek spirit. Many of the great philosophers before Socrates emerged in the west. Pythagoras, called the father of science, flourished in Magna Graecia. Later, Archimedes, the most celebrated mathematician and inventor of ancient Greece, lived in Sicily. Perhaps the fires of democracy itself were fueled in the west before reaching Athens.
Modern archaeology is revolutionizing our portrait of the western Greeks. Until recently we had to rely on the often biased or hearsay writings of ancient historians, most of whom lived centuries after the events they reported. However, archaeologists are now documenting for the first time actual settlement patterns, farm sizes, and agricultural techniques. Excavations of cemeteries in and near the ancient city of Metapontion (today's Metaponto) in southern Italy have yielded hundreds of skeletons, providing scientists with some of their first hard facts about the physical health of the ancient Greek world.
Why did the Greeks go west? "They were driven in part by curiosity. Real curiosity," explains Elizabeth French, director of the British School at Athens. "They wanted to know what lay on the other side of the sea."
Centuries earlier their ancestors, known as the Mycenaeans, had sailed western waters and had traded with the indigenous people. The Mycenaeans were the ones who, in legend, fought the Trojan War. Odysseus was a Mycenaean who got lost in the west on his way home from Troy.
Beginning around 1200 B.C. the Mycenaean civilization fell into turmoil, triggered perhaps by social unrest or a series of earthquakes. After 1100 B.C. a dark age descended over most of Greece, and writing disappeared. Contact with the west dwindled; nevertheless, it lived on in myth as a land of mystery, sorcery, and apprehension. The monsters Scylla and Charybdis lurked in the turbulent strait that separates Italy from Sicily. The Cyclops Polyphemus hurled boulders at Odysseus from the slopes of Mount Etna.
As the dark age ended, adventurous Greeks sailed west again. At first the lure may have been trade, but soon social forces at home began to dominate the colonization. "Villages coalesced into city-states, or poleis, such as Athens and Sparta," explains Anthony Snodgrass, an archaeologist at Cambridge University in England. "The population boomed. There was not enough land."
An emerging class of independent small farmers tilled rocky plots on infertile mountainsides. The ruling elite held the growing masses in contempt. In one polis aristocrats went through the streets clubbing people they disliked. Soon bands of people seeking a better life began striking out for the new world. Each band was led by a founder who first consulted with the famous oracle at Delphi. And so I, too, go to Delphi, where journeys west began.
The mystical aura of Delphi persists. Dark clouds brood above the Temple of Apollo, where the oracle sat, enshrouded by vapors and chanting in a language only the priests could interpret. The oracle was usually an older woman, but dressed as a girl. The Greeks believed she spoke the will of the god Apollo.
Like so many pilgrims in the past, I walk up Delphi's Sacred Way, passing the rubble of monuments erected by numerous city-states to commemorate great victories. The finest architecture, the most sublime sculptures once adorned this path. It would have glittered, awing suppliants. Some of the most conspicuous monuments were built by westerners after they became wealthy.
Delphi's first recorded involvement in establishing a colony dates from around 730 B.C. The geographer Strabo writes that the city of Chalcis, suffering a severe drought, sent 10 percent of its young men as a human tithe to Delphi, thereby decreasing its overstressed population. Perhaps not knowing what to do with the men, the oracle in turn sent them to Italy to help establish the colony of Rhegion.
As the colonists arrived in their new world, a radical concept began to emerge--the equality of citizens. Colonists also began to build a new kind of settlement.
In Greece, towns had evolved helter-skelter. For instance, in the ruins of a Greek town called Zagora, which developed at the end of the dark age, I see houses built around a central hearth and arrayed in clusters. There was no regular pattern of streets. When I arrive in Sicily, however, I find an utterly different type of city. Called Megara Hyblaea, it was built in the eighth century B.C. by the first wave of colonists. Only the foundations of its buildings remain. Nevertheless, the houses were clearly laid out on a grid of streets, much like Manhattan today. Different sectors of the city served different functions. The plan was highly rational.
"Until the early 1970s we were taught that urban planning was invented at the city of Piraeus in mainland Greece in the 430s B.C.," says Malcolm Bell III, an archaeologist at the American Academy in Rome. "Megara Hyblaea shows us it happened in the colonies about three centuries earlier."
The grid reveals a major innovation. The city was divided into blocks and lots of roughly the same size. "Everyone was equal in the colonies in the beginning," explains Paola Pelagatti, an Italian archaeologist, "so that's how they laid out their cities."
