Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry

G >> George Edward Woodberry >> Heart of Man

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Giovanni, a Taorminian, who
flourished in the last century. He was a man of vast erudition, and
there is in his pages the Old-World learning which delights me. He was
born before the days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. To allege
an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers who
repeat the original source is to render truth impregnable. Rarely does
he show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. _Scripta
littera_ is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances to
be at stake. He was really learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminish
his authority. He was a patient investigator of manuscripts, and did
important service to Sicilian history. The simplicity I have alluded to
affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative. A few
statements also in regard to the prehistoric period might disturb the
modern mind, but I own to finding in them the charm of lost things. In
my mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the
lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science;
but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was brought up on
quite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins with
the flood. I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go
back with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, when
the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in her
search for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched out
under these bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough to say that
Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War. Very dimly, it must
be acknowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriving and driven, like
all doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place the
Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits from
Italy and joins them. Here for three centuries these sparse communities
lived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warred
confusedly from their mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called
because the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble a
bull's horns; and they left no other memory of themselves.

Authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth century before our
era. It is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock,
the young Greek mariners leaped on the strand. This was their first
land-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, doubtless, the
alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers of
the world's torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark
island for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light,
and were at last made friends with it--a chance that does not always
befall. Then quickly rose the lowland city of Naxos, and by the river
sprang up the temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine of the
Sicilian Greeks, where they came ever afterward to pray for a prosperous
voyage when they would go across the sea, homeward. They were from the
first a fighting race; and decade by decade the cloud of war grew
heavier on each horizon, southward from Syracuse and northward from
Messina, and swords beat fiercer and stronger with the rivalries of
growing states--battles dimly discerned now. A single glimpse flashes
out on the page of Thucydides. He relates that when once the Messenians
threatened Naxos with overthrow, the mountaineers rushed down from the
heights in great numbers to the relief of their Greek neighbours, and
routed the enemy and slew many. This is the first bloodstain, clear and
bright, on our Taorminian land. Shall I add, from the few relics of that
age, that Pythagoras, on the journey he undertook to establish the
governments of the Sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, curing a mad
lover of his frenzy by music, and being present on this hill and at
Metaponto the same day--a thing not to be done without magic? But at
last we see plainly Alcibiades coasting along below, and the ill-fated
Athenians wintering in the port, and horsemen going out from Naxos
toward Etna on the side of Athens in the death-struggle of her glory.
And then, suddenly, after the second three hundred years, all is over,
the Greek city betrayed, sacked, destroyed, Naxos trodden out under the
foot of Dionysius the tyrant.

Other fortune awaited him a few years later when he came again, and our
city (which, one knows not when, had been walled and fortified) stood
its first historic siege. Dionysius arrived in the dead of winter. Snow
and ice--I can hardly credit it--whitened and roughened these ravines, a
new ally to the besieged; but the tyrant thought to betray them by a
false security in such a season. On a bitter night, when clouds hooded
the hilltop, and mists rolled low about its flanks, he climbed
unobserved, with his forces, up these precipices, and gained two outer
forts which gave footways to the walls; but the town roused at the sound
of arms and the cries of the guards, and came down to the fray, and
fought until six hundred of the foe fell dead, others with wounds
surrendered, and the rest fled headlong, with Dionysius among them, hard
pressed, and staining the snow with his blood as he went. This was the
city's first triumph.

