II ‘SYRACUSE’?

Rooms given special place-names (and I will give some more Roman examples below) have something to tell us about the owner's relationship to the physical world; they are his (or his observers’) imaginative choice from an atlas of possibilities. But what ‘Syracuse’ signified has been surprisingly controversial. Philemon Holland, in his 1606 translation, was confident that Augustus named it ‘for pleasure therein … comparing it to that beautiful city in Sicily’.Footnote ¹⁶ More recent Suetonian commentators are understandably cautious. Shuckburgh writes: ‘No satisfactory explanation has been given of why Augustus called his lofty study “Syracuse”.’ Carter agrees: ‘The reason for the name is a mystery.’ However, Shuckburgh goes on to point out that Augustus ‘was at Syracuse in b.c. 21, which was then ruinous and deserted [Cal. 21], and he may have found it so quiet and retired (perhaps too living on the high ground of Achradina) as to suggest a suitable name’. And Carter adds: ‘Perhaps the place was effectively an island, like Ortygia, the original heart of Syracuse, or was extremely difficult to penetrate, like the defences of the town in the hands of a Dionysius or an Archimedes.’ Budé editor Henri Ailloud has an entirely different suggestion (also endorsed by Rolfe): the Syracusans used to sleep upstairs (he cites Nepos’ life of Dion of Syracuse, who despite retiring to an upper chamber for safety, was assassinated by hostile fellow-citizens with a sword passed through a window).Footnote ¹⁷ Archaeologist Filippo Coarelli has suggested, most plausibly, that ‘Syracuse’ paid homage to an island retreat constructed by Dionysius inside his fortress palace on Ortygia (which he claims also inspired the Maritime Theatre in Hadrian's villa at Tivoli).Footnote ¹⁸ We might also remember another tyrant's floating retreat: Hiero's luxury ship Syracosia, ‘Lady of Syracuse’.Footnote ¹⁹ Already the possibilities, with their different topographical peculiarities and historical personae, are multiplying far beyond the obvious connection with Archimedes. There is no reason so far to reject any of them. Each one, as I hope to show, may have been in play in Augustus’ choice of name, or, if he did not name it himself, in the self-generating plasma of anecdotes that he inspired.Footnote ²⁰

To start with the place: the ancient city of Syracuse had glory and pretensions quite out of proportion to its size.Footnote ²¹ Part of the triad of cities, along with Athens and Carthage, that once fought for dominion over the ancient Mediterranean, it was the David that defeated Goliath Athens in the Sicilian expedition of 415–13 b.c., following Athens’ defeat of Persia at Salamis in 480 b.c. — a year in which the Sicilians themselves had defeated the Carthaginians at Himera. Two centuries later, Syracuse's own empire in the Western Mediterranean succumbed in the Punic Wars to the rising power of Rome.Footnote ²² Syracuse, in other words, was ‘a place with imperial stories to tell, stories of one empire giving way to another’.Footnote ²³ Livy's and Plutarch's accounts of the city's capture in 212 b.c. make the Romans, especially their general Marcellus, self-conscious about the ironic cycles of history: Rome was on the up, Syracuse on the turn, poised to become a city in decline.Footnote ²⁴ But the city continued to attract superlatives. Theocritus had called it the ‘marrow of Sicily’, the choicest part;Footnote ²⁵ Cicero, quoting Sicilian historian Timaeus, calls it urbs ornatissima and ‘the largest of Greek cities and loveliest of all cities’ (Rep. 1.43: ‘Graecarum maxumam, omnium autem esse pulcherrimam’). Syracuse was and was not equivalent to Sicily: a glorious figurehead for the whole island, whose citizens still claimed an independent, Syracusan identity.Footnote ²⁶ It was a city connected with extreme forms of tyranny, the place where Plato went three times and failed to realize his ideal Republic (Cicero's Verres is constructed conspicuously in the mould of a Dionysius).Footnote ²⁷ It was also famous for luxurious cuisine, lascivious dancing and overblown grandiosity,Footnote ²⁸ and for mild winters and sweltering summers, as Seneca records in a vivid list of the pros and cons of visiting Syracuse.Footnote ²⁹

