Part 11

All interest was now centred on the fate of the Spartans shut up on Sphacteria. Instead of laying down their arms they waited for the Athenians to "come and take them." The starving process failed, because daring Spartans on shore were found who risked their lives to carry in provisions. Helots, especially, ran every risk, securing freedom as the price of success. The Athenians themselves suffered terribly, inasmuch as they controlled only the sea, and so were forced to take their meals in cramped quarters or in imminent fear of attack by the dreaded Spartan hoplite. More painful still was the lack of good drinking water. They were obliged to scratch away the sand with their hands and drink brackish sea water. The Spartans on the island had a well which afforded much better water. When this strain had lasted nearly two months the patience of the Athenians gave out. But just at this critical time a fire was accidentally started on the island by some Athenians who were cooking their dinner there, out of sight of the Spartans. Nearly the whole island, which was uninhabited and heavily wooded, was burned over. For the first time the Athenians were able to see how few the enemy were, and to watch their movements. Demosthenes, now the soul of every movement, resolved to attack them. But in the meantime tidings of the sad plight and sufferings of the besiegers had been carried to Athens, and a stormy and somewhat amusing scene had taken place in the Athenian Assembly, in which Cleon, the leader of the majority, who had been responsible for the failure of the peace negotiations, was compelled, much against his will, to go to Pylos, as commander, "to show how easy it was to take the Spartans by force." But he arrived in the nick of time, and, by trusting everything to Demosthenes, he went back to Athens with the captives within the few days in which he had boastfully said he would do it. It was, however, well understood at Athens that the planner and executer of the deed was Demosthenes. Aristophanes, in the Knights, makes Demosthenes say: "Out at Pylos I had kneaded up a Spartan cake, and Cleon, in a most rascally manner, snatched it away and served it up." Demosthenes landed on the island a force of about fifteen thousand men, mostly light armed, who could skip about over the rocks and burnt trees, inflicting injuries on the Spartan hoplites without suffering much in return. There were only 420 Spartans, and no note is taken of their attendant light armed. If we allow seven such attendants to each of them, which is a usual proportion, we should have a total force of 3,360; but as Thucydides says nothing of light armed troops on the Spartan side, but makes it an affair of hoplites against light armed, there was probably not a large body of auxiliaries present to the Spartans; but allowing the maximum, the opposing forces were in a proportion of five to one. If, however, the light armed attendants were lacking, the proportion was about fifty to one. Never in all Spartan history did their splendid fighting machine better show its superiority than in the slow march from the well at the centre of the island to the "old fort" at the north end. Demosthenes had distributed his light armed, in detachments of several hundred each, all along the line of march. His small force of hoplites, every time it was confronted by the Spartans, fell back at once and gave place to the light armed, who, with arrows and javelins, inflicted severe losses, easily keeping out of reach of the Spartan spears. There was, in fact, no serious loss to chronicle on the Athenian side. But that the little company led by Epitidas should move steadily toward its goal during the whole of a long summer day, half stifled with ashes and smoke, oppressed by raging thirst, surrounded by yelling thousands and pelted by every kind of missile, without the slightest thought of surrender, is perhaps the most brilliant page in the annals of Sparta. However much we may be inclined to throw up our cap at every success of Athens, we must here assign the honors to the vanquished. The movement of the Spartans over that mile and a half reminds us of a lion worried by a pack of yelping hounds.

Epitidas, and after him the second in command, had been killed before the little band reached the fort, which is made in a semicircle around the west side of the peak to which the island rises on the northeast. When they got inside this the attack slackened. But the end came by a turn that one can hardly understand, even with all the explanation afforded by an exact knowledge of the lay of the land. A Messenian captain told the Athenian leaders that they were wasting time and men, but that he knew a way to approach the Spartans in the rear. His suggestion being accepted, he, with a few desperate men, scrambled up a precipice and appeared suddenly on the summit in the rear of the Spartans.