Not only with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, as a city should,
with a great man. He was really great, this Andromachus. Do you not
remember him out of Plutarch, and the noble words that have been his
immortal memory among men? "This man was incomparably the best of all
those that bore sway in Sicily at that time, governing his citizens
according to law and justice, and openly professing an aversion and
enmity to all tyrants." Was the defeat of Dionysius the first of his
youthful exploits, as some say? I cannot determine; but it is certain
that he gathered the surviving exiles of Naxos, and gave them this
plateau to dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount Taurus, as had
been the wont, but Tauromenium, or the Abiding-place of the Bull. A few
years later Andromachus performed the signal action of his life by
befriending Timoleon, as great a character, in my eyes, as Plutarch
records the glory of. Timoleon had set out from Corinth, at the summons
of his Greek countrymen, to restore the liberty of Syracuse, then
tyrannized over by the second Dionysius; and because Andromachus, in his
stronghold of Taormina, hated tyranny, Plutarch says, he "gave Timoleon
leave to muster up his troops there and to make that city the seat of
war, persuading the inhabitants to join their arms with the Corinthian
forces and to assist them in the design of delivering Sicily." It was on
our beach that Timoleon disembarked, and from our city he went forth to
the conquest foretold, by the wreath that fell upon his head as he
prayed at Delphi, and by the prophetic fire that piloted his ship over
the sea. The Carthaginians came quickly after him from Reggio, where he
had eluded them, for they were in alliance with the tyrant; and from
their vessels they parleyed with Andromachus in the port. With an
insolent gesture, the envoy, raising his hand, palm up, and turning it
lightly over, said that even so, and with such ease, would he overturn
the little city; and Andromachus, mocking his hand-play, answered that
if he did not leave the harbour, even so would he upset his galley. The
Carthaginians sailed away. The city remained firm-perched. Timoleon
prospered, brought back liberty to Syracuse, ruled wisely and nobly, and
gave to Sicily those twenty years of peace which were the flower of her
Greek annals. Then, we must believe, rose the little temple on our
headland, the Greek theatre where the tongue of Athens lived, the
gymnasium where the youths grew fair and strong. Then Taormina struck
her coins: Apollo with the laurel, with the lyre, with the grape;
Dionysus with the ivy, and Zeus with the olive; for the gods and temples
of the Naxians had become ours, and were religiously cherished; and with
the rest was struck a coin with the Minotaur, our symbol. But of
Andromachus, the founder of the well-built and fairly adorned Greek city
that then rose, we hear no more--a hero, I think, one of the true breed
of the founders of states. But alas for liberty! A new tyrant,
Agathocles, was soon on the Syracusan throne, and he won this city by
friendly professions, only to empty it by treachery and murder; and he
drove into exile Timaeus, the son of Andromachus. Timaeus? He,
evidently, of my Casa Timeo. I know him now, the once famed historian
whom Cicero praises as the most erudite in history of all writers up to
his time, most copious in facts and various in comment, not unpolished
in style, eloquent, and distinguished by terse and charming expression.
Ninety years he lived in the Greek world, devoted himself to history,
and produced many works, now lost. The ancient writers read him, and
from their criticism it is clear that he was marked by a talent for
invective, was given to sharp censure, and loved the bitter part of
truth. He introduced precision and detail into his art, and is credited
with being the first to realize the importance of chronology and to seek
exactness in it. He never saw again his lovely birthplace, and I easily
forgive to the exile and the son of Andromachus the vigour with which he
depicted the crimes of Agathocles and others of the tyrants. In our
city, meanwhile, the Greek genius waning to its extinction, Tyndarion
ruled; and in his time Pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever invading
power of Carthage. But he was little more than a shedder of blood; he
accomplished nothing, and I name him only as one of the figures of our
beach.

