Sicilian Odyssey Read Free Page B

fifteen thousand spectators crowded into these seats to watch the tragedies of Aeschylus, who lived and worked here in the royal court of Hiero I. What waves of excitement and anxiety must have rippled through the crowd as the masked actors performed Prometheus Bound, a play about the tensions between obedience and individual freedom, between following the will of the gods and finding the courage to break the divine law that would have doomed mankind to live without fire, in the cold and the darkness. How subversive—how dangerous—would Aeschylus’s words have sounded to theatergoers who lived under the rule of a greedy, violent dictator, one of the succession of tyrants who ruled Syracuse from the fifth to the second century B.C .
    Like us, they believed that their civilization would last forever. Whatever they thought as they heard Prometheus cry out from the rock to which he had been chained for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mortals, not one of them (we can only assume) could have imagined the day when, from the high rows of their theater, you could see trains in the rail yard, traffic speeding by on the highway, the tall flat roofs of the modern city built over the ruins of their own. (At the city’s archaeological museum, photographs and exhibits explain exactly where excavations under the busy streets and sidewalks have exposed the remnants of ancient burial grounds.) The early Syracusans could not have foreseen this any more than Aeschylus could have anticipated that he would be killed at Gela, not far from here, when, so the story goes, an eagle dropped a tortoise directly onto his bald head, which the eagle mistook—clearly, this is one of those stories that gets progressively more implausible as you pile on the details—for the sort of rock on which it was accustomed to drop turtles, in order to smash their shells so that their insides could be eaten.
    At least initially, the history of Syracuse resembled, in a general way, the history of the United States—that is, it began as a colony which became as powerful as, and then more powerful than, its mother country. The Greeks arrived in Sicily during the eighth century B.C ., around the same time that Homer was dispatching Odysseus to have his adventures and misfortunes on the Island of the Sun, his travel delays and unscheduled layovers on the long journey home from Troy to Ithaca.
    Establishing their first colony on the coast at Naxos, the Greek invaders quickly conquered the indigenous tribes and founded a series of outposts. Then, in the fifth century B.C ., Gelon of Gela—a chariot-racing champion known for his ferocity—consolidated his power by marrying the daughter of the tyrant of Acragas (now Agrigento) and by defeating the Carthaginians at the battle of Himera. With the help of an immense Carthaginian slave-labor force captured in the war, he moved his capital from Gela to Syracuse.
    There, Gelon (perhaps out of gratitude for his good fortune) began building the Temple of Athena on the island of Ortigia, which was already connected by a causeway to the mainland at Syracuse. With palm-lined boulevards bordering its shore and pink and ochre palaces giving its harbor an almost Venetian appearance, Ortigia is one of the most appealing places in all of Sicily.
    In fact, when I think about being reborn as a Sicilian, it’s most often in Ortigia that I imagine my new life beginning. The winding alleys are lined with abandoned baroque palazzi, many of which are in the process of being restored. Since our arrival, we have been looking longingly at the ubiquitous signs that announce A vendersi— FOR SALE. We fantasize about buying a derelict palace, fixing it up, persuading our friends to move into their own palazzi nearby. The light, the high ceilings, the studio space, the ocean views! As we pass one of the palaces under reconstruction, a German tourist grabs Howie’s arm and pulls us over to see what he’s just seen: A building site