Throughout the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. immigrants flooded into the new cities of the west. Because writing was still so limited, little is known of those cities until about 550 B.C. Around that date coins came into use, and each city produced its own distinctive design.
Among the earliest known coins in the west are those from Sybaris, which by then had become the most powerful city in Magna Graecia. The luxury-loving Sybarites reportedly banned roosters, lest the citizenry be awakened too early. They supposedly also had wine piped directly into the city from the vineyards.
Pipes still dominate the landscape at Sybaris, but now they belong to a massive pumping system designed to keep the excavated portions of Sybaris dry. The original Sybaris perished abruptly in 510 B.C. when its neighbors, led by the city of Kroton, attacked and razed it. Seventy years later Athens built a new city on the ruins. The Romans built yet another. Groundwater rose, and Sybaris eventually became a swamp.
"Without these pumps this would all be under water," says Isora Migliari, an archaeological assistant, as she takes me to see what's been exposed of the original Greek Sybaris during a quarter century of occasional digging. We enter the atrium of a Roman-era home. Migliari points into the remnants of a shallow well. I see a frog and a few building stones.
"That well belongs to Sybaris," she says.
"That's all that's left?"
"No. The whole city is buried here. Everything," she declares. "We know where the buildings are, and exactly where to dig. We have a great culture here but very little money to excavate."
I travel to Sybaris's rival and conqueror, the mighty city of Kroton. It too lies buried--beneath the bustling modern metropolis of Crotone. On a peninsula known as Capo Colonna on the outskirts of the city rises a lone column of a temple, a sanctuary for the goddess Hera. The original 42 columns were standing until around 1500, when looters began to cart them off to reuse the stone.
"The temple was like the Statue of Liberty, the first thing you saw as you approached," says Tommaso Tedesco, an architect and history enthusiast. "It was famous throughout the Mediterranean."
Crotone offers few other artifacts of the Greek town. However, its Piazza Pythagoras recalls ancient Kroton's most famous citizen.
Pythagoras and his disciples had enormous influence in the evolution of Western thought. They believed that all aspects of nature, from the notes of the musical scale to the sides of triangles, were governed by the relationships between numbers. Mathematics, science, architecture, and engineering revolve around that concept. The Pythagoreans probably influenced a school of philosophers in the city of Elea, thinkers such as Parmenides and Zeno, who also pioneered in asking questions about the nature of being. Although Greek philosophy had been born earlier--in Miletos, a Greek center in Asia Minor--these westerners refined the intellectual journey that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would later continue in Athens, a journey fundamental to Western civilization. It was the beginning of reason.
But who was Pythagoras? It's hard to separate the man from his legend. "We have no writings of his," says Leonardo Taran, a historian of philosophy at Columbia University. "Much of what is ascribed to him may, in fact, be that of his followers."
According to legend, Pythagoras fled a tyrant on the Aegean island of Samos as a youth and then traveled in Egypt and the Near East, where he was exposed to new ideas. He reached Kroton in 530 B.C. and established a school. He became deeply involved with the aristocracy of Kroton and during a political upheaval was forced to escape to the nearby town of Metapontion. Part of his difficulty was, ironically, a mystical side to his teachings. Pythagoreans became a religious sect. They apparently believed in reincarnation, emphasizing the purification of souls to erase some ancient wrong that all humans share.
In Pythagoras's day, however, his fellow Krotoniates were doubtless far more interested in the city's athletic prowess. Sports obsessed the city. At one Olympics, the first seven finishers in the stadium footrace were from Kroton, inspiring a saying that the last of the Krotoniates was the first among all other Greeks.
"Not only did Kroton have the best athletes, it had the most beautiful women," says Tedesco. "The great painter Zeuxis came here to find models for a painting of Helen of Troy."
Modern Crotone remains famed for beautiful faces. They surround me on a Sunday evening, when much of the town turns out for the passeggiata, or evening stroll. The piazza fills with young people chattering, kissing, and eating gelato, or ice cream. Older people walk dogs. Flirtation is rampant.
"This is a very old tradition," says Tedesco. "Until modern times women weren't supposed to be seen in public with men. The passeggiata was a chance to catch eyes. It was also a time to discuss business or have a chat. Perhaps such assemblies were also the way in the agora of the old Greek city."
Such outings may have been one of the few freedoms women had in ancient Greece.
