The Divine Spark of Syracuse

Ingrid D. Rowland

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781512603057, 9781512603040
• eBook ISBN: 9781512603064
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Focusing on the figures of Plato, Archimedes, and Caravaggio, The Divine Spark of Syracuse discloses the role that Syracuse, a Greek cultural outpost in Sicily, played in fueling creative energies. Among the topics this book explores are Plato and the allegory of the cave, and the divine spark mentioned in his Seventh Letter. It also considers the machines of Archimedes, including his famous screw, and the variety of siege and antisiege weapons that he developed for the defense of his hometown during the siege of Syracuse during the Second Punic War, including "the hand" (a giant claw), the "burning mirror," and the catapult. The final chapter offers a look at the artist and roustabout Caravaggio. On the run after yet another street brawl, Caravaggio traveled to Syracuse, where he painted Burial of St. Lucy (Santa Lucia) in 1608. Typical of his late works, the painting is notable for its subdued tones and emotional and psychological delicacy. This captivating book lends clear insight into the links between the sense of place and inspiration in philosophy, mathematics, and art. Rowland is the most learned tour guide we could ask for.

We have traveled to Syracuse and found Athens.

W. ROBERT CONNOR, Thucydides

The Syracusans . . . were most like the Athenians in character and thus the best at fighting them.

THUCYDIDES

1

PLATO
and
SYRACUSE

We know from Plato’s dialogues that he was unusually sensitive to places; otherwise he could not have written about them with such evocative power. The dialogues are set in a variety of venues—dining rooms, courtyards, gymnasia, a shrine to the nymphs—located in widely disparate parts of Athens; its port, Piraeus; and its suburbs. The places his participants mention in conversation range all over the Hellenic world and beyond. Long before the conquests of Alexander the Great, the ancient Greeks had already settled far beyond the contemporary boundaries of Greece, founding cities along the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Black Sea; in southern Italy and much of Sicily; and at scattered Mediterranean ports like Ampurias (or Empúries) in modern Spain (the Greek Emporion), Marseille in modern France (the Greek Massalia), and Naucratis in Egypt. Cities like Syracuse in Sicily and Ephesus on the Ionian seaboard were as central to Mediterranean commerce as Athens or Corinth. Even Socrates, who famously protests in both the Phaedrus and the Republic that he rarely ventures outside the walls of his native city, is said in the Symposium to have fought in the Battles of Potidaea and Olynthus in distant Thrace, as well as at Delium on the edge of Attica. Plato, by contrast, is said by ancient writers to have traveled extensively, to Cyrene in North Africa, to Egypt, and to southern Italy. He also made three trips to Syracuse, the most powerful city-state in Sicily, and maintained close friendships with Syracusans both in Athens and abroad. He was only one of many illustrious Greeks from Ionia or the mainland who traveled west to Sicily, attracted by the region’s wealth, beauty, and vibrant intellectual life. Much of the ancient Greek literature that survives today is Athenian literature, but by no means all. Syracuse, for example, produced its own illustrious poet, Theocritus, and its own mathematician, Archimedes, and their writings have survived to the present. Furthermore, Athens owed its own cultural ascendancy to the presence of a large, talented population of immigrants, from the historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus to the colorful figures who populate Plato’s dialogues. Plato’s immigrants include the hotheaded political philosopher Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, born on the shores of the Bosporus, the Thracian Protagoras of Abdera (born in the same region as Aristotle), southern Italians like Timaeus of Locri, and a veritable spate of Sicilians: the flashy orator Gorgias of Leontini, from just north of Syracuse, as well as several Syracusans—the shield manufacturer Cephalus; his sons Polemarchus and Lysias; and an illustrious temporary visitor, the statesman Hermocrates.

For an Athenian of Plato’s generation, Syracuse stood out among Greek cities for a more tragic reason: it was the place where Athens had gambled its status as a Mediterranean power and lost. By changing the fortunes of Athens, Syracuse had changed Plato’s life before he ever set foot there. When he finally did come to Sicily, he found danger, new sorrows, and disappointment. Yet for all its troubling memories, Syracuse may also have given Platonic literature two of its most memorable positive images for describing the transforming impact of philosophy on the human soul. They are both images of light. One appears in the famous allegory of the cave from the Republic, with its description of what how it feels to emerge for the first time from darkness and captivity into the light of day: “‘And if [a prisoner] should come [out of the cave] into the light, with his eyes so full of sunshine, would he be able to see any of the things we call real?’ ‘Not immediately,’ he said” (Plato, Republic, 516b). The other image appears in the seventh of the thirteen letters that circulated under Plato’s name in antiquity, a letter at least ostensibly addressed to his followers in Syracuse: “[Philosophy] cannot be communicated in words like other kinds of learning; rather, after long familiarity and living with the subject, suddenly, like a light ignited by a leaping spark, it comes to life within the soul, already self-sufficient” (Plato, Seventh Letter, 341 c–d).

