SICILIANS AND GREEKS To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica is reissuing his books, one a week for twenty weeks. In theory, I have read most of them: when I first lived in Italy, I used to buy them at the newsstand in Rome’s Termini station just before boarding a train to Siena or Florence, back when trips that now take an hour and a half took a good four hours and the conductors would announce our arrival in person, out loud, their Tuscan accent pleasantly interrupting Sciascia’s Sicilian reveries. At that stage of my life, I had never been to Sicily. My Italian was little better than restaurant Italian. It didn’t matter: Sciascia’s ability to evoke an atmosphere and a psychology penetrated all the clouds of unknowing, so that the ugly hotel and corrupt politicians of Todo Modo and the Maltese forger of The Council of Egypt took up permanent lodging in my memories among other fantastic imagined people and places. Reading the books again, after years in Italy, is almost like reading them afresh. Most of all, perhaps, Sciascia’s present has become a historical past; for readers in their twenties today, the tangible realities of life in the 1960s and 1970s are no longer accessible experiences, not only the long-altered political and economic situations but also the tiny details of existence: telephones that took special grooved tokens, the smell of tobacco and sweat on a crowded bus, the formality, and the modesty, of everyday dress. And with a knowledge of Sicily, I can see now how Sciascia’s urge to tell a certain kind of story has emerged from the same sere, eroded volcanic landscape as the works of Luigi Pirandello and Andrea Camilleri, a terrain where implacable nature has contended in combat stupendous with deep-rooted culture: the region around Agrigento, once the great Greek city of Akragas, its splendid panorama now blighted by cheap, shoddy high-rises, yet still one of the most beautiful, mysterious places on earth. Now it is easier to catch the barrage of sly, oblique comments Sciascia makes as an author. They passed me by on first reading, and not only because my Italian was so raw; only older people have the restraint to express their insights with such world-weary economy. I missed Sciascia’s caustic wit back then not only because I grew up in another country, but also because I was young, or distracted by the fact of riding on a train: interrupted by the ticket collector, or by the luminous view out the window of twilight in the heart of Tuscany. The best books need to be read in a variety of ways, and reward reading more than once: both in a rush of adrenaline and slowly, closely; as a young person and as an older person; when times are hard and when times are hard again, perhaps under different conditions of hardship, perhaps hewing to the same old unchanging patterns. When my professors in graduate school decided to challenge me by giving me four months to study for my doctoral exams rather than the usual year, I had to read one Greek tragedy a day for a month and add in a second tragedy a couple of times a week. (I reserved the double-headers for Euripides’ crazy melodramas.) I split another month between all the comedies of Aristophanes and Thucydides’ history of the war between Athens and Sparta, reading so fast that I began to dream in ancient Greek, and the little words, called particles, that signal the nuances of an ancient Greek sentence took on the vividness of living language. I had been to Athens and Sparta when I read Thucydides in Rome for my exams, in a state of abject panic and manic illumination, not quite aware yet of the extent to which his history finds its real dramatic center in Sicily, in Syracuse, a place as lush as Agrigento is pitiless. One of Sciascia’s Agrigentine characters declares that people from the province of Syracuse are stupid, implying that life is too easy in that southeastern corner of Sicily. But fertility brings its own perils, as Syracuse has discovered time and again: perils like an Athenian fleet appearing on the horizon with plans to invade you before moving on to conquer Carthage, back in the days (415 BCE) when the Athenian fleet was the most powerful in the Mediterranean world. Two years after that glittering epiphany, however, Thucydides shows us the remnants of the Athenian army (the ships of the fleet have all been captured, sunk, or incinerated) as they beat a miserable retreat through the farmlands and gullies to the west of Syracuse. When the stragglers come to the river Assinaros, they are so exhausted and so thirsty that they swarm into the water to drink and there they are cut down en masse by the Syracusan cavalry, greedily gulping down the river’s water even when it turns red with their blood and muddy from the churning of horses’ hooves. Thucydides had long since suggested that the war between Athens and Sparta had become one great atrocity, but this scene is the most atrocious of them all. The survivors of the slaughter were thrown into the quarries of Syracuse, in the shadow of the theatre where Athenian tragedies played, then and now, and prisoners who could quote the latest play of Euripides were allegedly released. Almost exactly two hundred years later, a very smart Syracusan, Archimedes, would be struck down in his home by an invading Roman soldier after holding off the Roman fleet for two years with the world’s most ingenious array of catapults, another utter foolishness of war. One of the great joys of rereading any book at a later stage of life is the freedom to draw one’s own conclusions. It is easier to read freely when fortified by the twin bastions of age and familiarity, two immemorial guarantees of authority. (One of the professors
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