Tyrant (31 page)
Authors: Valerio Massimo Manfredi
‘Follow him!’ shouted Leptines. ‘He’s out of his mind!’
But Dionysius was perfectly lucid in his rage. He rode straight to the dockyards at the Great Harbour and ordered pitch to be brought to the gate. He burned down the doors to let his bodyguards and skirmishers through.
The Knights were holding council in the agora; they were planning to summon an Assembly the next day and declare the end of the reign of the ‘tyrant’, for it was such that they had already decided to call their political adversary.
They were completely taken by surprise. Dionysius, mindful of how he himself had been surrounded in that square along with Hermocrates and his men, had his troops enter from the side streets and alleys all around, blocking off any possible exit. He gave the order to attack and threw himself forward, his sword held high and his shield on his arm, plunging into the butchery with delirious abandon.
No one got away. No one was spared, not even those who threw themselves at his feet begging.
Late that night, assisted only by his brother Leptines, Dionysius burnt Arete’s despoiled remains on an improvised pyre. He gathered up her ashes and buried them in a secret place that no one knew of but him. And on that same night he buried – in a place even more secret and hidden in his heart – all mercy, every trace of humanity.
T
HE MEETING OF
Dionysius’s most trusted friends was held at Philistus’s house in Ortygia. Besides the two of them, Iolaus, Doricus and Biton were present; they were soon joined by Heloris, overheated and out of breath. His brother was the last to arrive; Dionysius nodded and Leptines told the others what he had learned: ‘They’ve sacked Camarina but they’re not stopping there. It’s here they’re headed.’
‘Are you certain?’ asked Dionysius, seemingly not too upset.
‘I would say so. The road they’ve taken leads this way, and I don’t think they’re coming on a courtesy visit.’
‘Fine. They may succeed in getting here, but this is where they’ll get nailed. Our walls have driven back even the Athenians. Our fleet is intact and so is our army. Why should they attempt an endeavour that is destined to fail from the start?’
‘Because they are convinced that they will not fail,’ broke in Philistus. ‘They’ve succeeded five times, why not the sixth? Their mercenaries are first-rate troops, and if they die, no one complains about it: no public funerals, no speeches, no epigraphs. They toss them into a ditch with a shovelful of dirt, and that’s that. One less salary to pay. We have to answer for every man we lose, answer to his city and his family.’
‘That’s only right,’ said Doricus. We are Greeks, after all’
‘Each one of us has a family,’ added Biton.
‘True,’ admitted Dionysius. ‘But then how did Theron of Acragas and Gelon of Syracuse manage seventy years ago to wipe out the Carthaginian army at Himera? I’ll tell you how. Because they had a vast territory from which they could draw all kinds of material and human resources. The Greek cities are just clusters of houses stuck on the cliffs along the coast. The Carthaginians can pick us off one by one. In theory, our troops are superior in terms of weaponry and combat technique, but there is no true chain of command in our armies; someone decides to leave and off he goes. And no one can stop him. Fifteen, twenty thousand men go off at once and all of a sudden you are seriously deficient in numbers. Why? Because they have to go home and sow their fields. Their fields. Do you hear what I’m saying? By Heracles, war is a serious business! It must be fought by professionals.’
‘I don’t agree,’ objected Iolaus. ‘Mercenaries sell themselves to the highest bidder and think nothing of leaving you in the lurch at any time, for any reason. Remember Acragas? It was the desertion of the Campanian mercenaries that left the city defenceless.’
‘That’s not exactly true,’ shot back Dionysius. ‘Mercenaries stick with the winner; not with the loser or whoever looks like the loser. They stick with whoever pays them well, gives them the chance to plunder, knows how to lead them and won’t squander their lives. They care about their skin just like we do, and they know how much it’s worth.’
‘You want a mercenary army?’ asked Heloris with a note of wonder.
‘At least the core, yes. Men who are nothing but soldiers; who spend all their time training, wielding weapons, fencing. Men who haven’t got fields to cultivate or shops to manage, whose only source of income is their sword and their spear. It would be best if they were Greeks. It doesn’t matter from where, but Greeks.’
Leptines got to his feet. ‘I can’t believe my ears. Those bastards are practically at our walls, and here we are talking about what we don’t have and should have. Does anyone have any idea of how we’re going to get out of this one?’
‘Don’t worry,’ replied Dionysius. ‘They’re in for a sound thrashing at our walls. And if they try to come by sea, we’ll send our whole fleet out to sink them. But I don’t think that will be necessary. They’ll see just how tough we can get and they’ll be begging to negotiate. You’ll see. What we have to do now is guard the walls day and night, reinforce the gates and station the fleet at the harbour outlets so that they can’t lock us in. Then we’ll sit and wait.’
‘Wait?’ asked Leptines, astonished.
‘Wait,’ repeated Dionysius.
Each of them left to carry out orders. Philistus sat down at his desk. He had long thought that the events he was witnessing deserved to be written down, and he was sure that what was about to happen would make history. It was going to be the fiercest fight ever fought between Greeks and barbarians, no less important than the Persian Wars narrated by Herodotus in his
History
. He was also convinced that he knew what his friend was planning: Dionysius would build a territorial Syracusan empire without giving a thought to anyone, Greeks or barbarians. He would create a new army, completely faithful to him, and use it in a duel to the death from which the Carthaginian enemy could expect no quarter.
