The Foundation of Syracuse

Plutarch tells us that the archaic Greek colony of Syracuse was founded by the Bac-chiad noble, Archias of Corinth. A Corinthian named Melissos had a very handsome and modest son named Aktaion. This Aktaion had many lovers, among them Archias, a descendant of the Herakleidai and an extremely wealthy and powerful man. When Aktaion rejected the amorous advances of Archias, Archias, together with a drunken crowd of friends and servants, stormed his house and attempted to take him away by force. Aktaion’s friends and family resisted, and in the end (like his mythic namesake) the young man was pulled to pieces and killed. Archias and his gang ran away and Melissos carried his son’s body into the Corinthian marketplace and demanded reparations for his son’s death. When he was refused, he went to the temple of Poseidon at Isthmia and, heaping blame upon the Bacchiads, hurled himself to his death, bringing drought and plague upon the city. The Corinthians consulted the god at Delphi about relief and were told that Aktaion’s death must be expiated. When Archias learned this news, he vowed not to return to Corinth, and instead sailed to Sicily where he founded the colony of Syracuse. (Plut. Mor. 772e-3b)

Pausanias, on the other hand, tells a slightly different tale. He, too, says that Archias consulted Delphic Apollo, but without giving any reason why. He then includes the text of the oracle that he received: “A certain Ortygia lies in the misty sea, above Thrinacia, where the mouth of the Alpheus gushes forth, having been mingled with the streams of fair-flowing Arethusa” (Paus. 5.7.3). Pausanias mentions Archias’s founding of Syracuse as part of the legend that explains why the Alpheus river, which originates in Greek Arcadia, passes through the sea and mixes its waters with a spring in Syracuse. Alpheus was a huntsman who fell in love with a huntress Arethusa, but she, not wanting to marry, fled and crossed the sea to an island opposite Syracuse called Ortygia. There she turned into a local water-spring, and Alpheus changed into an Arcadian river for love. Pausanias concludes by explaining that he believes that the Greek river does, in fact, pass through the sea to mingle its waters in the waters of the Syracusan spring.

The fifth-century Athenian historian Thucydides, finally, offers a much simpler and more straightforward narrative: “Archias, one of the Herakleidai from Corinth, founded Syracuse, having first expelled the Sikels from the island where the inner city now is - though it is no longer surrounded by water” (Thuc. 6.3.2). After reading all three versions, one might be tempted first to reject stories of murder or love in favor of Thucydides’ simple and straightforward account: the Corinthians came, expelled the natives, and settled their new city. Thucydides’ version might also appear more persuasive on chronological grounds, although the three-hundred-year gap between Thucydides’ work and the founding of Syracuse (734 bc) hardly makes his a contemporary account, and scholars have come to acknowledge the value of antiquarian texts such as those of Plutarch and Pausanias for recording and preserving authentic nuggets of earlier material. Moreover, if we take a closer look at the plot elements that structure the mythical versions of Plutarch and Pausanias, we will see some important points of convergence with Thucydides’ account.

Plutarch’s tale of a murderer who goes to Delphic Apollo to be purified and who is then sent to found a new city in Sicily combines two narrative patterns familiar from Greek literature. First, the murderer sent into exile is a story that goes back to the Homeric poems: Tlepolemos killed his uncle and fled Argos (Il. 2.661-69); Patroklos killed a young boy in anger over a game of knuckle-bones and fled with his father to the house of Peleus (Il. 23.84-90); Theoklymenos fled home after killing a relative and sought purification and sanctuary from Telemachos (Od. 15.272-78). This theme is perhaps most powerfully enacted on the Athenian stage in Aeschylus’s (Oresteia - a set of plays that (among other things) looks to the myth of Orestes’ family to legitimate a shift from exile to trial by jury as a way to address homicide.