For members of the Late Republican ‘ex-pat’ community, Syracuse indeed held out a mixed prospect of business and pleasure. After his campaign against Sextus Pompeius in 36 b.c., Augustus further reduced the conquered city to a colonia, removed Latinitas, Latin rights, from its citizens, and planted his veterans there, to mingle with the Roman negotiatores, bankers and businessmen who were already laundering the profits of this fertile province.Footnote ³⁰ Cicero had been quaestor of Sicily till 74 b.c., based at Lilybaeum on the other side of the island. He tells a revealing story about how he returned to Rome assuming his term there had been the talk of the town, but was dazed to discover that he had made no impact in the metropolis at all: the people he met first assumed he had been in Africa; and then, when they realized it was Sicily, they got the place wrong, remembering it as Syracuse (that is to say, the provincial capital, the governor's seat). Cicero despaired, went along with the story and pretended that is where he had gone, but to take the waters, not to do official business.Footnote ³¹ He tells another story about a Roman knight who joked that he felt like moving to Syracuse for pleasure, not for business like all the negotiatores (‘otiandi causa non negotiandi’); he wanted to buy a nice estate where he could invite his friends and enjoy life without interruption (‘sine interpellationibus’, the very phrase Suetonius uses of Augustus in retreat).Footnote ³² While business (negotium) may have been the reality of Roman life in Syracuse, escapism (otium) was a huge part of the fantasy. It was a city of dreams, but more often than not these were broken ones.

There was, moreover, something peculiarly suggestive about the city's topography. Syracuse is a city with an extension, or so it appears. Just as reaching Sicily requires a sea crossing from Italy, so Ortygia, the most ancient part of Syracuse, is a virtual island separated by a narrow channel of sea (it was known as the ‘Insula’ in Cicero's dayFootnote ³³) and joined by a bridge to the mainland (thus Dionysius’ private retreat on Ortygia, cut off by a canal, was an island within an island within an island).Footnote ³⁴ Ortygia to Syracuse, Sicily to Italy: each could be seen as the annexe or garden shed to the main house, despite the fact that Ortygia was the original, the quintessential part of the city, just as Syracuse was the ‘marrow’ of Sicily and Sicily was acknowledged to be more ancient than Rome. In addition, this city on the eastern coast looked out towards the Peloponnese and its mother-city Corinth, in other words towards a corresponding part of Greece ‘tacked onto’ the mainland, whose ‘island’ status was also marked in its name, a part, again, separated from the whole by an isthmus roughly equivalent to the Straits of Messina.Footnote ³⁵ Meanwhile, the notorious impregnability of Syracuse's fortress Achradina added an idea of remoteness, the safety of its harbour a vision of peace and quiet. All of this provided a unique analogy for the relationship between main house and supplementary retreat. ‘Garden shed’ is not as anachronistic as it seems. Recommending Sicily to his audience in the Verrines, Cicero describes this ‘fruitful province’ (‘fructuosam … prouinciam’) as the country farm to Rome's city house: ‘Our provinces and subject states are like the farms of Rome: just as you take most pleasure in estates that are easy to get to, so the suburban quality (suburbanitas) of this province [Sicily] is a joy (iucunda) to Rome.’Footnote ³⁶ In Pro Plancio, he describes Sicily affectionately as a ‘second home’ for which his mind's eye longed.Footnote ³⁷

How far, then, was Syracuse from Rome? Technically about 450 miles or a week's journey, but conceptually the distance was more elastic. Horace judged Lucilius’ poem about travelling to his Sicilian estates a never-ending ramble.Footnote ³⁸ Was going to Syracuse really just like going to one's allotment, one's summer house in the suburbs, or was it a journey into the back of beyond? Cicero praises the efficient communications between Sicily and Rome, but also presumes that, for metropolitan Romans, being posted to Sicily was the equivalent of being sent to Congo or Tangier.Footnote ³⁹ Augustus’ presumed phrase ‘I’m just going across to Syracuse’ sounds like another of his notorious jokes, as though he were pretending to be making a real journey to a real place (the verb transire is standard for making a sea crossingFootnote ⁴⁰). A similar confusion arises in Shakespeare's account of the death of Henry IV, who it was prophesied would die in Jerusalem and did indeed die in the Jerusalem chamber of the Palace of Westminster (which also contained a Jericho and a Samaria).Footnote ⁴¹ Mythologically, in any case, Sicily has always been a movable island.Footnote ⁴² Virgil in Aeneid 3 describes the primeval convulsions that first split it from Italy; Silius Italicus minimizes the stone's-throw distance between the two by calling the Straits of Messina so narrow that dogs’ barks and cocks’ crows can be heard across them.Footnote ⁴³ Yet the political distance could be as decisive as the geographical one was minute. Cicero recalls his shock at being refused entry to Sicily in 58 b.c. by his one-time friend, the praetor there: ‘Just as the island seemed to be stretching out its arms towards me, he refused to let me land.’Footnote ⁴⁴