Thus philosophy, to Plato, was a fire. Its heat drove him to speak his mind fearlessly, risking his life at home in Athens and abroad in Syracuse. Yet ancient biographers make a point of reporting that Plato died of old age, either in his own bed or during a wedding banquet—proof that, no matter how widely his thoughts might have wandered among transcendent ideas and celestial geometries, he always kept a wary eye on the world around him. In his lifetime, he would experience civil war, tyranny, and slavery as well as wealth and fame and the ecstatic visions that he compared in his Republic to “eyes . . . full of sunshine.” For that philosophical sunshine and his tireless efforts to communicate it, Plato ranks as one of the most influential people in human history. He is also one of the most elusive. He peoples his dialogues with friends and relatives, but he himself stays carefully in the background. In fact, we know frustratingly little about him, and what we do know has been relentlessly embroidered by legend. Often, however, the legends reveal as much in their own way as the facts do. So also, for this great writer about places, do the distinctive landscapes of Athens and Syracuse, the two cities that seem to have forged his ardent thoughts into a systematic philosophy.

Plato (Plate 6) was born into wealth and privilege, the child of landed aristocrats who could offer him a superb education, the leisure to pursue it, and the political connections to further a civic career when he reached adulthood. His father, Ariston, traced his ancestry back to the heroic Athenian king Codrus; his mother, Perictione, descended from the great lawgiver Solon (ultimately, both lines were traced back to the god Poseidon; however, we can probably discount the story that Plato’s real father may not have been Ariston, but the god Apollo). There were already three siblings in the household to greet his arrival: two brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a sister, Potone. Adeimantus and Glaucon must have been several years older, as they converse with Socrates in the Republic at a time when Plato himself would have been a little boy. Potone seems to have been closer to Plato, and not only in age: she and her husband eventually lived next door to the philosopher in his later years, and their son, Speusippus, would succeed his uncle as head of the Academy. The family was registered in the urban deme of Collytus, beneath the Acropolis and the Areopagus Hill (the modern neighborhood of Theseion), although Plato may have been born on the island of Aegina, where Ariston owned property.¹ Upper-class Athenian husbands were usually ten to fifteen years older than their wives, and Ariston was probably no exception. In any event, he died in Plato’s childhood. As a widow, Perictione had no independent legal rights, and it is not surprising to find her making an advantageous second marriage to her mother’s widowed brother, Pyrilampes, a friend of Pericles and an illustrious former ambassador to Persia. Pyrilampes already had a famously handsome son, Demus, but he and Perictione also added another son to their household, Antiphon, named for Pyrilampes’ own father. If Plato’s picture of his half-brother in the beginning of the dialogue Parmenides is accurate, Antiphon had studied philosophy but eventually devoted his life to breeding horses, a supremely aristocratic pastime in ancient Greece but not, perhaps, an intellectual challenge.²

“Plato” was a nickname. The future philosopher’s real name was Aristocles, the same as his grandfather’s. Ancient Greek names spoke eloquently of parents’ aspirations for their children. Aristocles, combining the word aristos (best) with kleës (illustrious), was as patrician as a name could be. So, for that matter, was Ariston, which simply meant “the best.” Glaucon (gray) was the color of Athena’s eyes and her symbolic owl; Adeimantus meant “fearless.”³ In the Republic, Socrates cites a poem (by Glaucon’s lover, perhaps not an objective source) describing Glaucon and Adeimantus as “sons of Ariston, godlike clan of an illustrious man,”⁴ but the illustrious Ariston’s third son, Aristocles, always lived and wrote as Platon (‘broad’ or ‘robust’; Plato is the Latin version of his name). Whether the name referred to Plato’s broad build, broad forehead, or broad writing style—ancient writers disagree—it certainly suggests an imposing person.⁵ But because “Plato” was a nickname he shared with other Athenians (notably a comic poet active in his youth) it lacked some of the elite connotations of Aristocles son of Ariston.⁶

However fortunate his social circumstances may have been, the Aristocles who was called Plato began life during one of the most difficult and discouraging periods in Athenian history. In 431 BCE, seven or eight years before his birth, war had erupted between Athens and Sparta. For two summers in succession, 431 and 430, the dread Spartan army had invaded the Attic countryside, burning houses and crops in hopes of starving its rival into submission. As terrified farmers flocked into the city center for protection, the Athenians, guided by their eloquent general Pericles, built the Long Walls—a protected access to their port of Piraeus, five miles away. Keeping control of Piraeus had become essential, for Athens, surrounded by the stony soil of Attica, depended for survival on imported grain from Sicily and the Black Sea and timber from Thrace, purchased with silver from the mines of Laurium or exchanged for olive oil (olives grew well on the rugged Attic terrain) and pottery. The space between the Long Walls provided a site for rural refugees to pitch what quickly evolved into a permanent camp. In 429, two years into the conflict, this crush of displaced people and their squalid living conditions brought on an epidemic. The disease killed Pericles and thousands of other citizens. Before the city could recover, the Spartans invaded Attica for a third time, in the summer of 428.