"The Greek polis was something of a men's club," says classicist Erwin Cook of the University of Texas. "Women tended to stay at home and do the household chores. They went out chiefly for ceremonies, festivals, and such duties as drawing water. In myth, trysts often took place at wells. Going there was one way a woman got out of the house."
But nearby in Lokroi, one of the largest towns of Magna Graecia, women seem to have had more rights. Unlike Sybaris and Kroton, much of Lokroi has been excavated. I walk its walls with Elena Lattanzi, the superintendent of archaeology for the Calabria region, and Claudio Sabbione, director of the Locri museum.
"There was a strong tradition of matriarchy in Lokroi," explains Lattanzi. "The aristocrats, for instance, descended from the mother's side. Also, the cults of two goddesses, Persephone and Aphrodite, were powerful here."
Women across Magna Graecia identified especially with Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and the earth goddess Demeter. As a girl, Persephone was kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld. Her mother demanded her return. But since she had eaten fruit in the underworld, she could only return for part of the year--when she blessed the earth with fertility.
Tablets that recount this myth were hung like stations of the cross in Lokroi's sanctuary. All over the west, women held festivals in Persephone's honor, often sacrificing piglets, symbols of fecundity, to gain her blessings. She became the Madonna of her day. Votive statues of her were mass-produced. They fill museum drawers all over southern Italy.
Persephone may have inspired a piety that lives on. Outside a church near Locri, I watch busloads of older women clutching rosaries and inexpensive statues of the Virgin Mary as they file into Mass on the Feast of the Madonna Nera. Most of the women's faces are creased, like seasoned olives, from years of work in the sun, and the majority wear black dresses, signifying they are in mourning. A few walk with husbands. The men look uninterested, but the women radiate their fervor as they move en masse toward the church. "I think of you night and day," they chant over and over to the Madonna, and somehow, across the ages, the women of Magna Graecia are still singing.
Nowhere do the voices of Magna Graecia echo as poignantly as near Metaponto, a town that is little more than a train stop and minor resort. For centuries the site was abandoned, and most residents are oblivious of its past as the great Metapontion.
"This was a swamp. Metaponto didn't exist until Mussolini drained it," says Michele Marra, one of two local soccer players I meet at the ruins of the old agora. Dressed in stylish running clothes, he comes to this lonely spot to work out. As he stretches, Marra swats at a mosquito. The remains of an elaborate drainage system here in the center of the old city testify that even in its glory days, a high water table--and inevitably a healthy population of insects--plagued the residents.
Before jogging off, Marra says he finds little inspiration in the ruins--a few columns of a temple, the wall of a theater, and numerous stone foundations. Experts on Magna Graecia feel differently. In Metaponto's ancient cemeteries nearly 700 skeletons have been found--by far the largest sampling of bones from any site of classical antiquity. And in the local archaeological museum, I come face-to-face with a western Greek for the first time.
"We call him the Musician," says archaeologist Joseph Carter of the University of Texas. "That's because he was buried with a lyre." The lyre commonly was used by poets who sang Homeric tales. So perhaps it tells us the occupation of this man.
The Musician's bones were found in nearly perfect condition, says Carter, who since 1974 has coordinated a multidisciplinary research program at Metaponto. The bones lie neatly arrayed in a box. The skull was in such good shape that scientists could create a lifelike plastic reconstruction of the Musician's head. Carter lifts the reconstructed skull and turns the face toward me. I see a robust man, one with a large nose and simple, rustic features.
He is haunting--a person history forgot but fortune saved.
"He died at about 40 and was exceptionally tall for his day--about five feet ten," says Carter. "Average height for a man then was about five feet five."
Why was he so tall? Maciej and Renata Henneberg, physical anthropologists at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, think that the Musician may have had mild acromegaly--a condition caused by an overactive pituitary gland. Their evidence is enlargement of his hands and feet, a frequent symptom.
"If he had the disease, he was probably high-strung and nervous," says Carter.
The Musician had been a sickly child. Rings of thin enamel on his teeth suggest he had high fevers while his teeth were forming.
I meet the Hennebergs in Metaponto as they work on a new skeleton, examining such things as teeth and cranial sutures to determine age, sex, and health.
"Life expectancy of a newborn here was 21 years," says Maciej. "Half of all children died before age 15. If a female survived beyond that, she could expect to live to 38; a male to 41."
Survival meant living in pain, frequently in the mouth.
"There were no dentists to extract teeth," says Renata. "People were walking around with raging toothaches. We've seen many teeth completely decayed or lost."
