Part IX
38
Taranto is in many ways the most remarkable city left to us in all
Magna Graecia... The ancient city spread itself out over the mainland
eastward, its acropolis alone occupying the peninsula, which is now
an island.
Edward Hutton, “Naples and Southern Italy”
THE TWO GREAT PORTS of southern Apulia are Tàranto and Brìndisi, on the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic. Since the third century BC they have been linked across the Heel of Italy by the Via Appia. Famous in Antiquity, they fascinated the travellers, who had read about them in Polybius or Livy. To understand how they saw these venerable cities and what they hoped to find there, you have to look at the history of Taras and Brentesion.
According to legend, Tàranto – in Greek, Taras – was founded by a divinity of that name, son of Poseidon, the god of the Mediterranean, and of the nymph Saturia, who was a daughter of Minos of Crete. She had set out for Italy from Crete with Iapyx (ancestor of the Messapians), but en route she had been raped by Poseidon. Taras arrived in Apulia on a dolphin, having ridden over the sea from Cape Matapan. He was worshipped as a demi-god by the Tarentines, who put him on their coins, and even today he appears on the city arms, riding on his dolphin.
The Cretan elements in the story, however fantastic, are probably significant. Minoan ships could well have visited the Gulf of Tàranto. Strabo says that the Cretans were here before the Spartans while Herodotus thinks that the Messapians came from Crete. (Although Herodotus admits that he is not infallible – “my job is to write down what has been said, but I don’t have to believe it.”) In reality, the Messapians came from the other side of the Adriatic; their pottery, unique in Italy, is relatively common in the Balkans. Yet there were undoubtedly Greek links from a very early date, with a small Mycenean trading colony on a site at Scoglio del Tonno – near today’s railway station – which flourished from about 1400–1200 BC. Even after the collapse of Mycenae, when most of the West lost contact, the Messapians kept in touch with Greece.
During the eighth century BC, a band of young Spartans left home because their countrymen refused to treat them as equals. They were bastards, born to women whose husbands had been away at war for nineteen years. The legend is that, led by Phalanthus – another dolphin rider – the youths sailed northwest into the Ionian Sea and founded Taras. What is certain is that Spartans established a colony here at about this time, administered by a ‘nomarch’. Trading with the Messapians, they were no doubt attracted by the marvellous harbour and beautiful coastline. “The landscape, vegetation and intensity of light all recalled Greece”, Francois Lenormant points out: “The first colonists from Hellas must have thought they were still in their own country... Here you enter a new land... which really does deserve the name ‘Greater Greece’.”
Predictably, there was unending war between colonists and natives. Yet there must also have been cultural exchange since the Messapians adopted the newcomers’ alphabet. This was realised in 2003 when archaeologists unearthed a ‘map’ on a shard of black-glazed terracotta, which is the size of a large postage stamp and dates from about 500 BC. The oldest example of western cartography, it shows thirteen towns including Òtranto, Soleto, Ugento, Leuca (Santa Maria di Leuca) and Taras. Save for Taras their names are in Messapian, but written in ancient Greek script.
Until the fifth century Taras was governed by kings. Like all Greek colonies its citizens frequently faced extermination by the natives; as late as 474 BC they suffered a terrible defeat. However, they won a decisive victory in 460 at Carbina, when, as Hutton puts it, “the Messapian women were outraged upon the altars of their gods with such refinements of lust that one must suppose an extraordinary corruption of manners among the Tarantines.” Carbina is modern Carovigno.
During the fourth century BC, its most prosperous period, Taras had a population of 300,000 and covered much the same area as modern Tàranto. Its first citadel was an acropolis, on a rock on what was then an island, but is now the peninsula occupied by the Old Town, guarding the entrance to the Mare Piccolo. The chamber tombs were the most magnificent in Magna Graecia. Later, elegant suburbs with wide streets, theatres and baths were laid out on the site of today’s New Town.
Tarantine pottery was more florid than any in mainland Greece, while Tanagra figurines originated here, being afterwards copied at Tanagra in Boeotia. The city’s craftsmen made enchanting gold jewellery – wreaths, bracelets, earrings – some of which have been recovered from graves at Mottola and Ginosa, where the richer Tarantines had summer villas. (There are superb examples in the museum.) The coins were among the most elegant in the entire ancient world; the silver staters show Taras or Phalanthus riding on a dolphin, while the reverse usually has either a horse, Tarantines being renowned for their horsemanship, or a murex shell.
All this wealth came from orchards, fisheries, sheep and the famous Tarantine purple dye. Each spiny-shelled murex (or rock-whelk) exudes a few drops from which a dye can be extracted, varying between dark purple and pale rose; since no other fast dye for these colours was then available, it was much prized, Tarantine purple costing only less than Tyrian. The merchants of Taras had depots all along the Adriatic coast besides close links with the Greek traders further east.