Philistus took a fresh roll of papyrus from the drawer, laid it out and weighed down its sides on the table. He began to write a new chapter. Philistus did not usually dictate, as all those who intended to compose a literary work of any sort were wont to do; he preferred to write in person, like a humble scribe, because he liked to hear the slight sound the quill made as it glided across the papyrus lubricated by the ink, and to see the words being born and chasing one another on the white scroll. In doing so, he savoured a sense of power greater than any in the entire world: that of setting down human events for the years and perhaps the centuries to come. The power of representing men, their vices and their virtues, on the basis of his own irrevocable judgement. He was at that moment the
histor
: he who narrates because he knows; he who knows because he has seen and heard. But the terms of his judgement obeyed only the categories of his mind, and naught else.
And he was writing about Dionysius.
He had witnessed the destruction of splendid cities, the massacre of thousands of men, women and children, the deportation of entire peoples and, worst of all, the rape and murder of his beloved wife when she was still very young, killed by his own fellow citizens in a time of internal disorder. As most often occurs under such circumstances, two very strong concepts were branded into his mind: the first was that democracy is inefficient when it becomes necessary to make immediate decisions and conduct operations that involve radical choices; furthermore, a democracy is incapable of containing the excesses of either the lawless individual or the mob. The second was that any live Carthaginian in the land of Sicily was to be considered a threat for the existence of the Sicilian Greeks and therefore was better off dead. As far as the future of the Greeks was concerned, Dionysius was influenced by the disheartening example of the metropolises. Eighty years earlier, all of the main cities of Greece had allied and succeeded in defeating the empire of the Great King of the Persians, the largest that had ever existed on this earth, and yet now an endless struggle was going on among those very cities as they set themselves up for nothing but ruin. He was thus firmly committed to preventing this from happening in the West, and was sure that the only way of doing so was through the conquest and unification of the Greeks of Sicily and Italy in a single state. Autocracy, in his frame of mind, was the only way to achieve this. He was aware, I believe, of how much solitude a man who would govern on his own must face, how much danger and deceit. But – at least at first – he was able to count on the friends he had known since childhood and on his brother Leptines. They had lost their parents when Dionysius was but a boy.
Doricus was the son of a grain merchant and his mother was Italian, from Medma. He was the same age as Dionysius, and showed great daring. He had participated in the Olympic games as a boxer when he was an adolescent and had won in his category. He had taken part in all the military campaigns, receiving many wounds, whose scars he was wont to show with great pride.
Iolaus, just a bit older than they were, was attentive and reflective, virtues that he had developed by dedicating himself to his studies with a number of teachers. He was said to have attended Pitagoric schools in Italy, at Sybaris and Croton, where he had learned much about the secrets of the human body as well as the spirit.
Biton had survived a twin brother whose name was Cleobis, a mythological name like his own, recalling the heroes who had dragged their mother’s chariot to the Temple of Hera, winning immortality. He was very strong, but quite calm-natured. Having lost his identical brother, he identified him with Dionysius and was completely devoted to him.
Besides being a brother, Leptines was a friend, the most one could hope for from life, but his impulsive temperament, his fondness for wine and for women and his sudden rages made him unreliable in war, where the valour and bravery that he possessed in great quantity were not always enough to ensure the favourable outcome of the operations.
In any case, this was the risk Dionysius took: founding his government on irreplaceable personal and family relationships. If they should fail him due to the whims of fortune or fall in battle or to disease, the solitude of the autocrat was destined to become greater and greater, and his soul ever more arid and similar to a desert . . .
Himilco arrived at Syracuse in early autumn and set up camp in the swampy plains near the mouth of the Cyanes river, the only place which could accommodate so many thousands of men. He soon sent a herald to Syracuse proposing an armistice. It was thus evident that deploying the Carthaginian army outside the city was more a manifestation of power than an actual threat. They were meant to strike fear rather than produce a true attack.
Dionysius received Himilco’s ambassador in Ortygia, in the mercenaries’ barracks. He had abandoned the house with the trellis in Achradina long before, and the grapevines had overrun the place, creeping even along the ground. They bore no fruit because there was no one left to prune them.
He met with the messenger in the fencing chamber, a large, bare room, hung on all four walls with spears and swords. He received him seated on a solitary stool, barefoot but wearing a breastplate and greaves and carrying a sword. The Corinthian helmet on a hanger next to him seemed a cold, impassive mask of war. ‘What does your master want from me?’ he asked the ambassador, an African Greek from Cyrene, a short man with kinky hair who sold precious purple-dyed cloth for a living.
‘Noble Himilco,’ he began, ‘wants to show his generosity. He intends to spare your city, although he could conquer it swiftly, as he has all the others . . .’
Dionysius said not a word, but stared at the man with a gaze as penetrating as the tip of his spear.
‘He is willing to allow the Sicilian Greeks to return to their cities, and to dedicate themselves to commerce and other activities. They must not rebuild the walls, however, and must pay taxes to Carthage.’
‘Fucking bastard,’ Dionysius thought. ‘You want to repopulate the cities because you need their money and their taxes.’ But he spoke with a detached tone, feigning indifference. ‘Are there other conditions?’
‘No,’ replied the ambassador. ‘Nothing else. But noble Himilco will also allow you to ransom the prisoners of war he has captured during the past campaigns.’
‘I see,’ said Dionysius.
The ambassador seemed uncomfortable as he waited for an answer that was not forthcoming. Dionysius glared at him in silence, his stare so icy that the poor man’s blood ran cold. He felt that he should ask for a reply but he did not dare. He had the impression that if he broke the silence, the whole world would collapse. He finally gathered up his courage and said: ‘What . . . what must I tell noble Himilco?’