Despite the ravages of war, the Athenians tried to continue their lives as usual, including the religious festivals they celebrated in hopes of winning over the gods and mortal spectators to their cause. The tragic poet Euripides won one of his few first prizes in 431 for Hippolytus, just as the war broke out. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King almost certainly reflects the horrors of the plague of 429 and must have been written either while it raged or shortly thereafter. In 425, a young playwright named Aristophanes won his first dramatic prize at the Lenaia, the winter festival of Dionysus, for The Acharnians, a wild, hilarious plea to end the war with Sparta. Plato was probably born the following year, in 424 or 423, when Aristophanes staged a virulent attack in his comedy The Knights, on Cleon, the politician who had succeeded Pericles as the most persuasive figure in Athens.

Throughout Plato’s infancy, the war dragged on, draining Athens of lives, resources, and money. Triumphant victories for both sides also entailed a series of humiliating defeats. In 425, Athenian soldiers, with Cleon as their general, captured a Spartan garrison at Pylos in southwestern Greece—the invincible Spartan soldiers turned out not to be invincible after all. But then, in 424, Sparta redeemed its tarnished honor when a brilliant Spartan general, Brasidas, made a lightning-quick march northward to capture the Athenian outpost of Amphipolis, an emporium for metal and timber in the northern region of Thrace. The attack was so quick and clever that it took the Athenian general, Thucydides, by surprise—despite his close ties to Thrace, where he owned land and gold mines and probably had relatives as well. Thucydides managed to keep the port of Amphipolis for Athens, but he did not keep his commission as general; his fellow citizens relieved him of his command and sent him into exile. He began instead to write a history of the war, “convinced that it would be important, and more worth recording than its predecessors.”⁷ A second battle for Amphipolis in 422 killed both Brasidas and Thucydides’ replacement, Cleon, putting the conflict into a hopeless deadlock. In 421, Athens and Sparta struck a fifty-year peace treaty, brokered on the Athenian side by the wealthy magnate and general Nicias, a close friend of Plato’s family. Both sides could feel that they had been delivered from a nightmare.

The opening of Plato’s Republic provides a picture of life during these heady months when Athens hoped at last to return to normality. The dialogue is set around 421 BCE, when a very young Plato would have been playing with Potone in the women’s quarters of his house rather than tagging along after his elder brothers.⁸ We learn that Glaucon and Socrates have walked the fortified road from Athens to Piraeus, cleared at last of huddling refugees, to see the festival of Bendis, the Thracian goddess of light (a celebration surely intended to cement Athenian ties with the region around Amphipolis). Just as the two decide to head homeward, they are intercepted by a friend from Piraeus, Polemarchus—the son of Cephalus, an elderly shield manufacturer from Syracuse who had set up shop in the port some thirty years earlier, after Pericles had encouraged him to do so.⁹ A contemporary US equivalent to this carefully chosen moment might be setting a scene in New York City circa 1999, before the elections of 2000; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; and the invasion of Iraq in 2003—a time that now seems impossibly innocent.

When Socrates and Glaucon are intercepted by their Syracusan friend, Syracuse, the most powerful city-state in Sicily, had been a crucial Athenian trading partner for several generations, supplying the city with grain in exchange for silver (forged into some of the most beautiful coins ever struck in antiquity), olive oil, and prized Attic pottery; Athenian clay could be spun into fantastic shapes on the potter’s wheel, and the glassy sheen of Athenian black glaze was as striking as it was impossible to imitate. Cephalus, as a Syracusan living in Piraeus, belonged to a category known as metoikoi (anglicized as “metics”), resident foreigners who obtained some privileges and obligations of citizenship at the price of paying a special annual tax.¹⁰ Athenians also maintained a network of businesses in Sicily: one of them was the general Nicias (of the peace treaty with Sparta), who...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Introduction
• 1. Plato and Syracuse
• 2. Plato in Syracuse
• 3. Archimedes in Syracuse
• 4. Caravaggio in Syracuse
• Notes
• Index
• Color illustrations