The mystery is how this could have been so unexpected by the Spartans; a single picket posted on the summit, only a few paces distant from the line that they were defending, could have seen the approach of the new enemy. How could they have failed to keep such a watch? But the sudden appearance of the Messenians is regarded as closing the fight. The Athenian commanders preferred to capture rather than kill, and so summoned the survivors to surrender. They then lowered their shields. Their commander at once asked permission to communicate with the Spartan army on the mainland. This was granted; and when the answer came back, "The Lacedemonians bid you act as you think best; but you are not to dishonor yourselves," they consulted and surrendered. Of the 420 Spartan hoplites, 120 surrendered. That a hundred Spartans had surrendered on the field of battle threw Greece into wild amazement, and broke the spell of Sparta's supposed invincibility until it was restored again by Agis on the field of Mantineia seven years later.

In modern warfare we consider it folly to throw away life after the battle is absolutely decided; and on Sphacteria we bow our heads reverently to the Spartans who, after a fight never surpassed in the world's history, dared to surrender and save their lives for the good of Sparta. When, however, we pass over to Pylos we pass to an admiration of Demosthenes, who planting himself in the midst of dangers, outwitted and outfought the enemy in superior numbers; and, by his wise plan, brought Sparta into such a position that, had Athens possessed a statesman wise enough to use it, she might have concluded an honorable peace which would have left her victor in the struggle into which Pericles led her with his eyes wide open. But Cleon let the golden opportunity pass through his fingers. The handful of heroes that were paraded so long in Athens were only a miserable residuum of the lost opportunity.

A TOUR IN SICILY

It was with an appetite whetted by long waiting that I landed in Sicily on the last day of May, 1897. _Anybody_ might enjoy travel in Sicily. Its scenery is magnificent. A mountainous country with a coast-line of rugged headlands, and here and there a river breaking through to the sea, opening up vistas into the interior and forming a fertile plain at its mouth; above all, snow-capped and smoking Ætna, with its nearly eleven thousand feet towering so high as to be seen from every part of the island except the valleys, form a combination attractive even to one who has left history and art out of his travelling outfit. The student of history, however, gets a keener enjoyment in this land where so much history--ancient, mediæval, and modern--has been enacted. Not only was it the apple of discord between Rome and Carthage, but, to say nothing of Sikans, Elymi, and Sikels, because their movements are wrapped in the mist of a prehistoric past, Phœnicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Franks, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Germans, French, and Spaniards successively shaped its destinies until Garibaldi at last brought it to rest in the bosom of the kingdom of Italy. But Sicily has an especial interest for the student of the history and art of ancient Greece. He who studies the country now known as Greece and neglects the greater Hellas in the west makes a great mistake. Akragas and Selinus have left more imposing ruins than Athens, Olympia, and Delphi; and Syracuse was at one time the most populous and the most powerful of all Greek cities.

It was this especial claim which drew me and my two companions, members of the American School at Athens, to Catania. We desired to become as familiar with western Hellas as we had already become with eastern Hellas. We came rather too late in the year; not that physical comfort is an element for great consideration in such a land; it is rather the psychological aspect which I have in mind. Theocritus has thrown such associations of spring over Sicily that the traveller feels that he ought to be there with "pulses thronged with the fulness of the spring," which can hardly be the case in the great heat of June. Perhaps our bicycles might seem to some out of time with Theocritus and Pindar, and we did not try to throw any glamour of poetry over them. But they were vastly convenient. We had sent forward our heavy luggage to Palermo, and they carried all that we needed for two weeks. While they were not a substitute for trains, they freed us from servile dependence on trains. If a train went our way at our time, as it did from Syracuse to Girgenti, we took it. But finding no railroad connection between Girgenti and Selinus, except such as took us across to the north side of the island and then back again to the south side, we passed the intervening space in a direct line along the southern shore, saving both time and money. When we were at Syracuse we wished to visit the river Asinaros, where the fugitive Athenian army was brought to bay and slaughtered and captured. The five o'clock train was too early. Who likes to take a morning meal at half-past four with the fear of losing a train before his eyes? Discomfort if not dyspepsia hovers over him. The alternative of a later train involved giving up the day to this excursion, and we needed that day for something else. We took a comfortable meal, and, starting at six o'clock, at a quarter past eight were on the banks of the Asinaros, and by the aid of a train were back in Syracuse at ten o'clock, ready for a good day's work.