The day of Greece was gone; but those two clouds of war still hung on
the horizon, north and south, with ever darker tempest. Instead of
Syracuse and Messina, Carthage and the new name of Rome now sent them
forth, and over this island they encountered. Our city, true to its
ancient tradition, became Rome's ever faithful ally, as you may read in
the poem of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty with the title
of a confederate city; and of this fact Cicero reminded the judges when
in that famous trial he thundered against Verres, the spoiler of our
Sicilian province, and with the other cities defended this of ours,
whose people had signalized their hatred of the Roman praetor by
overthrowing his statue in the market-place and sparing the pedestal, as
they said, to be an eternal memorial of his infamy. From the Roman age,
however, I take but two episodes, for I find that to write this town's
history were to write the history of half the Mediterranean world. When
the slaves rose in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves on this
hill, and in their hands the city bore its siege by the Roman consul as
hardily as was ever its custom. Cruel they were, no doubt, and
vindictive. With horror Monsignore relates that they were so resolved
not to yield that, starving, they ate their children, their wives, and
one another; and he rejoices when they were at last betrayed and
massacred, and this disgrace was wiped away. I hesitate. I cannot feel
regret when those whom man has made brutal answer brutally to their
oppressors. I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit to remember that
the slaves, too, fought for liberty. I am sorry for those penned and
dying men; their famine and slaughter in these walls were least horrible
for their part in the catastrophe, if one looks through what they did to
what they were, and remembers that the civilization they violated had
stripped them of humanity. After the slave, I make room--for whom else
than imperial Augustus? Off this shore he defeated Sextus Pompey, and he
thought easily to subdue the town above when he summoned it. But Taormina
was always a loyal little place, and it would not yield without a siege.
Then Augustus, sitting down before it, prayed in our temple of Guiding
Apollo that he might have the victory; and as he walked by the beach
afterward a fish threw itself out of the water before him--an omen,
said the diviners, that even so the Pompeians, who held the seas, after
many turns of varied fortune, should be brought to his feet. Pompey
returned with a fleet, and in these waters again the battle was fought
and Augustus lost it, and the siege was raised. But when a third time
the trial of naval strength was essayed, and the cause of the Pompeians
ruined, Augustus remembered the city that had defied him, sent its
inhabitants into exile, and planted a Roman colony in its place. Latin
was now the language here. The massive grandeur of Roman architecture
replaced the old Greek structures. The amphitheatre was enlarged and
renewed in its present form, villas of luxury bordered the coasts as in
Campania, and coins were struck in the Augustan name.

The Roman domination in its turn slowly moved to its fall; and where
should the new age begin more fitly than in this city of beginnings? As
of old the Greek torch first gleamed here, here first on Sicilian soil
was the Cross planted. The gods of Olympus had many temples about the
hill slopes, shrines of venerable antiquity even in those days; but if
the monkish chronicles be credited, the new faith signalized its victory
rather over three strange idolatries,--the worship of Falcone, of
Lissone, and of Scamandro, a goddess. I refuse to believe that the
citizens were accustomed to sacrifice three youths annually to Falcone;
and as for the other two deities, little is known of them except that
their destruction marked the advent of the young religion. Pancrazio was
the name of him who was destined to be our patron saint through the
coming centuries. He was born in Antioch, and when a child of three
years, going with his father into Judea, he had seen the living Christ;
now, grown into manhood, he was sent by St. Peter to spread the gospel
in the isles of the sea. He disembarked on our beach, and forthwith
threw Lissone's image into the waves, and with it a holy dragon which
was coiled about it like a garment and was fed with sacrifices; and he
shattered with his cross the great idol Scamandro: and so Taormina
became Christian, welcomed St. Peter on his way to Rome, and entered on
the long new age. It was here, as elsewhere, the age of
martyrs--Pancrazio first, and after him Geminiano, guided hither with
his mother by an angel; and then San Nicone, who suffered with his one
hundred and ninety-nine brother monks, and Sepero and Corneliano with
their sixty; the age of monks--Luca, who fled from his bridal to live on
Etna, with fasts, visions, and prophecies; and, later, simple-minded
Daniele, the follower of St. Elia, of whom there is more to be recorded;
the age of bishops, heard in Roman councils and the palace of Byzantium,
of whom two only are of singular interest--Zaccaria, who was deprived,
evidently the ablest in mind and policy of all the succession, once a
great figure in the disputes of East and West; and Procopio, whom the
Saracens slew, for the Crescent now followed the Cross.

