Sybaris

“ Dyer, Ruins of Rome.
Sybaris was a town of Lucania, situated on the banks of the Bay of Tarentum. It was founded by a colony of Achaians; and in process of time became very powerful.
The walls of this city extend six miles and a half in circumference, and the suburbs covered the banks of the Crathis for seven miles.
Historians and orators, of all ages, have been guilty of praising heroes. “For my own part,” says Mr. Swinburne, “I cannot help feeling pity for the hard fate of the Sybarites, to whom we are indebted for the discovery of many most useful pieces of chamber and kitchen furniture. ”

“ Among the new colonists were Herodotus, and Lysias the orator, who was then a boy. The spirit that had given Sybaris its comfort and its immense population appeared in the legislation of the new state. It received its laws from Charondas, one of the noblest legislators of the world. Study these laws and you will see that in the young Sybaris the individual had his rights, which the public preserved for him, though he were wholly in a minority. There is an evident determination that a man shall live while he lives, and that, too, in no sensual interpretation of the words. ”

“ The shores of Asia Minor and of the Mediterranean were soon fringed with rich Greek colonies. Every place they touched blossomed into beauty, with temples and houses adorned with sculpture and painting. One of their cities on the coast of Italy was called Sybaris, and it has given us the word "sybarite," which means a person who abandons himself to luxury. ”

“ The state of Sybaris had prospered for a time by the adoption of a principle which is ever apt to force civilization to premature development, and not unfrequently to end in the destruction of national character and internal stability—viz., it opened its arms to strangers of every tribe and class. ”

“ Herodotus draws a contrast between the emotion of Athens and the apathy of the Sybarites. When Sybaris was destroyed by Kroton about the year 510, the whole [134] Milesian population had mourned the loss of their old commercial friend.
The last twenty years had been fateful in the history of Greek trade. Sybaris, Chalkis, and Miletus—three of the greatest names in the history of Greek commerce—had successively fallen; and their disappearance from the stage of the commercial world must have greatly modified that obscure but powerful factor in Greek history. ”

“ Now at this time, the men of Sybaris say that they and their king Telys were about to make an expedition against Croton, and the men of Croton being exceedingly alarmed asked Dorieos to help them and obtained their request. So Dorieos joined them in an expedition against Sybaris and helped them to conquer Sybaris. This is what the men of Sybaris say of the doings of Dorieos and his followers ”

“ Making allowance, however, for exaggeration on all these accounts, there can be no reason to doubt that Sybaris, in 560 B. C., was one of the most wealthy, populous, and powerful cities of the Hellenic name; and that it also presented both comfortable abundance among the mass of the citizens, arising from the easy [p. 396] attainment of fresh lots of fertile land, and excessive indulgences among the rich,—to a degree forming marked contrast with Hellas proper, of which Herodotus characterized poverty as the foster-sister. ”

“ Thus Herodotus (vi, 127) informs us that, at the time when Kleisthenês of Sikyon invited from all Greece suitors of proper dignity for the hand of his daughter, Smindyridês of Sybaris came among the number, “the most delicate and luxurious man ever known,” (ἐπὶ πλεῖστον δὴ χλιδῆς εἷς ἀνὴρ ἀφίκετο—Herodot. vi, 127) , and Sybaris was at that time (B. C. 580-560) in its greatest prosperity. In Chamæleon, Timæus, and other writers subsequent to Aristotle, greater details were given. ”

“ With regard to remote times, the numbers of people assigned are often ridiculous, and lose all credit and authority. The free citizens of Sybaris, able to bear arms and actually drawn out in battle, were 300,000. They encountered at Siagra with 100,000 citizens of Crotona, another Greek city contiguous to them, and were defeated. This is Diodorus Siculus’s account, and is very seriously {p144} insisted on by that historian. Strabo also mentions the same number of Sybarites. ”

“ The conquest and destruction of the original Sybaris—perhaps in 510 B. C. the greatest of all Grecian cities—appears to have excited a strong sympathy in the Hellenic world. In Milêtus, especially, with which it had maintained intimate union, the grief was so vehement, that all the Milesians shaved their heads in token of mourning. [758] The event happened just at the time of the expulsion of Hippias from Athens, and must have made a sensible revolution in the relations of the Greek cities on [p. 415] the Italian coast with the rustic population of the interior. ”