Our beginning was inauspicious. A chapter of small accidents on the lava-paved streets of Catania kept us hovering around a shop presided over by a woman in which sewing-machines and a few other miscellaneous machines, including bicycles, were repaired. Here, in a subordinate position, was one of those mechanics who know how to do things as if by instinct, a not unworthy successor of Hephæstos, who used to do business on a grander scale hard by, with Ætna for his forge. Your real mechanic, from Tubal Cain down, is always the right man in the right place. A deft-handed New Hampshire mechanic once said to me, after putting some dislocated object to rights in less than five minutes, "I shall have to charge you ten cents for doing the job and fifteen cents for knowing how." It struck me as a good expression of the claims of the guild.

When we got off it was nearly eleven o'clock, and the flower of the day was gone; but we had vowed to see the sunrise from the theatre of Taormina the next morning; and so we sped off in the heat over roads so bad as to make us repent of all the hard things we had said of the roads of Greece. A good deal of the way lay between Ætna and the sea over lava-beds of various ages, among them the identical stream which, coming down fresh and hot, turned Himilco from proceeding straight against Dionysius and Syracuse after the destruction of Messina, and obliged him to make the circuit of the awful mountain. Shortly after noon we passed, on the highest of these lava-beds, Acireale, the most important of several Acis, all of which commemorate Acis, who here, to his grief, associated with Galatea and Polyphemus. Near by are several jagged islands pointed out by tradition as the very rocks which the latter hurled at Ulysses with such poor results. From this point on Taormina lay clear before us in the distance, high up above the sea, though but a short horizontal distance from it. When we reached Giardini, the village on the seashore which serves as a railroad station for Taormina, parched with heat and thirst, we were reminded of the verse of Euripides, "The sea washes away all human ills," and we here began a series of baths with which we encircled the island. Nemesis marked me when, in exuberance of spirit, I made the understatement, "This bath is worth a dollar," and made it cost me just that amount. Between the road and the shore was a railroad with a cactus hedge on each side of it. In passing this I hardly noticed that my wheel had lightly brushed against a cactus plant. But we had hardly begun the ascent to Taormina before my wheel was in a state of collapse.

Well, the morrow must take thought for the things of itself. Here was Taormina for us to enjoy. We had planned to spend one night only here, because there was little material for archæological study except the famous theatre, which in its present state is Roman. It was indeed refreshing to see near the upper rim of the theatre, and partly covered by its massive but cheap-looking walls of brick, the foundations of a Greek temple in four courses with its perfect joints of stone. But while Syracuse and Girgenti and Selinus were our proper fields for study, Taormina was for pleasure. From this eyrie, Ætna, which from Catania is in some degree disappointing, as is even Mont Blanc when seen from Chamonix, rises as grandly as does Mont Blanc when seen from the heights across the valley, Flégère or Brévent; and when the sun, rising over Calabria, gives a rosy color to the slope up to the snow-line, one gazes, forgetting the theatre in the glory of the mountain.

Although we had studied the theatre adequately on the first day, we were caught by the charm of the place; and a second sunrise in the theatre seemed so desirable that we broke our carefully drawn up itinerary at the very outset, the necessary two-thirds vote being easily obtained. About a thousand feet above Taormina rises a height which once served as an acropolis to ancient Tauromenium, crowned with a village and castle called Mola. Having climbed this in the hot afternoon we saw, about another thousand feet above us, a point called Monte Venere, which seemed to dominate the whole region. We subsequently read in Frances Elliot's "Travels in Sicily," "Certain misguided travellers have even been known to attempt Monte Venere." But not suspecting at the time that we were misguided, but only questioning whether the scaling of Monte Venere would cost us our table d'hôte dinner at the Hotel Timeo, we decided, by a rather doubtful two-thirds vote, to try it. We stormed it at a pace such as the Bavarian division struck at Speicheren when told that a fresh keg of beer was to be broached "up there" at ten o'clock, and that they must be on hand. As the result of our toil we got a superb view into the interior, including a peep in behind Ætna, which from this point seemed even grander than from Taormina. It was labor well spent.

