Sicilian Odyssey Read Online Free
where a group of workmen digging in a basement have just discovered—and are gently unearthing—an ancient burial urn containing the bones of a child.
Gelon’s temple survives on Ortigia, intact but greatly changed, its outlines and columns still visible in the walls of the Duomo. Partly what’s so pleasing about the cathedral is the evidence it offers that each invader who arrived in Ortigia, each champion of each new faith, seems to have been inspired by an admirable desire to preserve and protect, rather than raze and obliterate, the remnants of the previous structure, the evidence of the old religion. In the seventh century A.D ., the Doric columns of the Greek temple were incorporated by the Byzantines into the walls of a Christian church, which was in turn converted into a mosque by the Saracens, then reconsecrated by the Normans. When the facade collapsed during the earthquakes at the end of the seventeenth century, it was rebuilt according to the principles of the high baroque. This amalgamation of styles represents a heartening aspect of Sicilian history and culture—the instances in which a ruler or a people extracted what was most valuable from an older tradition; among the happy consequences are the cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalù, which combine the aesthetics of the Normans, the Byzantines, and the Arabs.
Gelon was succeeded by his brother Hiero I, the patron of Aeschylus, who was followed by another brother, Thrasybulus, one of the cruelest of the tyrants—though possibly not as vicious as the early ruler of Acragas who had his enemies roasted alive inside a specially fashioned bronze bull, the idea being that the howls of the dying would sound like the bellowing of a bull. During the rule of Hermocrates, the quarries surrounding the amphitheater at Syracuse were first used as prisons to hold—under inhuman conditions—thousands of captives brought back from the war against Athens. (Cicero, in The Verrine Orations, claims the caves were employed for that purpose, though this has been disputed by some modern scholars.) In 405 B.C ., the throne was assumed by Dionysius the Elder, a soi-disant poet and playwright so loutish that he had Plato imprisoned when he came to Syracuse as a guest of his brother-in-law. It was during his reign that Syracuse became one of the most powerful cities in Europe.
Dionysius was not only an effective leader but also a world-class paranoid so obsessive that he had a moat dug around his bed, complete with a drawbridge he could pull up when he went to sleep. Good fences may, as Robert Frost wrote, make good neighbors—but great paranoids make great walls. In an attempt to surround and fortify the entire settlement of Syracuse as a deterrent to foreign invasion, Dionysius built the prodigious walls of Epipolae, fragments of which can still be seen on the drive up to the ruins of the Castello Eurialo—a defensive fort constructed by Hiero II, most likely with the help of Archimedes, and one of the largest extant examples of Greek military architecture.
The scale and ambition of the fort gives it an air of near-insanity, and indeed it’s the product of a plan to encircle and protect the entire known world—the classical equivalent of the “Star Wars” missile defense shield. When you consider the amount of labor involved, the human suffering all that labor represented, and, as it turned out, the fort’s utter uselessness in repelling the Roman invasion, the castello seems more aptly described as a folly than those harmless pagodas and pleasure palaces eccentric English lords built in their gardens.
And yet, for all the pointless grandiosity and wastefulness that the Castello Eurialo represents, its builder, Hiero II, was one of the more progressive and rational of the despots who ruled Syracuse. It was he who enlarged and rebuilt the amphitheater, and who built the nearby altar (also in the Archaeological Park) on which, according to Diodorus, 450 bulls were
Gelon’s temple survives on Ortigia, intact but greatly changed, its outlines and columns still visible in the walls of the Duomo. Partly what’s so pleasing about the cathedral is the evidence it offers that each invader who arrived in Ortigia, each champion of each new faith, seems to have been inspired by an admirable desire to preserve and protect, rather than raze and obliterate, the remnants of the previous structure, the evidence of the old religion. In the seventh century A.D ., the Doric columns of the Greek temple were incorporated by the Byzantines into the walls of a Christian church, which was in turn converted into a mosque by the Saracens, then reconsecrated by the Normans. When the facade collapsed during the earthquakes at the end of the seventeenth century, it was rebuilt according to the principles of the high baroque. This amalgamation of styles represents a heartening aspect of Sicilian history and culture—the instances in which a ruler or a people extracted what was most valuable from an older tradition; among the happy consequences are the cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalù, which combine the aesthetics of the Normans, the Byzantines, and the Arabs.
Gelon was succeeded by his brother Hiero I, the patron of Aeschylus, who was followed by another brother, Thrasybulus, one of the cruelest of the tyrants—though possibly not as vicious as the early ruler of Acragas who had his enemies roasted alive inside a specially fashioned bronze bull, the idea being that the howls of the dying would sound like the bellowing of a bull. During the rule of Hermocrates, the quarries surrounding the amphitheater at Syracuse were first used as prisons to hold—under inhuman conditions—thousands of captives brought back from the war against Athens. (Cicero, in The Verrine Orations, claims the caves were employed for that purpose, though this has been disputed by some modern scholars.) In 405 B.C ., the throne was assumed by Dionysius the Elder, a soi-disant poet and playwright so loutish that he had Plato imprisoned when he came to Syracuse as a guest of his brother-in-law. It was during his reign that Syracuse became one of the most powerful cities in Europe.
Dionysius was not only an effective leader but also a world-class paranoid so obsessive that he had a moat dug around his bed, complete with a drawbridge he could pull up when he went to sleep. Good fences may, as Robert Frost wrote, make good neighbors—but great paranoids make great walls. In an attempt to surround and fortify the entire settlement of Syracuse as a deterrent to foreign invasion, Dionysius built the prodigious walls of Epipolae, fragments of which can still be seen on the drive up to the ruins of the Castello Eurialo—a defensive fort constructed by Hiero II, most likely with the help of Archimedes, and one of the largest extant examples of Greek military architecture.
The scale and ambition of the fort gives it an air of near-insanity, and indeed it’s the product of a plan to encircle and protect the entire known world—the classical equivalent of the “Star Wars” missile defense shield. When you consider the amount of labor involved, the human suffering all that labor represented, and, as it turned out, the fort’s utter uselessness in repelling the Roman invasion, the castello seems more aptly described as a folly than those harmless pagodas and pleasure palaces eccentric English lords built in their gardens.
And yet, for all the pointless grandiosity and wastefulness that the Castello Eurialo represents, its builder, Hiero II, was one of the more progressive and rational of the despots who ruled Syracuse. It was he who enlarged and rebuilt the amphitheater, and who built the nearby altar (also in the Archaeological Park) on which, according to Diodorus, 450 bulls were
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