Tyrant

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  ‘He’s a victim, he’s not to blame!’

  ‘We need his courage!’

  ‘Restore his rights!’

  The last word still belonged to the Council, who met in a closed session under the portico that faced the hemicycle.

  ‘We cannot come to a decision under this sort of pressure!’ began Daphnaeus.

  ‘You’re right,’ replied a councillor. ‘There’s too much of an uproar, and it’s obvious that Dionysius planted his supporters so that they would cow the other citizens and prevent them from expressing their true opinions.’ The man who had spoken was called Demonattes; he was a relative of one of the men burnt alive in the house near the harbour.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say that exactly . . .’ Euribiades put in weakly.

  Demonattes spun around to face him as if he could not believe his ears. ‘What do you mean, you wouldn’t say so? Even a blind man could see what is happening in this Assembly. I’m shocked at your reaction: weren’t you one of those who wanted Dionysius condemned to death at all costs if he was captured?’

  Pancrates rallied to his friend. ‘Things can change. Only stones don’t change, by Heracles! There’s been a development in the course of events that—’

  ‘Development? Ten men were carved to pieces or burnt alive by a cruel murderer, and if you can’t guess just who that was, I suppose I’ll have to spell it out for you. What’s more, if the two of you insist on this ridiculous posturing, I’ll demand that an official investigation be opened on your account. Such sudden changes in mood can look very suspicious.’

  The situation was worsening, and Pancrates tried to assume a more accommodating, wait-and-see attitude that could be shared by his fellow councilmen. He suggested that the order of the day which could restore Dionysius’s rights might be postponed. But Euribiades nudged him hard with his elbow, motioning with his eyes at something at the top of the hemicycle.

  Pancrates noticed his panicked expression and shifted his gaze to the colonnade that closed off the Assembly auditorium. He couldn’t help but startle when he saw the comic theatrical mask hanging from one of the columns; the same one, it seemed, worn by the mysterious figure in the countryside south of Catane. The mask’s grotesque leer reminded them quite effectively of their pact – unwritten but extremely binding nonetheless. Pancrates sighed and didn’t speak for a few moments, after exchanging an eloquent look with Euribiades. As soon as Demonattes started up his fiery oration again, he whispered something into his friend’s ear.

  Euribiades asked for the floor then and said: ‘It is useless to put off dealing with our problems; certain matters are best faced at once. In order to avoid a repeat of the intimidatory situation which we’ve seen today in the Assembly, I would ask the Council members to vote now, in a secret ballot.’

  ‘I approve,’ said Pancrates. ‘It’s the best way.’

  There was no reason to oppose such a common procedure, and no one protested. Dionysius’s restoration was approved by a single vote and Demonattes indignantly abandoned the Council.

  Dionysius received the news from Heloris himself, but his adoptive father warned him not to attend meetings for a while, to avoid provoking quarrels and controversies that his adversaries could fault him with. He didn’t show his face until the Company had ensured the goodwill of a wide majority of the Assembly, winning the contentious factions over by fair means or foul.

  He made his entry with his cheeks perfectly shaved, his hair gathered at the nape of his neck, dressed in a beautiful light-blue chlamys. He sat in the midst of his friends, protected and guarded on every side. Pancrates and Euribiades shot him captivating smiles, as if to demonstrate that the mostly favourable atmosphere was due to their intervention. Dionysius smiled back and they were convinced that the score was settled.

  They were wrong.

  One evening, just after dusk, Pancrates was captured as he was returning home from a dinner with friends. He was bound and gagged, bundled up into a cloak and brought to the cellar of the house with the trellis. Two days later, Euribiades was captured in his own home in the middle of the night. He had heard his dog barking and had got up with a lantern to see what was happening. A yelp, and then silence. When he saw his slaves gagged and tied to the gate he realized that something was wrong, but it was too late. Four armed men jumped on him, knocked him out with clubs and carried him off in a sack.

  He came to his senses in the house with the trellis, underground. Next to him was Pancrates, white as a sheet, who stared at him in terror. Dionysius stood before them, sword in hand. ‘But . . . we had an agreement . . .’ he stammered.