During our whole stay at Taormina there was no spot on which my eye and my thoughts so frequently rested as on the little tongue of land just below us to the south, which we had passed in coming from Catania. On this vine-covered plain once lay Naxos, settled by men from Chalkis in 734 B.C. What a chain of consequences followed upon this small beginning! Leontini and Catania were founded from Naxos itself almost immediately afterward. Dorian Corinth, following hard after Ionian Chalkis, founded Syracuse, and with the birth of western Hellas the strife of Dorian and Ionian was made a part of its life. But before this strife brought ruin a period of expansion and prosperity followed which finds its only parallel in the two centuries and a half of the history of our own country.

Having no desire to traverse again a bad road, we took an early train, which brought us back to Catania at eight o'clock. Our first visit there was to the "divine artificer," who found eight punctures impartially distributed over my two tires. We thus learned to know the cactus in a new light. Hereafter we avoided even a dry piece of it lying in the road as cavalry would avoid caltrops. We took advantage of the necessary delay to visit the most interesting monument of Greek Catania, the theatre, covered by lava, on which rest the houses of the modern city. Enough underground excavation has been done to enable one to realize the appearance of the place when Alcibiades here harangued the Catanians to bring them over to the Athenian alliance, and had such drastic force lent to his lisping oratory by a body of Athenian hoplites, who, coming from their camp outside the city, broke down a weak spot in the wall and entered the city before he got to his peroration.

Again it was about noon when we mounted with intention to ride to Lentini, somewhat over a third of the way to Syracuse, across a level plain, and then take a train across the hill-country to within ten miles of Syracuse, there to resume our ride. For an hour or more we were passing through the famous "Campi Læstrygonii," which Cicero calls "_uberrima pars Siciliæ_," now known as the plain of Catania, the most extensive plain in Sicily. Then we crossed the Symæthos, and soon began a gentle climb, with the sun almost in the zenith. Now and then a turn in the road, or if not that, a look over the shoulder, gave us a fine view of Ætna, which kept increasing in majesty as we receded from it. I was thankful that we had not climbed it. That would have in some measure vulgarized it. A geologist might do it in the line of his profession. But one who wishes to keep the Ætna of Æschylus and Pindar may do better to gaze with awe from the hill of Syracuse, as _they_ did, upon this Greek Sinai. I do not want to overpower a mountain like that. I want it to overpower me. One may doubt whether Coleridge would or could have written his hymn to Mont Blanc if he had "conquered" it, as tourists express it.

Just as the train for Syracuse was coming in we reached Lentini station, and this time the sea that "washes away all human ills" was not available. We here made a resolve to do our work in the future when the sun was nearer the horizon. There was nothing of interest for us to investigate in the city of Gorgias, the sophist and orator, whose silver tongue, combined with a bold and transparent trick of the Segestans, duped the Athenians, who thought themselves the wisest of men, into the Sicilian expedition. We were accordingly glad to speed along to Priolo, a station between the ruins of Megara and the flat peninsula, Thapsos. Just beyond the latter, having ridden long enough to get up steam, we washed away our ills for that day with the hill of Syracuse looking down upon us, and then as renewed men passed, when the sun was approaching the horizon, over that historic hill, and looked down on the historic harbor and on little Ortygia, large enough to hold the modern city as it held the first Corinthian colony. What a tide of associations rush over one at this sight! In a sense we were at our goal. Had we closed our journey with that nightfall we should at least have read our Thucydides for the future with different eyes.

In an exaltation of spirit we came to the Casa Politi, almost at the point of Ortygia, looking out upon the sea, where we found a German host and hostess. After our strenuous and partially successful wrestling with Italian, which had generally ended by our falling back on the member who had taken Italian at Harvard to straighten out for us the tangled web of the dialogue, how welcome it was when we asked the question, "_Haben Sie vielleicht gutes Bier?_" to get straight from the shoulder the honest answer, "_Jawohl, gewiss_," and the more tangible answer of three foaming mugs from a cool cellar. We had lived in the spirit a good deal that day, enjoying the beauty of Taormina, Ætna, and Syracuse, and holding converse with Alcibiades and Gorgias and Thucydides. Now we hobnobbed with Gambrinus, and enjoyed "the warmest welcome in an inn."