Although dental care was lacking, Metapontion was praised by ancient writers for its medicine. Maciej shows me a fractured male thighbone that had been masterfully set and had healed.
"This was a remarkable surgical procedure," he says. "Someone used a lot of force to pull the lower part of the broken bone down, reset it, and keep it in place for weeks against the enormous pressures of contracting muscles."
Not everyone got such care, however. Maciej shows me a thighbone that belonged to a man buried in a rural cemetery. It looks twisted. No effort had been made to set it. It had healed with the bone fragments still separated.
"We can tell this man lived for at least five years after the break," says Maciej. "Someone cared for him for perhaps three months. After that he would have walked with a limp."
The Hennebergs' most surprising finding, however, suggests that syphilis, which most scientists believe spread to Europe from the Americas after Christopher Columbus returned, was already present in southern Italy in Greek times.
Renata holds up another skull. It is riddled with what look like wormholes.
"These lesions are indicative of the microorganism that causes syphilis--a spirochete called Treponema," she says.
"We see a lot of it," adds Maciej. "Forty-seven skeletons out of 272 show signs of treponemal infection."
The lesions could be related to another treponemal disease, called yaws, which children may have contracted from infected playmates. But other researchers have recently found evidence that syphilis probably occurred in medieval England before Columbus's time. The skeletons of Metapontion suggest that the disease may always have been present in Europe. In pre-Columbian times syphilis might well have been misdiagnosed as leprosy.
The skeletons also lend credence to the idea that rituals of a mystic cult were practiced at Metapontion. Named Orphism for the mythical singer Orpheus, the cult apparently swept the Greek world in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Orphism taught that performing purification rituals guaranteed redemption and a better life after death.
"Orphic purifiers traveled the countryside," explains Walter Burkert, a German scholar. "Those wandering charismatics had books of poems supposedly written by Orpheus and gold leaves bearing instructions for getting through the underworld."
Orphic rituals varied. In some regions they might be frenzied revels with animal sacrifice and wine drinking.
"Wine, the gift of the god Dionysus, helped you reclaim the carefree existence of the golden age," explains scholar Erwin Cook. "You lost your inhibitions. You forgot your pain."
Elsewhere the rituals might be cleansings. The skin of an initiate was coated with plaster. It was coated again when the initiate died--so he would be recognized in the afterlife as among the saved.
Until the Metaponto excavations scholars had scant archaeological evidence for these rituals. However, several of the skeletons from one rural cemetery have plaster on their bones. The plaster would have settled onto the bone surface after the flesh decayed. The presence of that plaster indicates Orphic rites were indeed practiced in the countryside of Magna Graecia.
The archaeological survey team from Texas has also overturned the long-standing idea that the western Greeks were primarily city dwellers. "Half of Metapontion's citizens may have been farmers living outside the city," says Joseph Carter. Ancient seeds, pollen, and plant remains confirm that barley, wheat, olives, and grapes were the primary crops grown by the Metapontians.
"We've learned that agriculture was already happening here before the Greeks arrived," says Carter's Italian associate Lorenzo Costantini, an archaeobotanist. "But there weren't true farms. The indigenous people used the same plants as the Greeks. The Greeks brought a more efficient way of growing them. They were strong farmers, used to putting in effort. They knew that some sites were good for olives, others for vines or wheat. So they divided the land accordingly. They brought new tools and deeper plowing. They rotated crops. They used cattle dung to fertilize fields. They knew that if you prune a tree properly, you get a much better yield."
Carter's team found animal bones as well. "We see that large horses appeared with the Greeks," says Sandor Bokonyi, a Hungarian archaeologist and specialist in early domestic animals. They also introduced chickens and sheep that bore fine wool.
Bokonyi discovered that the Greeks often mistreated animals. "They were quite rude to them," he says. "I've found cattle with unhealed fractures. Their owners could have set the bones easily, but they didn't bother. Animals were often beaten. I've seen many fractures on the heads of dogs."
Discoveries by other teams at Metaponto may document a triumph of the human spirit--the emergence of democratic ideas--years before Athenian citizens introduced their revolutionary demokratia, or rule by the people, in 507 B.C.
Ancient historians wrote that the last tyrant of Metapontion was killed by a man named Antileon because the tyrant lusted after Antileon's young lover. After slaying the tyrant, Antileon fled with the youth. Unfortunately they ran into a flock of sheep tied together in the street. Slowed down, both men were caught and killed. Citizens celebrated the death of the tyrant by erecting bronze statues to the lovers--and by forbidding shepherds to tie their sheep together while driving them through the streets.
