A Sweet and Glorious Land (12 page)

Thurii, settled more than six decades after Sybaris was destroyed by rivals from the nearby Greek colony of Kroton, was the last stronghold of the doomed Spartacus. Thurii also was where, nearly three hundred and fifty years before the rebel-slave leader's time, the ancient world's first western historian, Herodotus, died—about 425
B.C.E.

Some chafe at calling Herodotus a historian. To James Romm, who wrote an impressive study of the ancient writer, his life, times, and methods, Herodotus was moralist, storyteller, dramatist, student of human nature, perhaps even journalist. The book, titled simply
Herodotus,
is not a biography because nearly nothing is known about the man's life, other than a few personal insights contained within Herodotus's seminal work, the
Histories.

We do know he lived through much of the fifth century
B.C.E.
, about 485 to 425, and about three hundred years after Homer, who wrote the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey.
As Romm points out, that span of three centuries between the two writers is about the same span that separates writers today from John Milton, who wrote
Paradise Lost.
The ancients would have seen the same kind of difference between Homer's and Herodotus's styles that we see today between Milton's complex form and Ernest Hemingway's terse, direct prose.

Homer wrote in verse, the universal written art form of the time; Herodotus wrote prose, which Romm says was a little-used, or second-class, art form the Greeks referred to as “‘naked language' (lacking the decorous ‘clothing' supplied by meter) … [or as] ‘language that walks on foot' (as opposed to riding in poetry's winged chariot).”

Up to the time of Herodotus, poets recounted myths crediting the gods with controlling all events. With Herodotus, “no longer can the muse be invoked as guarantor of authenticity,” Romm tells us. Instead, Herodotus calls upon “human powers of investigation and reason” to replace the role of the gods.

All we really know about Herodotus's place of birth is the clue he gives us in his original opening line of the
Histories:
“This is the setting-forth of the research of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that the things arising from humankind may not be dulled by time, and that great and wondrous deeds displayed by both Greeks and barbarians may not lose their renown, as regards other things and through what cause they made war upon one another.” This quote is from the translation Romm used. Other translators convey those same opening remarks, but often with the sentence's clauses in different order.

Halicarnassus was a Greek city on the southwest coast of Turkey, within the Greek colony of Ionia, colonized around the same time as southern Italy to the west. In a later edition of the
Histories,
produced in the fourth century
B.C.E.
and quoted by Aristotle, according to Romm, Herodotus identifies himself in that famous first sentence as being “of Thurii,” the Greek city rebuilt from the stones of Sybaris and later supplanted by Roman Copia. If true, these two scant geographical references mean he spent his youth “on the eastern perimeter of the Greek world and his maturity in the far west.”

Herodotus appears to be an extensive traveler, writing about events and describing sites that existed prior to his birth. But he rarely describes the journeys themselves. “It would be as though Marco Polo, in medieval Italy, had given his account of China without saying anything about the journey there or back!” Romm says. Of course, the critic writes, some scholars explain this dearth of travel description by accusing Herodotus, as Marco Polo has been accused, of “inventing most of all of his travels.”

Romm tells us that Herodotus migrated to Thurii when he was well into his forties, and that he likely had written most of his
Histories
by that time, although it is believed that he was still adding to it at the time of his death. But there still remains some question as to whether he died there:

“Thurii was said by some to contain Herodotus's grave, indicating perhaps that he remained there until his death, sometime after 430 (
B.C.E.
); but another city, Pella in Macedonia, also claimed his remains, so he may have left the golden west to return to the Greek mainland.”

*   *   *

In Gissing's time, remains of Sybaris/Thurii/Copia had not yet been found. Historians generally agree that in 510
B.C.E.
the enemies from Kroton (called Cotrone at the time of Gissing's visit in the late 1800s, and changed to Crotone in 1928) razed the city by breaching retaining walls built by the original settlers to hold back the Crati just west of where the waterway emptied into the sea. The deluge completely flooded Sybaris and obliterated one of Magna Graecia's most magnificent cities after a mere 210 years of life.

Then, sixty-six years later, in 444
B.C.E.
, on the orders of Pericles of Athens, the southern Italian Greeks re-established the city, naming it Thurii. A few years after Rome's war with Hannibal two centuries later, Rome began building in 193
B.C.E.
what it named Copia, using as building blocks the remains of the two earlier Greek towns. After Copia was abandoned, its remains were buried to a depth of at least twenty feet by more than two thousand years' accumulation of alluvial mud and silt.

For more than one hundred years, modern archaeologists had speculated about where Sybaris/Thurii/Copia lay, but major excavations did not begin until the mid-twentieth century, some six decades after Gissing's visit.

Chapter 9

Searching for Sybaris

The tiny modern-day hamlet Sibari is where, in late 1897 during a brief train layover en route to Taranto, Gissing enjoyed lunch after his early morning departure from Cosenza. He likely munched bread and drank wine just a few miles from where the archaeological dig at Sybaris/Thurii/Copia would begin in earnest more than a half century later. When leaving Taranto and heading days later toward Cotrone (today Crotone), his train passed within shouting distance of where the three ancient cities, the last two built from their predecessors' stones, are today being unearthed.

I wanted to visit these digs and see what Gissing had been unable, but yearned, to see. Driving north toward Sibari across miles and miles of flat, coastal plain, I realized that S106, a two-lane modern highway, was cutting through the middle of an archaeological dig. Excavations revealing stone foundations spread out on both sides of the highway. Ahead, to the north, a road turned west into the archaeological park. I went in, parked, and started walking toward the dig, my camera strapped around my neck.

