on in the heart of the city, so that their sleep might be wholly undisturbed by noise. . . . . And a Sybarite who had gone to Lacedæmon, and had been invited to the public meal, after he had sat on their wooden benches and partaken of their fare, said that he had been astonished at the fearlessness of the Lacedæmonians when he knew it only by report; but now that he had seen them, he thought that they did not excel other men, for he thought that any brave man had much rather die than be obliged to live such a life as they did." Then there is another story, among the "miscellaneous anecdotes," of a Sybarite who was asked if he had slept well. He said, No, that he believed he had a crumpled rose-leaf under him in the night. And there is yet another, of one of them who said that it made his back ache to see another man digging. I have asked Polly, as I write, to look in Mark Lemon's Jest-Book for these stories. They are not in the index there. But I dare say they are in Cotton Mather and Jeremy Taylor. Any way, they are bits of very cheap Greek. Now it is on these stories that the reputation of the Sybarites in modern times appears to depend. Now look at them. This Sybarite at Sparta said, that in war death was often easier than the hardships of life. Well, is not that true? Have not thousands of brave men said it? When the English and French got themselves established on the wrong side of Sebastopol, what did that engineer officer of the French say to somebody who came to inspect his works? He was talking of St. Arnaud, their first commander. "Cunning dog," said he, "he went and died." Death was easier than life. But nobody ever said he was a coward or effeminate because he said this. Why, if Mr. Fields would permit an excursus in twelve numbers here, on this theme, we would defer Sybaris to the 1st of April, 1868, while we illustrated the Sybarite's manly epigram, which these stupid Spartans could only gape at, but could not understand. Then take the rose-leaf story. Suppose by good luck you were breakfasting with General Grant, or Pelissier, or the Duke of Wellington. Suppose you said, "I hope you slept well,” and the great soldier said, “No, I did not; I think a rose-leaf must have stood up edgewise under me." Would you go off and say in your book of travels that the Americans, or the French, or the English are all effeminate pleasureseekers, because one of them made this nice little joke? Would you like to American" go down have the name to all time, defined as Webster * defines Sybarite? 66 A-MER'I-CAN, n. [Fr. Américain, Lat. Americanus, from Lat. America, a continent noted for the effeminacy and voluptuousness of its inhabitants.] A person devoted to luxury and pleasure. Should you think that was quite fair for your great-grandson's grandson's descendant in the twenty-seventh remove to read, who is going to be instructed about Queen Victoria and William the Conqueror? Worst of all, and most frequently quoted, is the story of the coppersmiths. The Sybarites, it is said, ordered that the coppersmiths and brassfounders should all reside in one part of the city, and bang their respective metals where the neighbors had voluntarily chosen to listen to banging. What if they did? Does not every manufacturing city practically do the same thing? What did Nicholas Tillinghast use to say to the boys and girls at Bridgewater? "The tendency of cities is to resolve themselves into order." Is not Wall Street at this hour a street of bankers? Is not the Boston Pearl Street a street of leather men? Is not the bridge at Florence given over to jewellers? Was not my valise, there, bought in Rome at the street of trunk-makers? Do not all booksellers like to huddle together as long as they can? And when Ticknor and Fields move a few inches from Washington *I am writing in Westerly's snuggery, and in I dare say Providence they believe in Webster. it is worse in Worcester. A good many things are. Street to Tremont Street, do not Russell and Bates, and Childs and Jenks, and De Vries and Ibarra, follow them as soon as the shops can be got ready? "But it is the motive," pipes up the old gray ghost of propriety, who started this abuse of the Sybarites in some stupid Spartan black-broth shop (English that for cafe), two thousand two hundred and twenty-two years ago, which ghost I am now belaboring, "it is the motive. The Sybarites moved the brass-founders, because they wanted to sleep after the brass-founders got up in the morning." What if they did, you old rat in the arras ? Is there any law, human or divine, which says that at one and the same hour all men shall rise from bed in this world? My excellent milkman, Mr. Whit, rises from bed daily at two o'clock. If he does not, my family, including Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, will not have their fresh milk at 7.37, at which time we breakfast or pretend to. But because he rises at two, must we all rise at two, and sit wretchedly whining on our respective camp-stools, waiting