The ancient war-cloud had again gathered out of Africa. The Saracens
were in the land, and every city had fallen except Syracuse and
Taormina. For sixty years the former held out, and our city for yet
another thirty, the sole refuge of the Christians. Signs of the
impending destruction were first seen by that St. Elia already
mentioned, who wandered hither, and was displeased by the manners and
morals of the citizens. I am sorry to record that Monsignore believed
his report, for only here is there mention of such a matter. "The
citizens," says my author, "lived in luxury and pleasure not becoming to
a state of war. They saw on all sides the fields devastated, houses
burnt, wealth plundered, cities given to the flames, friends and
companions killed or reduced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin,
that did not rule unpunished among them." Therefore the saint preached
the woe to come, and, turning to the governor, Constantine Patrizio, in
his place in the cathedral, he appealed to him to restrain his people.
"Let the philosophy of the Gentiles," he exclaimed, "be your shame.
Epaminondas, that illustrious _condottiere_, strictly restrained himself
from intemperance, from every lust, every allurement of pleasure. So,
also, Scipio, the Roman leader, was valorous through the same continence
as Epaminondas; and therefore they brought back signal victory, one over
the Spartans, the other over the Carthaginians, and both erected
immortal trophies." He promised them mercy with repentance, but ended
threateningly: "So far as in me lies I have clearly foretold to you all
that has been divinely revealed to me. If you believe my words, like
the penitents of Nineveh, you shall find mercy; if you despise my
admonitions, bound and captive you shall be reduced to the worst
slavery." He prophesied yet more in private. He went to the house of a
noble citizen, Crisione, who esteemed him as a father, and, lying in
bed, he said to him: "Do you see, Crisione, the bed in which I now lie?
In this same bed shall Ibrahim sleep, hungry for human blood, and the
walls of the rooms shall see many of the most distinguished persons of
this city all together put to the edge of the sword." Then he left the
house and went to the square in the centre of the city, and, standing
there, he lifted his garments above the knee. Whereupon simple Daniele,
who always followed him about, marvelling asked, "What does this thing
mean, father?" The old man had his answer ready, "Now I see rivers of
blood running, and these proud and magnificent buildings which you see
exalted shall be destroyed even to the foundations by the Saracens." And
the monk fled from the doomed city, like a true prophet, and went
overseas.

The danger was near, but perhaps not more felt than it must always have
been where the prayer for defence against the Saracens had gone up for a
hundred years in the cathedral. The governor, however, had taken pains
to add to the strength of the city by strong fortifications upon Mola.
Ahulabras came under the walls, but gave over the ever unsuccessful
attempt to take the place, and went on to ruin Reggio beyond the
straits. When it was told to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, as the
Saracens called it, had again been passed by, he cried out upon his son,
"He is degenerate, degenerate! He took his nature from his mother and
not from his father; for, had he been born from me, surely his sword
would not have spared the Christians!" Therefore he recalled him to the
home government, and came himself and sat down before the city. The
garrison was small and insufficient, but, says my author, following old
chronicles, "youths, old men, and children, without distinction of age,
sex, or condition, fearing outrage and all that slavery would expose
them to, all spontaneously offered themselves to fight in this holy war
even to death: with such courage did love of country and religious zeal
inspire the citizens." Ibrahim had other weapons than the sword. He
first corrupted the captains of the Greek fleet, who were afterward
condemned for the treason at Byzantium. Then, all being ready, he
promised some Ethiopians of his army, who are described as of a
ferocious nature and harsh aspect, that he would give them the city for
booty, besides other gifts, if they would devote themselves to the bold
undertaking. The catastrophe deserves to be told in Monsignore's own
words:

"This people, accustomed to rapine, allured by the riches of the
Taorminians and the promises of the king, with the aid of the traitors
entered unexpectedly into the city, and with bloody swords and mighty
cries and clamour assailed the citizens. Meanwhile King Ibrahim, having
entered with all his army by a secret gate under the fortress of Mola,
thence called the gate of the Saracens, raged against the citizens with
such unexpected and cruel slaughter that not only neither the weakness
of sex, nor tender years, nor reverence for hoary age, but not even the
abundance of blood that like torrents flowed down the ways, touched to
pity that ferocious heart. The soldiers, masters of the beautiful and
wealthy city, divided among them the riches and goods of the citizens
according as to each one the lot fell; they levelled to the ground the
magnificent buildings, public or private, sacred or profane, all that
were proudest for amplitude, construction, and ornament; and that not
even the ruins of ancient splendour should remain, all that had survived
they gave to the flames."