  ‘I don’t remember making any agreement,’ replied Dionysius.

  ‘The man with the comic mask . . . was you . . . or one of your friends. He promised to spare our lives in exchange for our votes in favour of restoring your rights in the Assembly.’

  ‘I’ve never worn a mask in all my life. I always show my face to my enemies.’

  ‘But we helped you!’ protested Pancrates, while his companion sobbed softly.

  ‘That’s true, and for this you will be granted a quick death. Don’t find fault with me: if I obeyed my heart, I would slowly cut you up into little pieces and feed you to my dogs. You can’t imagine the sight I was greeted with when I crossed the threshold of this house after the debacle in the agora. You can’t imagine what I felt when I saw my wife’s naked, broken body. Those who tortured and raped her at least took responsibility for their actions. You didn’t even have the courage to do that.’

  ‘I beg of you,’ insisted Euribiades, ‘you’re making a mistake! We had nothing to do with that, we have no blame in what happened. We are sorry, and we can understand your anger, but we did nothing wrong, believe me. In the name of the gods, do not stain yourself with the blood of two innocent men!’

  Dionysius came closer. ‘I may be making a mistake, and in that case I will have to face the judgement of the gods. But Arete’s shade must be appeased. Farewell.’

  He said no more and ran them through from front to back, one after another, with clean blows to the bases of their throats.

  Their bodies were never found.

  Philistus met Dionysius two days later in an olive grove near Epipolae. ‘You told me you would spare them if you were readmitted to the city,’ he said reproachfully.

  ‘I lied,’ said Dionysius. And he walked away.

  11

  OVER THAT SUMMER, the attention of the authorities and of the common people of Syracuse was distracted by menacing news brought by informers from both Carthage and Greece. Settling up local affairs now seemed a trifling concern. The word was that the Carthaginians had sent an embassy to Athens to convince the city government to continue their war against the Spartans, even though the foremost Athenian general, Alcibiades, had fled to Asia. This would prevent Sparta from coming to the aid of Syracuse in Sicily when Carthage decided to attack. They also learned that the Athenians had sent a delegation to meet with the Carthaginian generals in Sicily. Athens hated the Syracusans with such a passion that she would have made a pact with anyone if it could wreak harm to the city that had routed and defeated her men seven years before.

  The government of Syracuse protested with an official note against the preparations for war, but they did not even obtain a response. Daphnaeus decided then to send a fleet of forty ships into the waters of western Sicily, and to repair the port of Selinus as well as possible in order to prevent a Carthaginian disembarkation. In their first engagement, the Syracusans sank fifteen of the enemy ships but as soon as Hannibal sent his entire fleet of eighty massive battleships out to sea, Daphnaeus ordered his vessels to retreat so they would not be totally wiped out. He immediately sent off envoys to request help from the Italian Greeks and from the Spartans as well. Sparta agreed to send one of their generals, Dexippus, with one thousand five hundred mercenaries. The Spartan landed at Gela and made his way to Acragas, where he also took command of the eight hundred Campanian mercenaries whom Tellias had
convinced to abandon the Carthaginians with his generous recruiting offer.

  Hannibal landed his troops in the immediate vicinity of Acragas in the early spring. He was getting on in age now, and was flanked by his cousin Himilco, a younger and more energetic man. He positioned a division east of the city to preclude raids from that direction, and raised a fortified camp to the west. He immediately began to demolish the monumental tombs of the necropolis to procure materials for an assault ramp which would give his troops access to the city.

  Inside the city, no one seemed to take the threat of an army seriously, albeit one that had already annihilated Selinus and Himera. Supplies were abundant and their sturdy walls were built on a rocky base which was considerably higher than the surrounding plain. They considered their city impregnable. They were also confident in the knowledge that Daphnaeus would soon be arriving from Syracuse at the head of the confederate army. The climate was so relaxed that the commanders had to issue an order that sentinels posted on the city walls could use no more than one mattress and two pillows apiece. Every now and then, the cavalry would even make a few sorties, attacking isolated units that had gone out to collect forage for their animals and supplies for their men.

