I keep being dragged back to the impact the Greeks, and other ancient civilizations, had on Sicily, when I look at pictures of ancient Greek temples. Anyone remotely interested in that subject knows that the best extant examples are in Sicily - Segesta, Agrigento, around Siracusa.
On my trip this April with my friend Alison, we were lucky to be driving through Segesta and Agrigento and seeing these massive (and they are massive) buildings from the autostrada is incredible.
And since I just got back from soaking in a neighboring hot spring, I was also interested to learn that Segesta was famous as a medicinal soaking place. Its hot springs were sulphurous, its founders were reputed by Thucydides to be Trojans and Phocians, who pre-date the Greeks on the island. This is an old, old place.
Segesta kept changing alliances between the Carthaginians and the Athenians, not to her benefit. Eventually she became subject to Carthage, then came under a brutal attack by the Athenian Agathocles, who came to Sicily to war against the Carthaginians. Segesta welcomed him, but for some reason he turned against them and hurled men from catapults, or bound them in brass beds with recesses for their arms and legs, then roasted them alive. What happened to diplomacy?
And I always wondered what happened to Hannibal of Carthage. I always imagined he was trampled by one of his elephants, but of course that wasn't the case. He actually died in Sicily, besieging Agrigento somewhere around 414 B.C. For eight months the siege dragged on but when Agrigento's mercenaries deserted and the Carthaginians poured into the city, the prominent men of Agrigento sealed themselves into the Temple of Athena and set fire to it, preferring death by burning to capture by Carthaginians.
A reflection on war, torture and its ongoing, seemingly never-ending, appearances.
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