Janet Ross was told the legend of the dye’s discovery; one day the hero Hercules’s dog had found a murex on the beach and, crunching it between his teeth, it had stained his jaws purple for life. She also heard the theory that the citizens of Taras had been the first Europeans to keep domestic cats. Previously, like other Greeks, they seem to have used tame ‘weasels’ – probably pine martens – for keeping down rats and mice. Some Tarantine coins of the fifth and fourth centuries have a youth on the reverse holding a bird, with a cat climbing up his leg to catch it, while one or two vases show cats hunting birds. Presumably they were imported from Egypt or Persia.
The later Tarantines grew so effete and unwarlike that in retrospect Horace gave their city the damning name molle Tarentum (soft Tàranto). Perhaps their decline was due to drinking a little too much of their good wine, which the poet compared favourably with his famous Falernian. Despite walls ten miles in circumference, they lived in daily fear of the Messapians and Lucanians, depending for protection on mercenaries who were not always victorious. The Romans became steadily more threatening, and in 280 BC Taras sought help from King Pyrrhus of Epirus.
Pyrrhus, who in Hannibal’s opinion was the finest general of his lifetime, possessed a great toe rumoured to have divine powers. When he landed at Taras, because of a storm he had only a handful of cavalry, 2,000 infantry and two elephants. Learning that the Tarantines expected him to do all the fighting, he at once conscripted the male population, banning drinking parties and banquets. He managed to beat the Romans twice, but his losses were so heavy that he evacuated his troops to Sicily. The second of these battles, Asculum, was the original ‘Pyrrhic’ victory; “One more victory over the Romans like that and we’re done for”, he told a soldier. When the Romans marched on Taras, he rushed back to relieve it but was defeated, and in 272 BC the city finally fell to the Romans.
Taras became Tarentum, a Roman garrison occupying the citadel. However, in 212 when some Tarantine hostages tried to escape from Rome and, after being caught, were flung to their deaths from the Tarpeian rock, there was widespread revulsion against Roman rule among the citizens. Two young cousins of the victims, Philomenus and Nicon, wrote to Hannibal, offering to hand over the city to him. His army was camped nearby and he had ingratiated himself by releasing all the Tarantine prisoners taken at Cannae – if he could capture the port of Taras, he would be able to get badly needed reinforcements and supplies from Carthage.
The Romans were accustomed to letting Philomenus in after dark because of his passion for hunting, and because he always gave them some of his game. One night, while the garrison were having a party, he came back with an enormous wild boar; when the sentry bent down to admire it, he stabbed him with his boar-spear and then opened the gate for the waiting Carthaginians. Nicon had already opened another gate for Hannibal with the main storming party, and together they quickly overran the city. However, the Romans held out in the citadel, protected by the sea on three sides, and guarded on the landward by a deep moat and a strong wall. It bottled up the Tarantine fleet, so Hannibal had the ships dragged across the isthmus on huge wagons. Then they blockaded the citadel, but it still refused to surrender.
Three years later, when the Carthaginians were busy elsewhere, a Roman army besieged Taras. A traitor opened the gates, and after half-heartedly throwing a few javelins at them, the panic-stricken Tarantines ran into their houses. The Romans enslaved 30,000 men, women and children, besides sending home an immense quantity of gold, silver and statuary. “I see the Romans have their own Hannibal” was Hannibal’s comment. “We’ve lost the city in the way we took it.”
This was the end of Taras as a great city-state, Brundisium swiftly replacing it as Southern Italy’s principal port. Yet Roman rule cannot have been all that harsh, since after two centuries Strabo reported how Tarentum still kept its Greek language and way of life. It charmed both Horace and Virgil, who, like most cultivated Romans, revered everything Greek. Horace swore that if the Fates did not allow him to live out his last days at Tivoli, then he would do so near Tarentum. He praised the wine, the merum tarentinum, claiming that it was far better than the bland vintages from the vineyards around Rome, while Virgil wrote lyrically of the Tarantine countryside.
About 95 AD, Marcus Cocceius Nerva, a kindly, dignified senator, was exiled here by the paranoiac Diocletian. Too gentle to fear as a murderer, the savage and tyrannical emperor may have been afraid of him as a potential replacement. When Diocletian was assassinated in 96, Nerva was summoned to the throne although in his sixties. He only lived for another two years but his reign was one of the most benevolent in Roman history. No doubt, he rewarded the pleasant place of his banishment.
Centuries later, the River Galaesus, so often mentioned by the two poets, attracted classically minded travellers to the city. But they could not credit that any of the wretched, swampy little streams flowing into the Mare Piccolo could possibly be the beautiful river of Horace and Virgil that had once “soaked the golden fields.”