Later, in Athens, a similar assassination by two lovers preceded that city's democratic revolution. That tyrannicide was so glorified by the Athenians that scholars assumed the Metapontion slaying was just a fable based on the Athenian tale.
But in February 1993 the director of Metaponto's archaeological museum, Antonio De Siena, opened a series of newly discovered aristocratic tombs. Local farmers had found the tombs as they deep-plowed an old olive grove. In one monumental tomb the remains of a man and woman were laid out on couches. The man had a sword. The tomb dates back to around 550 B.C. The letters A N T were carved in several places on the walls of the tomb. De Siena believes those letters stand for Antileon.
"I think these are the relatives of Antileon, the tyrant slayer," De Siena says. "After the burial this part of the cemetery was never used again. I think the people of Metapontion made the family tomb a monument."
De Siena notes that sweeping social changes set in at Metapontion around that time. No more grand aristocratic tombs were built. The temple was reconstructed to align with a new grid plan in which land was divided into equal plots. Workers dug a massive drainage and sewer system, which served all the residents. Perhaps most significantly, a place for people to assemble, called an ekklesiasterion, was constructed. The earliest such structure known in the Greek world, it had seats for all the region's citizens.
A nore democratic, independent spirit also appears in the spectacular temples of Magna Graecia and Sicily. "Western temples had especially large central rooms," says Dieter Mertens, an architectural scholar at the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. "They may have been used as much for political assemblies as for religious ceremonies."
Western temple builders freely experimented with design. They became the architectural leaders of the Greek world. For instance, the Temple of Athena in Poseidonia, a city south of Naples, fused the simple Doric with the more elaborate Ionic style. Architects in Greece would not dare blend those two rigidly observed styles for another 50 years. The same well-preserved temple also reflects the famous Pythagorean dictum: "All is number." A two-to-one ratio runs through the building. Its width is half its length; its height, half its width. That ratio imbues the temple with harmony.
Nearby, the much larger Temple of Hera II, built half a century later, proclaims even more dramatically the western Greek mastery of proportion. Its massive yet elegant columns, its perfect unity, its muscular strength make it seem alive. It's an organism, a concept of the universe, an embodiment of the emerging force of reason.
The surge of temple building reached even more awesome dimensions in Sicily. In the fifth century B.C. Sicilians began to eclipse the Greeks of southern Italy. The indigenous people of the Italian peninsula had risen up against some cities, such as Poseidonia. Elsewhere local geophysical forces had caused the water table to rise, creating swamps and increasing the incidence of malaria. But Sicily prospered. Its vast wheat fields, vineyards, and olive groves brought fabled wealth, much of which went into temples. No city colony on the island.
"Here were constructed within one century the greatest number of temples in all the Greek world--Athens included," says Dieter Mertens at ancient Selinus. "Seven great temples. They were not only large, they also required highly skilled workmen." Selinus's so-called Temple G, for example, one of the largest Greek temples ever built, measured 362 feet long and 164 feet wide. To erect its 48 columns, workers had to hoist blocks weighing 50 tons as high as 60 feet. Slaves or captives may have provided much of the manpower.
"They used ropes, pulleys, and wooden cranes," says Mertens. "Imagine an ancient crane 80 feet tall!"
Yet Temple G was never quite finished. In 409 B.C. Carthage attacked and destroyed Selinus. Earthquakes later toppled the building, turning it into a jumble of huge blocks.
Perhaps the same earthquakes destroyed the even more daring Temple of Zeus in the nearby city of Akragas.
Akragas, founded in 580 B.C., was built on a dramatic, steep-sloped limestone plateau that rises out of a fertile plain. The ancients presumably wanted to dazzle visitors approaching their citadel and so built a series of temples on its acropolis and along its walls. In late afternoon light the temples still glow as I near the modern town, now known as Agrigento. They affirm, as few places in Italy still do, that the city was born Greek.
The temple of Zeus, now rubble, was the grandest in Akragas's crown of temples. The city's tyrant, Theron, supposedly commissioned the monument to celebrate a crucial victory over the Carthaginians in 480 B.C. Theron enslaved his prisoners, forcing them to build this immense monument.
"This temple was unusual," says architectural historian Pietro Meli as we wander through its remnants. "It was not an open design. It had walls between the columns." Embedded in those walls were 36 painted stone giants 25 feet tall. These telamones resembled huge genies with their arms raised skyward.