for Mr. Whit to arrive with the grateful beverage? Many is the time, when I have been watching with a sick child at five in a summer morning, when the little fellow had just dropped into a grateful morning doze, that I have listened and waited, dreading the arrival of the Providence morning express. Because I knew that, a mile and a half out of Boston, the engine would begin to blow its shrill whistle, for the purpose, I believe, of calling the Boston station-men to their duty. Three or four minutes of that skre-e-e-e must there be, as that train swept by our end of the town. And hoping and wishing never did any good; the train would come, and the child would wake. Is not that a magnificent power for one engine-man to have over the morning rest of thirty thousand sleeping people, because you, old Spartan croaker, who can't sleep easy underground it seems, want to have everybody waked up at the same hour in the morning. When I hear NO. 117. 5 VOL. XX. that whistle, and the fifty other whistles of the factories that have since followed its wayward and unlicensed example, I have wished more than once that we had in Boston a little more of the firm government of Sybaris. For if, as it would appear from these instances, Sybaris were a city which grew to wealth and strength by the recognition of the personal rights of each individual in the state, - if Sybaris were a republic, where the individual was respected, had his rights, and was not left to the average chances of the majority of men, then Sybaris had found out something which no modern city has found out, and which it is a pity we have all forgotten. I do not say that I went through all this speculation at the Latin school. I got no further there than to see that the Sybarites had got a very bad name, and that the causes did not appear in the Greek Reader. I supposed there were causes somewhere, which it was not proper to put into the Greek Reader. Perhaps there were. But if there were, I have never found them, — not being indeed very well acquainted with the lines of reading in which those who wanted to find them should look for them. WHAT I did find of Sybaris, when I could read Greek rather more easily, and could get access to some decent atlases, was briefly this. Well forward in the hollow of the arched foot of the boot of Italy, two little rivers run into the Gulf of Tarentum. One was named Crathis, one was named Sybaris. Here stood the ancient city of Sybaris, founded, about the time of Romulus or Numa Pompilius, by a colony from Greece. For two hundred years and more, almost as long, dear Atlantic, as your beloved Boston has subsisted, — Sybaris flourished, and was the Rome of that region, ruling it from sea to sea. The walls of the city were six miles in circumference, while the suburbs covered the banks of the Crathis for a space of seven miles. At last the neighboring state of Crotona, under the lead of Milon the Athlete (he of the calf and ox and split log), the Heenan or John Morrissey of his day, vanquished the more refined Sybarites, turned the waters of the Crathis upon their prosperous city, and destroyed it. But the Sybarites had had that thing happen too often to be discouraged. Five times, say the historians, had Sybaris been destroyed, and five times they built it up again. This time the Athenians sent ten vessels, with men to help them, under Lampon and Xenocritus. And they, with those who stood by the wreck, gave their new city the name of Thurii. Among the new colonists were Herodotus, and Lysias the orator, who was then a boy. The spirit that had given Sybaris its comfort and its immense population appeared in the legislation of the new state. It received its laws from CHARONDAS, one of the noblest legislators of the world. Study these laws and you will see that in the young Sybaris the individual had his rights, which the public preserved for him, though he were wholly in a minority. There is an evident determination that a man shall live while he lives, and that, too, in no sensual interpretation of the words. Of the laws made by Charondas for the new Sybaris a few are preserved. 1. A calumniator was marched round the city in disgrace, crowned with tamarisk. "In consequence," says the Scholiast, "they all left the city." O for such a result, from whatever legislation, in our modern Pedlingtons, great or little ! 2. All persons were forbidden to associate with the bad. 3. "He made another law, better than these, and neglected by the older legislators. For he enacted that all the sons of the citizens should be instructed in letters, the city paying the salaries of the teachers. For he held that the poor, not being able to pay their teach ers from their own property, would be deprived of the most valuable discipline." There is FREE EDUCATION for you, two thousand and seventy-six years before the date of your first Massachusetts free school; and the theory of free education completely stated. 