The Battle of Syracuse

The battle of Syracuse, B.C. 413, between the Syracusans and the Athenians, is accounted the second decisive battle of the world. The city of Syracuse was the stronghold of the island of Sicily; the Athenians laid siege to it by land and by sea, and would have made an easy conquest but for the aid rendered by Sparta to the Syracusans. Arnold says of this battle: "The Romans knew not how deeply the greatness of their own posterity, and the fate of the whole Western world, were involved in the destruction of the fleet of Athens in the harbor of Syracuse. Had that great expedition proved victorious, the energies of Greece during the next eventful century would have found their field in the West no less than in the East; Greece, and not Rome, might have conquered Carthage; Greek instead of Latin might have been at this day the principal element in the language of Spain, of France, and of Italy; and the laws of Athens, rather than of Rome, might be the foundation of the law of the civilized world." Thus this battle of Syracuse forms a decisive epoch in the strife for universal empire which engaged all the great states of antiquity successively. Athens in this battle made one bold throw for the dominion of the Western world; failing in this, her career of conquest was forever checked. At Marathon she had been struggling in self-defence; at Syracuse she was an ambitious invader.

By the capture of Syracuse all Sicily would have been secured to her. Then Carthage and Italy were within reach; nor did the known world at that time contain a power capable of checking the growing might of Athens, if Syracuse had been won. The die was cast and the game was lost; never was defeat more decisive, or revenge more terrible. The Athenians who escaped death were either imprisoned in cells of the labyrinth one hundred feet below the surface of the ground, or sold into slavery. The labyrinth used as a prison for the immense number of Athenians was originally the limestone quarry out of which the material for building Syracuse had been taken. It can be visited by tourists. The entrance is by a narrow passage beneath the Convent of Cappuccini, where permission to explore its cavernous recesses must be obtained. It has been thus described by J.A. Symonds: "The Latomia de' Cappuccini is a place which it is impossible to describe in words, and of which no photographs give any notion. Sunk to the depth of a hundred feet below the level of the soil, with sides perpendicular and in many places as smooth as though the chisel had just passed over them, these vast excavations produce the impression of some huge subterranean gallery, widening here and there into spacious halls, the whole of which has been unroofed and opened to the air of heaven. It is a solemn and romantic labyrinth, where no wind blows rudely, and where orange-trees shoot upward luxuriantly to meet the light. The wild fig bursts from the living rock, mixed with lentisk shrubs and pendant caper-plants. A light yellow, calcined by the sun to white, is the prevailing color of the quarries. But in shady places the limestone take a curious pink tone of great beauty, like the interior of some sea-shells. Yet this garden was once the Gethsemane of a nation, where 9000 freemen of the proudest city of Greece were brought by an unexampled stroke of fortune to slavery, shame, and a miserable end. Here they dwindled away, worn out by wounds, disease, thirst, hunger, heat by day and cold by night, heart-sickness, and the insufferable stench of putrefying corpses. The pupils of Socrates, the admirers of Euripides, the orators of the Pnyx, the athletes of the Lyceum, lovers and comrades and philosophers, died here like dogs: the dames of Syracuse stood, doubtless, on those parapets above, and looked upon them like wild beasts. . . . . . The weary eyes turned upwards found no change or respite, save what the frost of night brought to the fire of day, and the burning sun to the pitiless, cold constellations."

Byron in his "Childe Harold," Canto IV. Stanza 16, perpetuates the story that some of the Athenian prisoners purchased their freedom by repeating verses of Euripides, and on reaching their own country hastened to fling themselves at his feet.

Syracuse was the oldest of the Greek colonies in Sicily, having been founded in 734 B. C.

The city was finally destroyed, the buildings burned, and the inhabitants put to the sword by the Saracens in 878 A.D. That portion of the city situated on the island of Ortygia is still inhabited, and the ruins of the old city of Syracuse are exceedingly interesting to intelligent travelers. Regarding one of the captives in the Latomia, or stone quarry, the following story was told. He had come from Athens with some fame as a poet and was therefore brought out of the prison and entertained by the tyrant of Syracuse, who also thought himself a poet and had written thousands of execrable verses He soon began to read his effusions to his Athenian guest, who bore the infliction for a while, but at last started up and was walking off. "Where are you going?" asked the reader. The answer was, "To my cell in the stone quarry!"