Sicily: The Annular of Wills

Visiting one of the most interesting places on earth, 2500 years into its future.  

Discovering Sicily

After circumstances swirled together last summer, my wife and I decided to spend eight days on the boiling island of Sicily—a dry, triangular chunk of rock, hills, and volcanoes in the middle of the Middle Sea.

If Japan is the land of the rising sun, Sicily is the land of the burning sun. In the most famous novel about Sicily, The Leopard, author Giuseppe Tomasi calls the Sicilian sun “the annular of wills.” He’s right. It slows you, tires you, and then cripples you into the shade where you lay idle like an unemployed teenager on summer break.

While some Americans and Northern Europeans begrudge Sicilians for their laziness, they do so far away from that burning sun. If these industrious northern types ever spent a long summer day in Palermo, their Protestant work ethic would melt like gelato, surrendering to the Mediterranean joys of sleeping late, drinking early, and never talking about tomorrow.

Closer to Carthage (sorry, Tunisia) than Rome, Sicily still feels ancient and alone. Not exactly European or North African, Sicily just lingers and says, “Go ahead, figure me out.”

For three thousand years, this spot in the sun has been conquered, reconquered, and surrendered by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, French, Spanish, British, Americans, and for now, the [Northern] Italians. 

After talking to the locals and reading their history, “Sicilian” seems to be an undefined identity. Some think of themselves as more Sicilian than Italian, while others don’t. Some think there should be a bridge to Italy, while others don’t. Some say there’s still a mafia, while others politely change the subject. Never quite putting my finger on what it means to be Sicilian seems to be why I fell in love with this remarkable place.

To paraphrase Walt Whitman, Sicily is filled with multitudes, an amalgamation of ideas, cultures, citizens, visitors, conquerors, and landlords. It is the most amalgamized piece of real estate in world history. Which for me makes it one of the most interesting and mysterious. Exploring its deep history is the historical equivalent of diving down the Mariana Trench. The deeper you go, the weirder shit you'll find.

Walking its streets and roaming its hills, you see Greek columns, Roman arches, Byzantine murals, Norman towers, and Spanish cathedrals. You see rows of vineyards, groves of olive trees, quarries of limestone, and hills crowned with thousand-year-old cities where alley cats prowl and whiffs of baking bread, hot coffee, and fresh tobacco remind you that these Sicilians might have this whole life thing figured out.  

When I arrived, three thousand years of civilization had passed. I had a lot of catching up to do. I was ready to explore the wreckage of history. What a beautiful disaster it turned out to be.

Drifting Back in Time

After meeting up with our dear friends, Nate, Margaret, and their two teenage daughters, my wife Chanda booked a motorboat with a guide who steered us around the ancient harbor of Syracuse along Sicily’s southeast coast.

Syracuse. It’s one of the most famous and wealthy harbor cities of antiquity, a city I’ve read about in books ranging from Stephen Pressfield’s Tides of War to one published 2500 years before, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.

After I executed one hell of a parallel parking job in this cramped city, we walked beneath the annulling sun to the harbor. Soon we boarded our small boat which reminded me of that long, sleek, wooden speedboat Indiana Jones zoomed around Venice in during “The Last Crusade.”

As we unmoored and got underway, I looked up at the city walls and thought of the Second Punic War. In 212 B.C., Archimedes, as the myth goes, hatched the idea of reflecting the sun’s power through a thousand mirrors aimed like ancient ray guns at the besieging Roman fleet, hoping to burn them to the waterline. But then, as I often do, I thought back to even older times, because when it comes to Sicilian history, the Punic Wars are just too soon for my barbarian tastes.

My mind drifted back to when Rome was just a backwater shithole ruled by an illiterate war chief. I thought back to when Ancient Greece was the center of the civilized world. And when I think of Greece, I think of the grandaddy of them all: The Peloponnesian War.