“ According to the narrative given by the later Pythagoreans, those exiles, whom Têlys had driven from Sybaris, took refuge at Kroton, and cast themselves as suppliants on the altars for protection. It may well be, indeed, that they were in part Pythagoreans of Sybaris. A body of powerful exiles, harbored in a town so close at hand, naturally inspired alarm, and Têlys demanded that they should be delivered up, threatening war in case of refusal. This demand excited consternation at Kroton, since the military strength of Sybaris was decidedly superior. ”

“ The Krotoniates might destroy Sybaris, and disperse its inhabitants, but they could not succeed to its wide dominion over dependent territory; and the extinction of this great aggregate power, stretching across the peninsula from sea to sea, lessened the means of resistance against the Oscan movements from the inland. ”

“ The rivers have long rolled lawless over these low, desolated fields; leaving, as they shrink back to their beds, black pools and nauseous swamps, to poison the whole region, and drive mankind still farther from its ancient possessions. Nothing in reality remains of Sybaris, which once gave law to nations, and could muster even so large a force as 300,000 fighting men. Not one stone remains upon another257! ”

“ His palace, his churches, and the mausoleums in which his daughter Amalasuntha laid the hero's bones, have survived the sieges of Belisarius and Astolphus, the conquest of Pepin, the bloody quarrels of Iconoclasts with the children of the Roman Church, the mediæval wars of Italy, the victory of Gaston de Foix, and still stand gorgeous with marbles and mosaics in spite of time and the decay of all around them.
[15] We may compare with Venice what is known about the ancient Hellenic city of Sybaris. Sybaris and Ravenna were the Greek and Roman Venice of antiquity. ”

“ At Sybaris, conversation between men and the lower animals had begun to appear not only absurd, but to be improved upon and made with the evident intention of being humorous. Hence, inanimate things were sometimes made to speak, and in succeeding fictions birds and beasts were given such special characteristics and requirements of men as could least have belonged to them. ”

“ But their city lies in a hollow, and in summer is liable to excess of cold both morning and evening, but in the middle of the day the heat is intolerable, so that the greater part of them believe that the rivers contribute a great deal to the health of the inhabitants; on which account it has been said, that "a man who, living at Sybaris, wishes not to die before his time, ought never to see the sun either rise or set." ”

“ Neither the men of the hills nor the men of the plains, as long as they formed independent communities, could become graziers on an extensive scale, and it has been pointed out that even a Greek settlement of the extent of Sybaris had been forced to import its wool from the Black Sea through Miletus. ”

“ Now the reader who has come thus far will understand that I, having come thus far, in twenty-odd years since those days of teetering on the pea-green settee, had always kept Sybaris in the background of my head, as a problem to be solved, and an inquiry to be followed to its completion. There could hardly have been a man in the world better satisfied than I to be the hero of the adventure which I am now about to describe. ”

“ The Italians are doing their best to revive the classical place-names, where they have been lost, and occasionally the incautious traveller is much misled. Of Sybaris no stone remains above ground; five hundred years before Christ it was destroyed by the people of Croton, who turned the course of the river Crathis so as to whelm the city's ruins. Francois Lenormant, whose delightful book, La Grande Grece, was my companion on this journey, believed that a discovery far more wonderful and important than that of Pompeii awaits the excavator on this site ”

“ But the people of Seleucia had reason to commend the wisdom of Aesop's fable of the wallet, seeing their general Surena carrying a bag full of loose Milesian stories before him, but keeping behind him a whole Parthian Sybaris in his many wagons full of concubines; like the vipers and asps people talk of, all the foremost and more visible parts fierce and terrible with spears and arrows and horsemen, but the rear terminating in loose women and castanets, music of the lute, and midnight revellings. ”

“ He sent, moreover, a thousand of them into the Chersonese as planters, to share the land among them by lot, and five hundred more into the isle of Naxos, and half that number to Andros, a thousand into Thrace to dwell among the Bisaltae, and others into Italy, when the city Sybaris, which now was called Thurii, was to be repeopled. And this he did to ease and discharge the city of an idle, and, by reason of their idleness, a busy, meddling crowd of people ”

