January 2009
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John Simpson discovers myths and heavy metal on a trip to southern Italy
‘It seems to me,’ writes PG Wodehouse somewhere, ‘that the proper place for these people who collect things is a loony bin.’ Absolutely right. Collectors are obsessives, who need protecting from themselves. I’m one myself, and I have a houseful of 19th-century books, Russian busts, Northern Sung ceramics, African masks, Afghan weaponry and pre-Columbian figures to prove it. It drives my family mad: madder even than I am.
Yet an interest in antiquarian things does have its uses. In a way, it’s why I’m here. Syracuse is quite superb, as I always expected it to be. True, we have scarcely come here at the best time, since the temperature is in the 90s, and the man we are renting our villa from is so pernickety about period correctness that he won’t install air conditioning. You can get a lot of mosquitoes in non-air-conditioned rooms in Sicily.
Never mind. We’re by the sea here, and there are plenty of good places to eat, and – best of all – we’re a short drive from Syracuse itself, which is, or was, the city of Euainetos. Now I know it’s not exactly a snappy name, but anyone who’s interested in such things will know that it belonged to one of the world’s great artists. He designed the coins of Syracuse between 415 and 390BC. And I don’t mean the ancient equivalents of the dull, workaday things in our pockets today – pounds and euros and other bits of coloured base metal. I mean the heavy silver decadrachms of ancient Greece, 4cm across and more than 40g in weight, which lie in the palm of your hand and glow with their beauty.
Actually, I have to admit that I have never held a Greek decadrachm in the palm of my hand: they’re far too valuable for dealers or museums to allow stray passers-by to pick them up and play with them. And as for collecting them, forget it. A good coin by Euainetos will cost you as much as a new Bentley.
One in particular will cost you even more. It was minted around 380BC and shows the elegant head of the nymph Arethusa on one side, with dolphins swimming round her. On the other is a chariot drawn by four magnificent horses with Nike, the god of victory, flying low to crown the driver with a laurel wreath. The sculpting of the horses, the locks of Arethusa’s hair and the sinuous bodies of the dolphins is quite unforgettable. It’s a lot to pack into 4cm: like putting a Raphael on a postage stamp.
My knowledge of ancient Syracusan economics being distinctly sketchy, I’ve no idea what a decadrachm like Euainetos’s would have bought you. Quite a lot even then, I suspect. But the reason he designed these wonderful coins is slightly depressing. They are to celebrate a battle during the terrible 27-year Peloponnesian War of 431-404BC between Athens, the shining light of democracy, and Sparta, the ferocious dictatorship. We all root for Athens, of course, but towards the end of the war, the Athenians got a bit above themselves and decided to invade Syracuse to grab its strategic resources. The Syracusans surprised everyone by scoring a devastating victory. In 413BC, the entire Athenian fleet and army were destroyed, and the poor Athenians who were taken prisoner lived out the rest of their lives in the Syracusan stone quarries. Athens never really recovered, and although they were unquestionably the good guys, they eventually lost the war. Which just goes to show you can’t always trust history to do the right thing.
Today the original part of Syracuse, the island of Ortygia where the first Greek settlers landed when they founded the city in 734BC, is more like a set from one of the best Italian comedies, Divorce Italian Style, which starred Marcello Mastroianni and was about his efforts to get the Mafia to murder his ghastly wife. The alleyways are in deep shadow, and people peer out at you from behind the shutters to see who’s making the noise outside. Syracuse is blessedly free of tourists at the height of summer, and the only people who were sitting in our little café for lunch were all locals. The place, with its big cushions and low seats, had a distinctly North African feel: Sicily has a dozen major influences, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Normans, and Africa, just across the shimmering water, is one of them.
As we wandered round Ortygia, I wanted to find the spring which, supposedly, was formed when the river god Alpheus caught Arethusa, the nymph whom Euainetos engraved so stunningly on his coins, as she took a bath in the sea. She called on the gods for help, and the goddess Artemis turned her into a fountain. On second thoughts, perhaps Arethusa should have kept quiet.
By now it was getting seriously hot, and the shutters on the few shops – Syracuse today isn’t a particularly prosperous place – were closed up. It was no time to be walking round with our two-year-old son, so to Rafe’s disappointment (since I was carrying him, and the effort was all mine), we headed back to our villa and lay under the fan. Now we’ll be spending most of our holiday on the beach.
We’ll go back to Syracuse in future, I hope, and see all the things we’d read about in the guidebook but were too hot to visit: the vast classical ruins, the temple which became a Christian church and then a mosque, the place where Archimedes jumped out of his bath shouting ‘eureka!’. Rafe will enjoy that. And maybe we’ll find out some more about the man whose coins brought us here: Euainetos. But I still won’t be collecting his work. I’m not that mad.
John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected British Airways flights.