A voice stopped me.
“É chiuso!”
It's closed. “There is too much water. It is dangerous,” said a man who was leaning out of the doorway of a long, one-story wooden building. I walked toward him, saying I needed photographs for a book. “If the pictures are to be published you need special permission. Go to the museum,” he said, pointing north up the road.

For a brief moment, I contemplated just going back to S106, taking pictures as any tourist would from a turnoff. But something told me to play it straight.
“Mille grazie,”
Thank you, I said to the earnest young man.

The museum, just off S106, east toward the Ionian Sea, is a modern structure that is one of the finest museums of its type. Its lighting is a major departure from that found in musty, centuries-old buildings that traditionally house ancient artifacts, and its display spaces are flexible. Many different types of exhibits can be set up, changed, and moved easily.

I walked inside and paid my four-thousand-lira (about two dollars and forty cents) entrance fee and asked who I needed to talk to for permission to take photographs of the archaeological site. The attendant shook his head. Written permission must be gotten from some official in some distant city. I felt defeat coming on, but decided to tour the museum while pondering whether to take the pictures from the road as I originally planned.

Then, just as I was walking up a ramp to the first exhibit room, a delightful woman, short in stature with a pixie-like haircut and sparkling eyes, approached. “May I help you?” she asked in perfect English, spoken with a distinct British accent.

I explained my mission. She smiled and said, “I will give you a tour even though the park is closed today. You can take all the photos you want!”

The Crati River once inundated this stone road in the heart of the Park of the Horse in the ancient Greek city of Sybaris, established in 720 B.C.E. and flooded by warriors from nearby Kroton in 510 B.C.E. This was the original Greek road, but archaeologists believe a second city, Thurii, was built at this site, followed by the later Roman city of Copia. The pipes on the left are attached to pumps that must operate around the clock to keep ground water from once again flooding the site.    
Photo by Paul Paolicelli

Isora Migliari described herself as a “technical assistant” at the excavations, where she has worked for the past eighteen years. Everything we were looking at, she said—stone foundations, paving stones for streets, a few pieces of columns scattered here and there, pieces of mosaic floors, an amphitheater—dated to the Roman-era town of Copia. If the predecessor Greek cities of Thurii or Sybaris, far underneath Copia, were ever to be uncovered, the Roman ruins would have to be destroyed. This is not something Italian archaeologists are prepared to do.

The major excavation at Copia is known as Parco del Cavallo, Park of the Horse. The name was applied because searchers found a set of stone hoofs and a tail, which suggest that a statue of a horse once stood there. It is not known if the statue was of Greek or Roman origin. But horses have a place in the early history of the site. The Greek founders of Sybaris were reputed to be magnificent horse trainers, supposedly training the animals to dance on hind feet to tunes played on reed pipes. This, if ancient writers are to be believed, helped lead to the undoing of Sybaris. The Krotonians knew about the dancing horses, so the legend goes, and when they fought the Sybarites, Kroton warriors blew songs through pipes, and the horses of the city's defenders began to rear up and dance, making it impossible for the mounted Sybarites to fight and save the city.

Farther to the east and closer to the Ionian shoreline from the
parco,
workers have uncovered the remains of what could have been a structure at the Roman city's wharf area. It is known as Casa Bianca, or White House, only because white stones used in buildings have been uncovered, said Signora Migliari. This site appears to be Roman, with no evidence of either Thurii or Sybaris underneath.

And about one mile north of Parco del Cavallo are the purely Greek ruins identified in modern times as Stombi, or Parco dei Tori, Park of the Bulls. Here, excavators found a small part of the original Sybaris, not impacted by later construction on top. According to a guidebook from the museum at Sibari, there is no evidence of Thurii or Copia at Stombi. But there are “the remains of houses, of the potters' kilns, of the streets and of the everyday objects of the Sybarites.”

My friend archaeologist Baldassare Conticello, sitting in his Rome apartment prior to my visit south, shook his head when I asked him about the search for Sybaris. It may be impossible to determine the precise identity of this particular site, he said, because of the overwhelming problem for excavators of water, making the money spent there a subject of controversy.

“Sybaris is in the Ionian Sea,” he says, throwing his right hand upward in frustration. Then he explains: It is not the actual sea off the coast of modern-day Sibari he is referring to, but the “sea” under the shoreline, the water that begins filling up the excavations when shovels bite into the earth twenty feet down. He says electric pumps must operate almost continuously to keep the water under control.

“This is the most wasted money ever spent in this country,” he says, fuming over the cost of the electrical bill for the continuously running pumps. Indeed, during my visit the park was closed to the general public because of rain and a heavy buildup of groundwater within the excavated area. Several pumps with bright yellow pipes snaking through the area hummed steadily in the background as Signora Migliari showed me the broad stone road, built by the Greeks and used by Romans to move people, wagons, and animals through Copia.

“Don't step there,” she advised me as we neared low stone walls surrounding an area used by the Romans as a public bath. “The ground is saturated and you may fall through.” Into what? I thought to myself. The hidden depths of Thurii? Of Sybaris? What an experience that would be!

*   *   *

I had read
Search for Sybaris,
an account of a combined American-Italian dig at the site during the 1960s. This phase in the decades-long search for the city was pursued in part by archaeologists from the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. Written by Orville H. Bullitt, the now-out-of-print book is an account of the area's history and how excavators, who were constantly besieged by water filling their excavations, had pinpointed the location of a city. Like the needle in the haystack, that city—in ancient times likely no more than two square miles in size—was found within a plain of four hundred square miles.