  The heat soon became torrid and the stink of the waste and excrement of sixty thousand men and five thousand horses crowded into those damp, poorly aired lowlands drifted all the way up to the top of the walls.

  Every morning, Tellias would go up to the battlements to observe the plains, taking advantage of the hour when the land wind would usually carry off that revolting stench. The city was still asleep and the last sentry had just gone off duty to allow the day shift to take over. The rising sun illuminated the great sanctuary of Athena on the acropolis, and then, little by little, lit up the houses, the gardens, the colonnaded porticoes and last of all the immense bulk of the Temple of Zeus still under construction. Work had not been interrupted, and the sculptors were busy carving the huge pediment that represented the fall of Troy: the entangled limbs of the heroes were taking on clearer definition and shape with each passing day. Only the figures of the gods had been completed; tall under the slopes of the tympanum, they regarded passers-by with their stony glares, awaiting the wash of bright colours that the painters had just begun to apply to their faces, limbs, hair and garments. The giants of the colonnade seemed to flex their muscles in the titanic effort of holding up the storied architrave; the gilding on the acroteria glittered in the morning rays, and flocks of pink ibis rose from the mouth of the Acragas, gliding over the almond and olive trees in the valley.

  The spectacle was so enchanting, the harmonious work of man and nature so sublime that the vision of human stupidity – jeopardizing such beauty with the threat of war! – filled Tellias with a sense of deep dismay, a bitter forewarning of the imminent end. He could not shake the thought of Arete from his mind: he remembered how much she had loved Acragas, how fascinating she had found the extravagance of a city always restless and hungry for life. He remembered how keenly she desired to become the bride of the man she had chosen as her companion. He grieved deeply at the thought of her cruel end, and could take no consolation in the vengeance that Dionysius had inflicted with equal cruelty.

  His only hope was that Acragas would survive! At times he recited Pindar’s verses softly to himself like a prayer. Acragas . . . high and luminous on her rock, the distant sparkle of the sea, the forests of pine and oak, the olive trees planted by her founding fathers, the sacred fire of the acropolis which had never been extinguished since the first time it was lit . . . could all of this be suddenly wiped out as though it had never existed? Was that possible? Could the fate of Selinus and Himera be perpetuated and infinitely repeated?

  One day, as he was immersed in contemplation, Tellias was startled by the voices of the generals who commanded the army. They were ridiculing the enemy, who seemed so distant and impotent down there. The Carthaginian ships – so tiny on the horizon – seemed as inoffensive as the boats which the children toyed with in the big pond at the bottom of the valley. They were so sure of winning! They must have their reasons, thought Tellias. One of them scoffed: ‘Look at them, camped out in their own shit! They must think their stink will make us surrender!’

  When plague broke out in the Carthaginian camp, mowing down thousands of men and dispiriting the enemy troops, it seemed that Acragas’s most optimistic predictions had come true. The smoke of the pyres and the insufferable odour of burning flesh befouled the air all throughout the surrounding territory. Hannibal himself fell ill and died; when the news became known in the city, the people exulted, imagining that the Carthaginians would raise the siege and go home.

  Tellias took such heart that he managed to think up a clever strategy for scaring them off. He recruited a number of tragic theatre actors and paid them to wander at night, like ghosts, among the ruins of the tombs demolished by the Carthaginians, wailing and groaning and letting out horrible curses in the Punic language. Spectral lights appeared in the cemeteries on moonless nights, and other terrifying apparitions would assail groups of Carthaginian auxiliaries intent on searching for forage or food along dark country roads. Their superstitious terror sowed panic among the besieging troops, to such an extent that no one would leave camp at night any more.

  But the surviving commander, Himilco, was no fool. He summoned diviners and ordered them to suggest an immediate remedy to placate the offended spirits of the dead chased from their tombs. Divinatory rites were performed, and they ruled that nothing but a human sacrifice would do.