A War Like No Other

The Peloponnesian War, what historian Victor Davis Hanson calls, “A War Like No Other,” was fought between Athens and Sparta. This thirty-three-year slugfest between the two most powerful city-states in Greece and their allies effectively ended western democracy and set the stage for Alexander the Great’s conquests a century later. It was a total war. A war of famine, plague, and annihilation. Athens and Sparta fought not only for the supremacy of Greece, but to decide who would rule the Mediterranean world.  

After a six-year intermission from the carnage called the Peace of Nicias, Athens decided to push all their chips forward for a sweeping victory. Led by the swashbuckling Alcibiades, Athens renewed the great war on a new front outside of Greece. They would besiege a wealthy Sicilian city filled with Greek colonists. They would attack Syracuse. 2500 years later, I arrived to see what all the fuss was about.

Despite their trite justifications for the invasion like “democracy,” and “it’s better to fight them there than here,” Athens sought to gain what leading men have always sought from war: wealth, power, and above all, glory. But the gods of war had other plans.

Landing near Syracuse and marching to the city’s walls, the Athenians began building their own rear defensive wall, effectively sandwiching themselves between that rear wall and the city ramparts to their front. Down from this narrow slit between parallel walls, the Athenians established a fortified port for naval resupply.  

As time ticked by, the Syracusans began building a counter wall that jetted out from their city wall with the hope that if they built it fast enough, this new wall could block the Athenian wall-building effort to surround their city. Sniffing an opportunity, Athens’ arch enemy, Sparta, soon joined the fight, invading Sicily along with their ally, the Corinthian Navy. 

The dominate land army of Ancient Greece, the Spartans landed north of the city and attacked the Athenian rear wall. Soon, it was the Athenians who were surrounded, with Spartan troops hammering their rear while the Syracusans slung javelins to their front. As the Athenians fought a two-front battle on land, the Corinthian ships sealed off the Syracusan harbor, blocking all naval resupply to the Athenians and any avenue for escape.

As we zoomed around the harbor, I thought of those Corinthian ships linked boat-to-boat by chains across the harbor’s two-thousand-meter-wide entrance. Pulling our boat near a cave etched into a nearby cliff, we all went for a swim.

Splashing into the warm blue, my first thought was, “Holy shit, I’m swimming in the Mediterranean Sea!” My next thought was that two of the most famous naval battles of the ancient world occurred right here. Ducking underwater, I imagined the hulls of Greek warships, each manned by 170 rowers with a bronze ram weaponed at the bow, knifing across the surface 2500 years before.

Soon I was floating on my back, feeling the old sea wash over me. I tasted the salt and felt my constant companion, the sun, blazing its rays on me from above. With my arms spread wide along a soft backstroke, I felt the wonders of it all—the fully-immersive experience of combining history, nature, and my imagination. It was a moment I’ll never forget.

After my sublime sea dance with Poseidon beneath Appollo’s bandit sun, I climbed aboard our boat. Next, we zoomed towards the place I hoped we would: the mouth of the harbor where those chained Corinthian ships trapped the Athenian army and its fleet.

After a series of desperate and unsuccessful naval attacks to break out of the blockade, the stuck Athenians knew they were screwed. From three sides, the Spartans, Syracusans, and Corinthians tightened their noose. Six hundred miles from their golden city, the beleaguered army of western democracy quivered with thirst, hunger, and regret.

Smelling blood, the Spartans did what they did best: they formed into their tight Hoplite battle formations and killed the enemy at close range. Along with the Syracusans, the Spartan warriors breached the Athenian wall and began their slaughter. Executing the Athenian generals, the Spartans turned their spears on what remained of the panicked Athenians, capturing them as they fled to the surrounding hills—effectively and permanently, annulling their will.

As you might imagine, there was no Geneva Convention or idea about “human rights” in the ancient world. “Woe to the vanquished,” was the only rule. If you surrendered, you became either a slave, a colony, or a corpse. And for those captured Athenians—thousands of them—their end would come with the lash at a nearby rock quarry where they were worked to death. And so, 2500 years into their future, I paid my respects.    