“ There are some who say that Siris, and also that Sybaris on the Trionto,2207 were founded by the Rhodians. Antiochus says that the site of Siris having become the subject of a contention between the Tarentini and the Thurii, on that occasion commanded by Cleandridas the general who had been banished from Lacedæmon, the two people came to a composition, and agreed to inhabit it in common, but that the colony2208 should be considered as Tarentine ”

“ The inscription on the heavens says that his son helped him to make it. The Hesperides (they were removed by the Eleans) were even in my time in the Heraeum; the treasury was made for the Epidamnians by Pyrrhus and his sons Lacrates and Hermon.
6.19.9 The Sybarites too built a treasury adjoining that of the Byzantines. Those who have studied the history of Italy and of the Italian cities say that Lupiae, situated between Brundusium and Hydrus, has changed its name, and was Sybaris in ancient times. The harbor is artificial, being a work of the emperor Hadrian. ”

“ Susiana, 5, 46, 52, 54 Sybaris, a city of Magna Graecia, 2, 39; 7, 1 Sycurium, a town in Thessaly, 27, 8 Syleium, a city in Phrygia, 21, 34 Synes, near Messene in Sicily, 1, 11 Syphax, king of Numidia, 11, 24; 14, 1-9; 15, 3-5; 16, 23. His wife Sophanisba, 14, 1, 7 Syracuse, 1, 8-12, 15, 16, 43, 52-54, 62; 5, 88; 8, 5-9, 37; 9, 10, 19; 12, 4d, 15, 23, 25, 26; 15, 35 Syria, 2, 71; 3, 5 ”

“ But it seems to me, that besides the fact of the riches of the Sybarites, the very natural character of their country,—since there are no harbours on their coasts, and since, in consequence, nearly all the produce of the land is consumed by the citizens themselves,—and to some extent also an oracle of the God, has excited them all to luxury, and has caused them to live in practices of most immoderate dissoluteness. ”

“ We are told that the Sybarites, in that final contest, marched against Krotôn with an army of three hundred thousand men: fabulous as this number doubtless is, we cannot doubt that, for an irruption of this kind into an adjoining territory, their large body of semi-Hellenized native subjects might be mustered in prodigious force. The few statements which have reached us respecting them touch, unfortunately, upon little more than their luxury, fantastic self-indulgence, and extravagant indolence, for which qualities they have become proverbial in modern times as well as in ancient. ”

“ Draping himself elegantly over Mr. Wimper's desk, George regarded P. Sybarite with an indulgent and compassionate smile and wagged a doggish head at him. From these symptoms inferring that his fellow-employee was in the throes of a witticism, P. Sybarite cocked an apprehensive eye and tightened his thin-lipped, sensitive mouth.
"O you—!" said George; and checked to enjoy a rude giggle.
At this particular moment a mind-reader would have been justified in regarding P. Sybarite with suspicion. But beyond taking the pen from between his teeth he didn't move; and he said nothing at all. ”

“ Rather, this venerable fellow is the companion of the advanced Sybarite. He is a product of extreme artificiality; he has nothing in common with nature. Moreover, he induces, so his enemies assert, the fell Podagra or gout. ”

“ I said in a whisper. "Shall I speak to Guy?—or Lady Sybil?"
Lady Judith's uplifted hand said unmistakably, "No!"
"Watch," she said. "Watch and pray, and wait. Oh, no speaking!—at least, not yet."
"But till when?" I asked.
"I should say, till you all return here—unless something happen in the interim. But if thou dost speak, little one—do not be surprised if nobody believe thee. Very impulsive men, like thy brother, rarely indulge suspicion or mistrust: and Sybil is most unsuspicious. They are likely enough to think thee fanciful and unjust." ”

“ Thy father, Sybil, never could be moved 270 By one who loved him, or by one he loved. Union like ours is but a bargain made By slave and tyrant—he will be obey’d, Then calls the quiet comfort;—but thy youth Is mild by nature, and as frank as truth.” “But will he love?” said Sybil; “I am told That these mild creatures are by nature cold.” “Alas!” the matron answer’d, “much I dread That dangerous love by which the young are led! That love is earthy; you the creature prize, 280 And trust your feelings and believe your eyes: Can eyes and feelings inward worth descry? ”