This narrative pattern continues to influence the ways that Greeks think about how to deal with murder. The murderer’s exile is conceptualized as a kind of purification - a ritual expulsion of the dangerous element - and the purification of murderers becomes an important function of Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi. It is at this point - at Delphi - that the homicide/purification narrative converges with another one whereby a civic crisis prompts the consultation of the Delphic oracle, often resulting in Apollo’s sponsorship of colonial enterprises. In both cases, Apollo’s oracular response articulates a resolution to the crisis.

Once we recognize these powerful narrative patterns at work in structuring Plutarch’s account of the foundation of Syracuse, we can begin to read the mythic elements more productively. Colonial expeditions were often initiated in response to some kind of domestic crisis (drought, political unrest, extreme poverty) and offered relief at home as well as new opportunities abroad. Furthermore, we recognize the purificatory function of Delphic Apollo here as well. As we can see from Thucydides’ account, the Corinthians forcibly expelled native Sikels from the territory that they eventually settled, a detail that is often overlooked in histories of the colonial movement precisely because it is not elaborated in any conventional historical narrative. And yet, the plot structure and metaphors of Plutarch’s narrative (and others like it) suggest that this violence was very much a part of the colonial experience, and offer a context for addressing it. The theme of murder first acknowledges the violent nature of a colonial expedition, and then expiates that violence by representing colonial conquest as the movement from crisis to resolution, from murder to purification. So while it may not be true that Archias killed a fellow Corinthian named Aktaion, the Corinthian colonists certainly did kill, or at least forcibly evict, Sikels as part of their colonial conquest. What the myth does is naturalize the violence inherent in the colonial project, violence against the former occupants of the land, by redescribing it within a familiar framework of murder and purification. In the end, the myth legitimates Greek presence on Syracusan soil (and the corresponding absence of Sikels) rather than describing how they got there.

Let’s turn now to Pausanias’s account of the foundation of Syracuse. Embedded in the oracular response given to Archias describing the geographical site of the new colony is yet another story of the colony’s foundation - one that tells the story of colonial foundation as the tale of the attempted rape of the nymph Arethusa by the river god Alpheus. Marriage, another familiar cultural metaphor and narrative pattern in Greek literature, structures the colonial story in significant ways, offering a more positive model for addressing the inevitable confrontation between Greeks and native populations that forms part of the colonial process.

Many mythic tales recall the founding of a colony as the rape and/or marriage of an indigenous young girl by a Greek god. Perhaps the best known - the rape and subsequent marriage of the Libyan Cyrene by Apollo - appears in Pindar’s Ninth Pythian Ode as a representation of the Spartan settlement of Cyrene in terms of fertility and abundance. While, as in the murder metaphor, the attempted rape of Arethusa or Cyrene acknowledges the violence to native lands and peoples, the civilizing and unifying ideology of marriage, suggested here by the image of two separate streams mingling together, comes to represent the relationship between the Greek settlers and native inhabitants in positive terms - a civilized Greek city where once there was just wilderness.

Here, Ortygia, the colonial site, is identified as the place where the Greek river Alpheus and the local spring Arethusa join, their waters mingled together. Thus marriage and colonial themes merge: the Greek river’s transoceanic travel from the Peloponnese to Sicily prefigures the colonists’ own westward movement from Corinth; erotic conquest symbolizes a new political foundation, and the intermingling of the two streams becomes an emblem for positive Greek and native interaction.

And so, as Barthes has argued, we can begin to see how the mythic nature of these colonial narratives “naturalizes” a specific historical reality - one that we find recorded in Thucydides without any of the trappings of myth, demystified, with all the power issues made explicit. The Corinthians expelled the native Sikels from the land and settled there in their place, and reading all three versions together provides the fullest picture of this event. Since myth is often embedded in literary texts, the historian eager to embrace myth must learn to appreciate the discursive strategies that organize historical facts into narratives. The Greeks filtered the historical experience of founding new colonies overseas through their pre-existing mythical system of Delphic Apollo and his powers of purification. New experiences of cross-cultural violence and contact are interpreted through familiar patterns of purification and marriage. Similarly, the Athenian autochthony myth draws upon the language of family to tell a story of Athens’ origins that legitimates a fifth-century political ideology.