This city, which the Saracens destroyed, is the one the Taorminians
cherish as the culmination of their past. In the Greek, the Roman, and
the early Christian ages it had flourished, as both its ruins and its
history attest, and much must have yet survived from those times; while
its station as the only Christian stronghold in the island would
naturally have attracted wealth hither for safety. In this first sack of
the Saracens, the ancient city must have perished, but the destruction
could hardly have been so thorough as is represented, since some of the
churches themselves, in their present state, show Byzantine workmanship.

There remains one bloody and characteristic episode to Ibrahim's
victory. The king, says the Arab chronicler, was pious and naturally
compassionate, but on this occasion he forgot his usual mildness. In the
midst of fire and blood he ordered the soldiers to search the caverns of
the hills, and they dragged forth many prisoners, among whom was the
Bishop Procopio. The king spoke to him gently and nobly, "Because you
are wise and old, O Bishop, I exhort you with soft words to obey my
advice, and to have foresight for your own safety and that of your
companions; otherwise you shall suffer what your fellow-citizens have
suffered from me. If you will embrace my laws, and deny the Christian
religion, you shall have the second place after me, and shall be more
dear to me than all the Agarenes." The prelate only smiled. Then, full
of wrath, the king said: "Do you smile while you are my prisoner? Know
you not in whose presence you are?" "I smile truly," came the answer,
"because I see you are inspired by a demon who puts these words into
your mouth." Furious, the king called to his attendants, "Quick, break
open his breast, tear out his heart, that we may see and understand the
secrets of his mind." While the command was being executed, Procopio
reproved the king and comforted his companions. "The tyrant, swollen
with rage, and grinding his teeth," says the narrative, "barbarously
offered him the torn-out heart that he might eat it." Then he bade them
strike off the bishop's head (who, we are told, was already half dead),
and also the heads of his companions, and to burn the bodies all
together. And as St. Pancrazio of old had thrown the holy dragon into
the sea, so now were his own ashes scattered to the winds of heaven; and
Ibrahim, having accomplished his work, departed.

Some of the citizens, however, had survived, and among them Crisione,
the host of St. Elia. He went to bear the tidings to the saint; and
being now assured of the gift of prophecy possessed by the holy man,
asked him to foretell his future. He met the customary fate of the
curious in such things. "I foresee," said the discomfortable saint,
"that within a few days you will die." And to make an end of St. Elia
with Crisione, let me record here the simple Daniele's last act of piety
to his master. It is little that in such company he fought with devils,
or that after he had written with much labour a beautiful Psalter, the
old monk bade him fling it and worldly pride together over the cliff
into a lake. Such episodes belonged to the times; and, after all, by
making a circuit of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously unwet,
and only his worldly pride remained at the lake's bottom. But it was a
mind singularly inventive of penance that led the dying saint to charge
poor Daniele to bear the corpse on his back a long way over the
mountains, merely because, he said, it would be a difficult thing to do.
Other survivors of the sack of Taormina, more fortunate than Crisione,
watched their opportunity, and, at a moment when the garrison was weak,
entered, seized the place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the
Greek emperor once more. He could not maintain war with the Saracens,
but by a treaty made with them he secured his faithful Taorminians in
the possession of the city. After forty years of peace under this treaty
it was again besieged for several months, and fell on Christmas night.
Seventeen hundred and fifty of its citizens were sent by the victors
into slavery in Africa. Greek troops, however, soon retook the city in
a campaign that opened brilliantly in Sicily only to close in swift
disaster; but for five years longer Taormina sustained continual siege,
and when it fell at last, with the usual carnage of its citizens and the
now thrice-repeated fire and ruin of Saracenic victory, we may well
believe that, though it remained the seat of a governor, little of the
city was left except its memory. Its name even was changed to Moezzia.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15