Such extravagance characterized Akragas, which the poet Pindar called "the most beautiful of mortal cities."
"It was said they lived here as if they were going to die the next day, but they built their buildings as if they were going to live in them forever," says Agrigento's archaeological superintendent, Graziella Fiorentini.
Sicily's most powerful city, however, was Syracuse. By 415 B.C. its growing influence had so alarmed Athens that it sent a great fleet to intervene in Sicilian affairs. In the celebrated Battle of Syracuse, the underdog Sicilians routed the Athenians after they sailed into the city's harbor.
Thousands of Athenian prisoners were held as slaves in stone quarries in Syracuse. A fortunate few were set free--reportedly those who could recite verses of the poet Euripides, who was much admired in Sicily. Most, however, died of disease or hunger working the quarries.
Earthquakes most likely destroyed most of those quarries, which were large chambers cut into a hillside. I enter one that survives, a dank, 200-foot-long grotto called Dionysius' Ear. Excellent acoustics inside the quarry, legend says, permitted the tyrant Dionysius I to sit unseen in an alcove high above prisoners and overhear their conversations.
I, too, can hear echoes across the quarry when I visit. Mostly they are the chatterings of tourists. But there's a deeper echo, sharpened by the countless chisel marks left on the grotto walls by the enslaved laborers of long ago. Much of the glory of Syracuse was built on the anguish of such slaves.
Despite bouts of egotism and cruelty, Dionysius I kept Sicily from falling into Carthaginian hands. Once he mobilized 60,000 people and 6,000 oxen to build in a matter of weeks a complex of 20-foot-thick walls that still stands on the northern edge of Syracuse. Warfare, in fact, obsessed Dionysius. "He assembled the best military minds of Italy and commissioned them to come up with new methods of attack and defense," says Dieter Mertens, who is studying the tyrant's great wall. "They developed the most important weapon of all antiquity--the catapult.
"The catapult had an effective distance of up to 50 meters [164 feet]. It could hurl not only stones but also arrows. No longer did people have to fight person-to-person. Catapults were moved across fields on top of towers ten meters high. That was tall enough to attack an enemy inside his own walls."
The power of Syracuse persisted. In 212 B.C., when the Roman armies of the general Marcus Claudius Marcellus besieged the city, Syracuse remained a citadel of military ingenuity. Audacious war machines invented by Archimedes thwarted Roman attacks for eight months or more.
Archimedes found solving mathematical problems, such as determining the relationship between the surface and the volume of a sphere, far more engrossing than warfare. Nevertheless, to please the tyrant Hieron, he designed poles with huge iron claws that thrust out from the city walls overlooking the harbor. Those claws could pluck Roman warships out of the water as they approached the walls. Shaking sailors from the ships, Plutarch wrote, the claws lifted the vessels to great heights, then dashed them against the jagged rocks below. Archimedes also invented machines that hurled barrages of stone balls at advancing Roman infantrymen. Soon Roman troops regarded the name Archimedes with terror.
Finally Roman forces breached the walls after dark and sacked the city. In the aftermath a Roman soldier ran his sword through Archimedes. Some say the mathematician was too engrossed in solving a problem to notice that the city had fallen.
The death of Archimedes symbolizes the end of the western Greeks' long odyssey. Already Rome had vanquished the Greek cities of the Italian peninsula. In Sicily only Akragas and the mountain town of Morgantina held out for another two years.
In spirit, however, the Greeks fought on. The orator Cicero tells how in the first century B.C. the people of Akragas rushed to a temple to keep Romans from stealing a treasured statue of Heracles.
"I do not know that I have ever seen a lovelier work of art," Cicero wrote of the statue. Its mouth and chin were rubbed, he said, as if the people had not only prayed to it but kissed it.
"There was not a man in Akragas that night," he continued, "so old or infirm that he did not get out of his bed...and lay hold of the first weapon that came to hand."
The citizens were fighting for more than a statue that night. "Many Greeks saw Heracles as their ancestor," says Erwin Cook. "He was their superman. In his 12 labors he descended into the underworld and triumphed over the forces of death. He held the sky on his shoulders. He destroyed monsters to make the land safe for habitation and agriculture. He represented the civilizing forces of the Greeks. Take away Heracles and you take away their identity."
Like Heracles, the western Greeks had traveled to the ends of the known earth. In a sense, they themselves had briefly held up the sky. And through their many labors, they, too, have become immortal.
Copyright 1994 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.
