III.2 The Betrayal and the Feast

By now the city measured time no longer in days but in surviving habits: the bread that returned each morning to the stalls of Achradina, the sentries relieving one another with nothing left to expect, the children who had learned to play inside the quarries as in any ordinary house. The old king had been dead two winters, the grandson who succeeded him had lasted less than a year, and the government of the city had passed into the hands of men who had chosen Carthage against Rome — a choice one pays for, sooner or later, with a siege. Eighteen months had taught the city one thing: that habit is stronger than fear, and that one can learn to sleep beside one's own murderer, provided the murderer stays outside the walls.

It was on one of those almost peaceful nights that the Roman sentries seized, as he tried to force the harbour blockade, a certain Damippus, a Spartan1 — middle-aged, ambassador or soldier of fortune or both at once, sent to keep alive the illusion that Sparta had not forgotten its most distant colony. He was no one, for the great history. But the great history, that week, entered Syracuse by the smallest gate: a prisoner to be ransomed.

The Syracusans wanted their Spartan back — not out of love for Damippus, probably, but because every hostage is a pretext for speaking with the enemy without having to admit one wishes to — and they sent envoys to negotiate the price. Marcellus, though he commanded an army and a siege wearing itself down with sickness and boredom no less than the Syracusans, found the time — found, one might say, the relish — to attend those talks himself, more than once, beneath a stretch of wall where the two armies had by now grown used to meeting like discourteous neighbours. A consul who comes down to haggle over a prisoner of little account is, in itself, already a strange thing. None of the Syracusans who went there to parley was astonished enough by it.

Perhaps because Marcellus, at Syracuse, was not altogether a stranger. For fifty years the city had had in Rome a faithful friend, as long as the old king lived: fifty years of grain shipped in the famines, of ships lent, of courteous embassies, of an alliance held together not by a treaty but by the word of a single man. Marcellus had known that man. He had eaten at his table, before the crown passed to a grandson who had thrown it away in a few months like a toy too large for his hands. To negotiate a ransom beneath those same walls, and meanwhile to be measuring them to open them by stealth, must have had for him a savour that none of his officers could have named — not shame, not yet, but something very close to it.

For Marcellus, while he spoke of ransoms, was looking at something else. He observed with care an ill-guarded tower, able to take in men unseen, with the wall beside it easy to scale2. A tower like any other, eaten away by the salt, with a wall beside it that someone, generations before, had judged too awkward to scale to deserve a true garrison. Talk after talk, without haste — for time always works for the besieger, never for the besieged — the height, from the frequent approaching and conversing near the tower, was well calculated3. And in the Roman camp, in silence, without a single Syracusan sentry thinking to ask himself why those talks repeated themselves so often, the ladders were made ready4. Ladders. Of the exact measure. Awaiting only a night distracted enough across the whole city at once.

The night came with a name and an excuse: Artemis. The goddess of the hunt and of wild things, she who will not be possessed, had her day even in a city under siege — perhaps especially in a city under siege, for no people desires freedom with more violence than one that has it no longer. On the island of Ortygia, where the spring of Arethusa welled up sweet a step from the salt sea — the so well-known myth of Alpheus and Arethusa5 reminded anyone who cared to listen that even the purest water carries within itself the memory of a pursuit — the priests had lit the braziers since sunset. The streets of Achradina and Tyche filled with torches and badly watered wine; on the steps of the temples some danced with that happy clumsiness of those who have stopped, for one night, counting the days that remain. In the porticoes they sold roasted fish and white bread, the real kind, the kind that for months had been seen only in children's dreams; someone had even found honey. Mothers brought their daughters to offer garlands at the altar, and the daughters, for one night, thought not of their brothers on the walls but of the young men watching them dance.

In the workshop of Archimedes, where for months the mechanical hands had been forged that lifted the Roman ships out of the sea like toys, young Damon set down his tools and went out to drink with the others. He was twenty, and his back already marked by the ropes of the windlasses; for one evening he wished to be only a boy of Syracuse, not the apprentice of the greatest genius in the world. The old man did not come to the feast. He never came. The feasts of men, he said, were an elaborate way of ceasing to think; and he, that night as on so many others, stayed bent over the sand of the courtyard, chasing a number that none of those dancing outside could have even so much as named.

Damon adored him, that old man, with the slightly irritated devotion of one who has chosen to serve something greater than himself and can never quite forgive him for it. He owed him the hands he had — hands that knew how to draw a cable taut, calibrate a counterweight, read a diagram cut in wax without fully understanding it and build it all the same, perfect. What he did not owe him, though, was that distance: Archimedes' capacity to stand in a burning city as though the city were a background noise, and his circles the only real thing. Damon did not know how to stand like that. He needed the wine, the girl who laughed beside him, the noise of the feast to still believe that something was worth defending. Perhaps — he thought, with the brief lucidity that wine sometimes grants before taking it away — that was precisely why he was of use to a man like Archimedes: because someone had to remain in the world of the senses, while the old man dwelt elsewhere.

Hippocrates, who by now governed the city more than any other, had that week other things on his mind: Appius Claudius was pressing his land forces against the outer quarters with a regularity that seemed made on purpose to tire the attention, a feigned assault here, a skirmish there, never enough to alarm, always enough to occupy every available sentry elsewhere. Hippocrates had the guards doubled on the most exposed walls and considered his duty discharged. He did not think of the Hexapylon, nor of the ill-guarded tower near which, for weeks, a Roman consul had been going to bargain over a prisoner of little account. Why should he have? It was a tower of little account, in a stretch of wall of little account, watched that night by men with wine in their bellies and the feast in their eyes, who looked more often at the torches of the temples than at the darkness of the enemy camp.

The feast he awaited came. ἑορτὴν Ἀρτέμιδι τοὺς Συρακουσίους ἄγοντας καὶ πρὸς οἶνον ὡρμημένους καὶ παιδιὰν παραφυλάξας6 — the Syracusans keeping the feast of Artemis, given over to wine and to play — and Marcellus gave the order. The ladders, of the exact measure, rose against the ill-guarded tower in the most absolute silence an army can produce. Unnoticed, he occupied not only the tower7. One man after another, without a cry, without a clash of bronze against stone — for war, when it wishes, can be as silent as a proof.

Then the rest, before the sky above Epipolae had even begun to lighten: he filled the walls all around with armed men before day broke, and cut through the Hexapylon8. The Six Gates — the Hexapylon, the hinge between the lower city and Epipolae9 which in the treatises of topography occupy a paragraph with a number, a chapter with a title — that night were no paragraph. They were a hole in the darkness through which passed, without a sound, the end of a freedom that the Syracusans, like all who have been free long enough to forget how one becomes so, had ceased to consider fragile.

The torches of Artemis were still burning when the most ancient walls of Syracuse changed masters. In the temples they danced. In the workshop of Archimedes a stylus still scratched the wax, chasing a number that awaited no city. Damon, somewhere in the crowd, laughed at something he would forget before dawn. And the whole city — beautiful, drunk, distracted, in love with its own goddess of the hunt — did not yet know, in that very moment, that it had become the prey.