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I die far from the land of Italy and from Tàranto, my home,
and for me that is a harder fate than death.
Leonidas, “Epigrams”
VERY FEW GREEK TARANTINES are remembered as recognisable historical personalities, as people in their own right. There are two exceptions, however. These are a brilliant scholar-statesman, Archytas, and a minor poet, Leonidas.
It was under Archytas, who was born about 400 BC, that Taras became the head of a formidable confederation of the Greek city-states of Magna Graecia. He was arguably the greatest Apulian in history, not excepting the Emperor Frederick II. Not a lot is known about him, and what we do know coming mainly from a few pages in an ancient Greek collection of lives of the philosophers. Chosen seven times by the Tarantines to be their leader, Archytas’s head remained unturned despite winning many victories over the Messapians and the Lucanians, and never once losing a battle. Because of his gifts as a statesman, as well as a military commander, the Tarantines reached the summit of their prosperity and the Tarantine fleet ruled the waves in the Ionian and Adriatic seas. Thanks to his alliance with Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily, several cities of Magna Graecia that had been conquered by Dionysius’s father recovered their freedom. Dionysius felt such respect for him that in his honour he sent a gigantic bronze candelabrum to light the Tarantine senate-house, with a burner for every day in the year.
Archytas wrote on astronomy, music, geography and politics, but only a few fragments of his books survive. A pioneer of mathematical mechanics, he developed new methods of weight-lifting with pulleys, constructed a wooden dove that flew, and solved the problem of duplicating the cube by building a scale model. His discoveries were so important that they influenced Plato and Euclid, possibly even Aristotle.
After the death of his mentor, Socrates, Plato took refuge with Archytas and his Pythagorean circle at Taras. When Plato went on to Syracuse and infuriated Dionysius, Archytas saved his life by writing an eloquent letter of intercession and then sending a galley to take him away quickly. A man who looked after his slaves as well as he did his family, he was probably a model for the philosopher king in Plato’s “Republic”.
He was drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of the Gargano. Three centuries later, Horace wrote a wistful ode to his memory, “Te maris et terrae”, in which he lamented how the superb genius, who had known how to measure the earth and the ocean, even all the grains of sand, was now himself “a little mound of earth near the Matine coast.”
The Tarantine poet Leonidas, who appears to have escaped from the city when it fell to the Romans in 272 BC, was neither a genius nor a very important poet. He seems to have been poor and obscure even before the fall of his beloved native city, knowing little of Tarantine luxury, a friend of peasants, fishermen and artisans, and writing how he found love in hovels. Yet, for all his terseness, or perhaps because of it, his poems have a gentle charm which inspired at least one really great poet, André Chenier.
He used a humble verse form, the epigram, which never consisted of more than a few lines. He wrote some lines in praise of Pyrrhus’s victory at the River Sinni in 274, when the king was trying to save Taras from the Romans, that give us the only clue to when he lived. He is most likeable, however, in his country mode, as in the four lines of Greek which form “The Farmer’s Rest” (translated by E.F. Lucas):
Spare to this humble hillock, this stone that stands so lowly,
Where poor Alcimenes slumbers, one word in passing, friend,
Though beneath briar and bramble it now lies hidden wholly
These same old foes that, living, I fought with to the end.
Leonidas’s descriptions of nature can still move. In one epigram, “The Goatherd’s Thank-offering”, he describes a very old lion, “time-worn in every limb”, who is so grateful at finding shelter from a snowstorm in a goatherd’s fold that he does not harm any of its terrified goats. In another, “The Cricket’s Grave”, he writes of “the wild thistle-climber... the corn-stalk scaler”.
In yet another epigram (translated by Kenneth Rexroth), his husband from Magna Graecia sounds just like a certain sort of Apulian farmer who even today is not yet quite extinct:
Here is Klito’s little shack.
Here is his little corn patch.
Here is his tiny vineyard.
Here is his little wood-lot.
Here Klito spent eighty years.
After escaping from Taras, Leonidas roamed the shores of the Aegean, especially those of the island of Kos off Asia Minor, lamenting that he was going to die in exile after so many wanderings. Yet, like Archytas, he had shown the world that not all Tarantines were heartless voluptuaries. Sadly the countryside the poet loved, all around Tàranto, is now covered with plastic tunnels for early vegetables.