III.3 The Sack

Cities seen from above, at dawn, all wear the same look of innocence: they seem not yet to know what has already been decided for them.

Marcellus knew it, and for that reason could not take pleasure in it.

The city had fallen on the night of the feast of Artemis, as has been told: not by siege but by a reckoning made during a negotiation over the ransom of a Spartan. Achradina1, the largest and most beautiful of its quarters, had passed from hand to hand before it grew light.

And now it was dawn, and through the Hexapyla Marcellus was descending2 into the city that was his.

His officers went with him, offering their congratulations — to him, for him, and a little for themselves: the longest war of their careers was closing that morning in a quiet descent, no swords drawn, as one goes down into a house to which one already holds the key. Marcellus stopped. He turned back toward the heights, toward the Epipolae3 from which they had come, and looked back at the city he had just finished conquering.

Having looked down from above and considered the greatness and beauty of the city, he wept a long while4, moved to pity by the fate that awaited it, thinking how its form and its aspect would be changed in a little time, once his army had sacked it5.

None of his officers dared tell him it was strange. None of them had ever seen a general weep over his own victory, and none would ever see it again — but all of them, that morning, chose in silence not to remember it. A general who weeps is a general who doubts, and an army encamped for two years beneath hostile walls has no need of a commander who doubts. It needs a commander who has already decided what to do with the city, now that it is his.

Many of his officers were asking that it be burned. No one dared oppose openly the soldiers' claim to enrich themselves by the sack — this Plutarch does not soften — but to the proposal of fire Marcellus would not yield at all. He let run, almost against his will, what he could not prevent: he granted that men might enrich themselves with goods and with slaves, but forbade the touching of free bodies, and ordered that no Syracusan be killed, outraged, or made a slave6. Things, yes; men, no.

It was a fine line, drawn with the same coldness with which Archimedes drew his in the sand — except that here the geometry of the order ran between bodies and things, and let the things fall to one side while the bodies remained, untouched, on the other. The living Syracusans would be neither sold nor killed nor outraged. Their houses, their temples, their gold — those, yes, were already merchandise, from the moment the Hexapyla had opened in the dark. Marcellus could not save everything. He had chosen to save the men and to let them take what the men possessed, as though a city could be stripped of everything but itself.

But this too was a way of saying farewell. A city is never only the bodies that inhabit it: it is also its things, its surface, the way the light strikes a portico that no other portico in the world possesses. To save the men and abandon the things meant saving Syracuse, and at the same time admitting that the Syracuse wept for a moment before, from above, would not survive all the same.

For days the plunder went out through the gates like blood from a wound no one wishes to look at. For it is said that the wealth then carried off from Syracuse was no less than that which, later, was carried off from Carthage7 — very nearly the same sum, of two centuries of Greek power and of Punic power, loaded onto the very ships that had once come to trade, not to despoil.

Not all the city had yet fallen. There remained Ortygia8, the island within the island, where old Hiero had had his palace and where a garrison still held out: it too would fall, but not by force of siege: they went on to sack the rest of the city as well, taken shortly after by treachery, save for the royal treasures: these were reserved for the public treasury9. Even kings, it would seem, remain the property of the state even in death.

But that morning Ortygia was still intact, and from where he stood — descended now almost to the Great Harbour — Marcellus could see it whole, clasped in its double embrace of water, just as those described it who had visited it before the war: a city so great as to seem made of four very great cities10 — and of those four, the Island was the first and the oldest, where there still rose, among the temples, a spring of fresh water called Arethusa, of incredible size, full of fish11.

Marcellus did not know that spring except by report. He knew only that it was still free, still whole, and for an instant — an instant his officers did not see, because they were already looking elsewhere, toward the plunder — he envied the water its indifference.

He decided, in that instant or in one much like it, what to do with the stones, now that he had already decided about the men: he spared all the buildings, public and private, sacred and profane, as though he had come with his army to defend them, not to storm them12. Not everything, however, stayed where it was. The most exact statues, the most beautiful paintings — those that generations of refined tyrants had gathered to make Syracuse the most sumptuous city of Sicily — took the way of the sea, toward Rome: what was carried to Rome we still see by the temple of Honour and Virtue, and in other places13. Much, however, remained where it had always been: at Syracuse he left very many distinguished works; no god did he violate, none did he touch14.

Not all Romans would have done the same. That same year Fabius Maximus took Tarentum and did not touch its statues, leaving to his soldiers a phrase that would outlive him: let us leave the Tarentines these gods in their wrath15, he had said. Marcellus, that morning, was thinking as yet neither of Fabius nor of the critics who would one day accuse him of having paraded even the gods as prisoners. He was thinking — insofar as a man on horseback after a sleepless night can think — that a city had never quite belonged to him until he had seen it whole, from above, a single instant, before he began to take it apart piece by piece.

He asked, that morning or one very near it, whether there still lived in the city a certain geometer of whom tales were told even at Rome — an old man who could move ships with a single finger. Not out of clemency alone: perhaps out of the same envy he had felt before the spring he had never seen, the envy of one who commands armies for a man who commanded only circles. For it is said that he himself had sought out that Archimedes, a man of the highest genius and learning, and that, when he learned he had been killed, he took it very hard16. But this — that learned, that took it very hard — belonged still to the future.

That morning Marcellus knew only that the most beautiful city of Sicily was his, that he had wept to have it, and that in some shaded courtyard, behind walls he had just finished violating, someone was probably still drawing as though nothing had changed.

He was not wrong.