4. Deserters or cowards in battle had to sit in women's dresses in the Forum three days. 5. With regard to the amendment of laws, any man or woman who moved one did it with a noose round his neck, and was hanged if the people refused it. Only three laws were ever amended, therefore, all which are recorded in the history. Observe that the women might move amendments, and think of the simplicity of legislation ! 6. The law provided for cash payments, and the government gave no protection for those who, sold on credit. 7. Their communication with other nations was perfectly free. I might give more instances. I should like to tell some of the curious stories which illustrate this simple legislation. Poor Charondas himself fell a victim to it. One of the laws provided that no man should wear a sword into the public assembly. No Cromwells there! Unfortunately, by accident, Charondas wore his own there one day. Brave fellow! when the fault was pointed out, he killed himself with it. Now do you wonder that a city where there were no calumniators, no long credit, no bills at the grocers, no fighting at town meetings, no amendments to the laws, no intentional and open association with profligates, and where everybody was educated by the state to letters, proved a comfortable place to live in? It is of the old Sybaris that the coppersmith and the rose-leaf stories are told; and it was the new Sybaris that made the laws. But do you not see that there is one spirit in the whole? Here was a nation which believed that the highest work of a nation was to train its people. It did not believe in fight, like Milon or Heenan or the old Spartans; it did not believe in legislation, like Massachusetts and New York; it did not believe in commerce, like Carthage and England. It believed in men and women. It respected men and women. It educated men and women. It gave their rights to men and women. And so the Spartans called them effeminate. And the Greek Reader made fun of them. But perhaps the people who lived there were indifferent to the opinions of the Spartans and of the Greek Reader. Herodotus lived there till he died; wrote his history there, among other things. Lysias, the orator, took part in the administration. It is not from them, you may be sure, that you get the anecdotes which ridicule the old city of Sybaris! You and I would probably be satisfied with such company as that of Herodotus and Charondas and Lysias. So we hunt the history down to see if there may be lodgings to let there this summer, but only to find that it all pales out in the ignorance of our modern days. The name gets changed into Lupiæ; but there it turns out that Pausanias made "a strange mistake," and should have written Copia,- which was perhaps Cossa, or sometimes Cosa. Pyrrhus appears, and Hadrian rebuilds something, and the "Oltramontani,” whoever they may have been, ravage it, and finally the Saracens fire and sack it; and so, in the latest Italian itinerary you can find, there is no post-road goes near it, only a strada rotabile (wheeltrack) upon the hills; and, alas! even the rotabile gives way at last, and all the map will own to is a strada pedonale, or foot-path. But the map is of the less consequence, when you find that the man who edited it had no later dates than the beginning of the last century, when the family of Serra had transferred the title to Sybaris to a Genoese family without a name, who received from it forty thousand ducats yearly, and would have received more, if their agents had been more faithful. There the place fades out of history, and you find in your Swinburne, “that the locality has never been thoroughly examined"; in your Smith's Diction ary, that "the whole subject is very obscure, and a careful examination still much needed"; in the Cyclopædia, that the site of Sybaris is lost. Craven saw the rivers Crathis and Sybaris. He seems not to have seen the wall of Sybaris, which he supposed to be under water. He does say of Cassano, the nearest town he came to, that "no other spot can boast of such advantages." In short, no man living who has written any book about it dares say that anybody has looked upon the certain site of Sybaris for more than a hundred years.* If a man wanted to write a mythical story, where could he find a better scene? Now is not this a very remarkable thing? Here was a city, which, under its two names of Sybaris or of Thurium, was for centuries the regnant city of all that part of the world. It could call into the field three hundred thousand men, an army enough larger than Athens ever furnished, or Sparta. It was a far more populous and powerful state than ever Athens was, or Sparta, or the whole of Hellas. It invented and carried into effect free popular education, a gift to the administration of free government larger than ever Rome rendered. It received and honored Charondas, the great practical legislator, from whose laws no man shall say how much has trickled down into the Code Napoleon or the Revised Statutes of New York, through the humble * The reader who