  A poor native boy, taken as a slave during the previous campaign, had his throat slit on the altar and his body cast into the sea. Himilco then proclaimed that the spirits had been satisfied and that things would soon start to change for the better. A couple of torrential rainstorms washed away the filth that had been surrounding the camp, and the situation did improve, confirming the diviners’ prophesies and the commander’s promises. The construction of the ramp was resumed with great zeal.

  Tellias watched, worried by their constant progress.

  Meanwhile, in Syracuse Dionysius had regained a position of considerable prestige. When the confederate army – a force of twenty thousand Syracusans, ten thousand mercenaries and twenty thousand Italians from allied cities – was ready to march, he was conferred the rank of adjutant to the board of generals.

  The night they were to leave, he had Arete’s body exhumed from the cellar where she had lain and buried her in a proper tomb that he had had built outside the western gate along the road to Camarina. Her body was found incredibly intact and Dionysius took this as a sign from the gods, rather than a consequence of the salinity of the ground, as Philistus maintained. It was his vengeance, Dionysius felt, that had engendered this miraculous event.

  The funeral took place quietly, after sunset, and when the massive slab of limestone was lowered on to the sepulchre, Dionysius asked to be left alone. He talked to her, at length, in the hope that she would answer him. In the end he fell asleep at the foot of her tomb, overwhelmed by weariness, and he dreamt of plunging headlong from the cliff into the crystal pool, falling breathlessly in a sort of infinite, agonizing abandon.

  He was awakened by Leptines, who had become his bodyguard and followed him everywhere, never too close and never too far. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  The confederate army set off the next day before dawn: Syracusans in front, the mercenaries in the middle and the Italians last. The cavalry brought up the sides. At their head was Daphnaeus with the commanding generals and Dionysius himself. Leptines rode at a short distance behind them, with his group of scouts. The cavalry proper was made up only of aristocrats known as Knights, who tolerated no one else in their presence.

  They covered the entire distance from Syracuse to Acragas in seven days, receiving supplies from the fleet, which sailed under convoy. Whenever necessary, they sent a number of dinghies ashore with provisions; they would shuttle back and forth for hours
between the ships and the mainland.

  They came within view of the city on the evening of the seventh day, and set up camp near the eastern detachment of the Carthaginian army. Dionysius deftly spurred on his horse, followed by Leptines, Biton, Doricus and some other friends from the Company, on a reconnaissance round; they estimated the enemy strength at about thirty-five thousand men. They could immediately see that the city was not inaccessible at all; the enemy strategy was becoming clear. The eastern detachment was there to prevent reinforcements from Syracuse from getting in, as most of the army prepared for the definitive assault from the nearly completed ramp, using siege engines and rams.

  Before night fell they circled the northern part of the walls, skirting the western necropolis from which they could see the ramp which had already reached the height of the natural rock platform that the city was built on. To defend themselves from the archers on the battlements, the Carthaginians had fashioned a kind of moving roof on wheels, covered with untanned, fire-proofed skins which protected the men who were working on the ramp pavement that would allow the machines to advance.

  When Dionysius got back to camp, he was informed that a meeting of the general staff had already begun, and he hurried to join them.

  ‘First of all,’ Daphnaeus was saying, ‘we must attack the eastern division of Himilco’s army. They’re in an open field, and the terrain is mostly flat. We’ll attack at dawn, when it’s still cool. In a closed formation, eight rows deep: we’ll be at the centre with our Sicilian allies. The Italians will be on the right, the mercenaries on the left. The cavalry on both sides.’

  ‘What if the bulk of Himilco’s army attacks us while we’re in the middle of combat?’ asked Dionysius. ‘I propose that we station a few cavalry detachments between us and the fortified Carthaginian camp at the west, so they can warn us if they make any moves.’

  The commander of the cavalry, an aristocrat of ancient lineage called Cratippus, gave Dionysius a disdainful look as though he had offended him. ‘I wouldn’t say you have any authority at all in establishing where and how the cavalry will be drawn up,’ he said in a scornful tone.