The Wonders and Horrors of History

After we swam the Med, our gang of six toured the on-land ruins of Syracuse. In the hills surrounding the harbor, we walked through a Greek Amphitheatre that existed during the time of the Athenian siege and a Roman coliseum built a few centuries later. As wonderous as those were, nothing compared to what we saw next.

With our wives and his daughters strolling behind us, my pal Nate and I took point. Rounding a corner through the surrounding Greco-Roman ruins, we saw what appeared to be a seventy-five-foot-high slice through a mountain of rock. Shaped high and pointy like an elf’s ear, the Greeks called the cave entrance and tunnel within it, the Ear of Dionysus.

Nate and I were intrigued. We moved in to investigate. It’s worth noting that Nate was a Classics major, wrote his college thesis on the Peloponnesian War, is a published author, and knows way more about this stuff than me. (That said, I make up for my lack of knowledge through high-volume enthusiasm.) For the last twenty-six years, Nate, myself, and two other history-loving Marine buddies still repeat the same inside jokes about the Peloponnesian War. As you can see ladies, we don’t just think about the Roman Empire, we also banter about the facts, fury, and foibles of Ancient Greece.

Treading into Dionysus’ ear is like stepping into a stone age Gothic cathedral, with the high-ceiling tunnel twisting like an S through the excavated rock. Deep into the ear, the acoustics are amazing. You can speak at a normal voice to someone fifty feet away who can hear your voice vibrate down the quarried walls of the canal.   

Nate immediately remembered what this cave was. He said, this is where the Athenians captured by the Spartans and Syracusans were enslaved. With bloody hands swinging worn picks, the emaciated men inside this stone prison 2500 years ago, cracked and pulled down limestone that would later be used to build the temples, villas, and sculptures of Sicily. The byproduct of their excavation was this tunnel, which for the Athenians, became a plantation of death. It was here, where they worked, lived, suffered, and died.

Beneath the vaulted rock, I stepped further inside the dimming tunnel of history, traveling deeper and deeper into the past. Turning the final corner, I saw the very end: the face of history staring back at me. Against the back wall sat a gigantic bronze head thirteen feet high and seven thousand pounds in bulk. With a bulging neck, scarred face, and cracked skull, I saw before me an enslaved Athenian. He’s simultaneously strong and broken. He is a slave. This is where he died. And then it hit me: I am standing inside a tomb.

---

Had this been America, there likely would’ve been a visitor’s center parked outside the cave’s entrance with a theater showing a short documentary—explaining the war, the slavery, the limestone quarry, etc.  But this is Sicily, and they do things different here.  Instead of pushing a narrative down your throat, the Sicilians offer something much more mysterious and surreal. They offer art.

Art gives me the same thing history gives me: a feeling. Art emits a feeling from the artist, a feeling about the subject, and above all, a feeling inside me. At the end of that dark and vaulted stone canal of Dionysus’ ear, sits the truth and consequences of war. The artist who crafted this beleaguered face wants us to feel the horrors of what occurred here. Despite it being so long ago, his art blows the energy these ancient men left behind.

The Fellowship and Gratitude of History

And so, two former U.S. Marines from the twenty-first century, two guys whose country is the Athens of our time, two guys who invaded countries in the name of democracy walked into this cave and felt something with the beleaguered ghosts, some sort of kinship I suppose. Or at least some sort of relief that we are here today, alive beneath the vigor of a Sicilian sun, inside the wonder of ancient history, and feeling the fellowship that history, including all its horrors, provides us all.

After Nate and I walked out of the dark and into the light, we met up with our wives and his daughters, knowing we’d be drinking wine, telling stories, and cooled by an infinity pool later that day. We walked on with smiles, ever thankful that despite our love for the ancient world, we were lucky enough to be born into this one.