cares to follow the detail is referred to Diodorus Siculus, XII.; Strabo, VI.; Elian, V. H. 9, c. 24; Athenæus, XII. 518; Plutarch in Pelopidas; Herodotus, V. and VI. Compare Laurent's Geographical Notes, and Wheeler and Gaisford Pliny, III. 15, VII. 22, XVI. 33, VIII. 64, XXXI. 9; Aristotle, Polit. IV. 12, V. 3; Heyne's Opuscula, II. 74: Bentley's Phalaris, 367; Solinus, 2, § 10, "luxuries grossly exaggerated"; Scymnus, 337-360; Aristophanes, Vesp. 1427, 1436; Lycophron, Alex. 1079; Polybius, Gen. Hist. II. 3, on the confederation of Sybaris, Kroton, and Kaulonia, "a perplexing statement," says Grote, "showing that he must have conceived the history of Sybaris in a very different form from that in which it is commonly represented"; third volume of De Non, who disagrees with Magnan as to the site of Sybaris, and says the sea-shore is uninhabitable! Tuccagni Orlandini, Vol. XI., Supplement, p. 294; besides the dictionaries and books of travels, including Murray. I have availed myself, without other reference, of most of these authorities. studies of the Roman jurists. It maintained in peace, prosperity, happiness, and, as its maligners say, in comfort, an immense population. If they had not been as comfortable as they were, - if a tenth part of them had received alms every year, and a tenth part were flogged in the public schools every year, — if one in forty had been sent to prison every year, as in the happy city which publishes the "Atlantic Monthly,". then Sybaris, perhaps, would never have got its bad name for luxury. Such a city lived, flourished, ruled, for hundreds of years. Of such a city all that you know now with certainty is, that its coin is "the most beautifully finished in the cabinets of ancient coinage"; and that no traveller even pretends to be sure that he has been to the site of it for more than a hundred years. That speaks well for your nineteenth century. Now the reader who has come thus far will understand that I, having come thus far, in twenty-odd years since those days of teetering on the pea-green settee, had always kept Sybaris in the background of my head, as a problem to be solved, and an inquiry to be followed to its completion. There could hardly have been a man in the world better satisfied than I to be the hero of the adventure which I am now about to describe. IF the reader remembers anything about Garibaldi's triumphal entry into Porto Cavallo in Sicily in the spring of 1859, he will remember that, between the months of March and April in that year, the great chieftain made, in that wretched little fishing haven, a long pause, which was not at the time understood by the journals or by their military critics, and which, indeed, to this hour has never been publicly explained. I suppose I know as much about it as any man now living. But I am not writing Garibaldi's memoirs, nor, indeed, my own, excepting so far as they relate to Sybaris; and it is strictly nobody's business to inquire as to that detention, unless it interest the ex-king of Na ples, who may write to me, if he chooses, addressing Frederic Ingham, Esq., Waterville, N. H. Nor is it anybody's business how long I had then been on Garibaldi's staff. From the number of his staff-officers who have since visited me in America, very much in want of a pair of pantaloons, or a ticket to New York, or something with which they might buy a glass of whiskey, I should think that his staff alone must have made up a much more considerable army than Naples, or even Sybaris, ever brought into the field. But where these men were when I was with him, I do not know. I only know that there was but a handful of us then, hardworked fellows, good-natured, and not above our work. Of its military details we knew wretchedly little. But as we had no artillery, ignorance was less dangerous in the chief of artillery; as we had no maps to draw, poor draughtsmanship did not much embarrass the engineer in chief. For me, I was nothing but an aid, and I was glad to do anything that fell to me as well as I knew how. And, as usual in human life, I found that a cool head, a steady resolve, a concentrated purpose, and an unselfish readiness to obey, carried me a great way. I listened instead of talking, and thus got a reputation for knowing a great deal. When the time to act came, I acted without waiting for the wave to recede; and thus I sprang into many a boat dry-shod, while people who believed in what is popularly called prudence missed their chance, and either lost the boat or fell into the water. This is by the way. It was under these circumstances that I received my orders, wholly secret and unexpected, to take a boat at once, pass the straits, and cross the Bay of Tarentum, to communicate at Gallipoli with no matter whom. Perhaps I was going to the "Castle of Otranto." A hundred years hence anybody who chooses will know. Meanwhile, if there should be a reaction in Otranto, I do not choose to shorten anybody's neck for him. Well, it was five in the afternoon, — |