III THE VIEW FROM SYRACUSE

One reason that the modern identification of Augustus’ ‘studiolo’ on the Palatine is unconvincing is that it is a room without windows. True, some of the ancients did use their private rooms to realize fantasies of total isolation: Quintilian tells us about Demosthenes’ padded cell, but Plutarch says the room in question was a basement (like the bunker Augustus went to in order to escape lightning).Footnote ⁴⁵ Maybe there is little point in hypothesizing about the specifications of a place that probably never existed. But Suetonius does say that Augustus’ room was high up (in edito), which suggests that ‘Syracuse’ was important not just as a place to go to, but also as a place to look out from.Footnote ⁴⁶ Many legends grew up about visibility from Sicily, suggesting its status almost as triangular watchtower of the Mediterranean, from which three crucial nations, Carthage (from Lilybaeum), Greece (from Pelorus, nearest to Syracuse) and Italy (from Messina), could be surveyed.Footnote ⁴⁷ A story circulated about a Sicilian Greek, possibly called Strabo like the geographer, who stood on the promontory at Lilybaeum and was able to count ships as they left the harbour at Carthage (200 km away).Footnote ⁴⁸ Cicero conjures up the agony of a live Roman citizen, Gavius of Compsa, deliberately crucified by Verres in a spot overlooking the Straits so that he could appreciate the narrow gap between slavery in Messina and freedom in Regium on the other side.Footnote ⁴⁹ Valerius Maximus tells how Hannibal executed a helmsman who failed to convince him that the distance between Italy and Sicily could be so tiny (and thus caused him to sail back to Africa).Footnote ⁵⁰ The helmsman was cleared after his death and a statue erected of him looking out to sea (‘speculatrix statua angusti atque aestuosi maris’) above the straits as a monument to Punic temerity.Footnote ⁵¹

Another occurrence of the rare word speculatrix can be found in Statius, Silv. 2.2, where the villa of Pollius Felix at Sorrento is introduced as ‘speculatrix uilla’ (3), because its many rooms look out on different islands in the bay of Puteoli: ‘Why should I recount the numberless summits and changing views? Each chamber has its own delight, its own particular sea’ (Loeb translation, Mozley).Footnote ⁵² Seneca, too, describes elevated villas, poised above the countryside for a panoramic vista, as ‘almost military’.Footnote ⁵³ Like islands, towers were look-out points, and Augustus’ ‘Syracuse’ might well be imagined as a tower with views on all sides, a speculatrix turris offering a virtual periplous equivalent to the geographers’ tours of the triangular island to which its original belonged (though the most obvious view from the city itself would have been towards Greece).Footnote ⁵⁴ The queen of all the rooms in Pollius’ villa is the diaeta at the top, facing Naples, which for Statius is the perfect Greek city, home of his hero Virgil and headquarters of the Epicurean cult that inspired this villa's own placida quies: Silv. 2.83–5, ‘una tamen cunctis, procul eminet una diaetis | quae tibi Parthenopen derecto limite ponti | ingerit’; 131–2, ‘celsa tu mentis ab arce | despicis errantes humanaque gaudia rides.’ Livy calls Archimedes an astronomer, a ‘spectator caeli siderumque’, and Silius Italicus credits him with the building of a ten-storey tower, from which he could view the sky.Footnote ⁵⁵ Marcellus, in several accounts, stands on a high hill outside Syracuse to survey his victory. Thus a single room towering above the rest might recall the metaphorical and physical pre-eminence of some very different Syracusan heroes, with their shared, almost ethereal distraction from the here and now.Footnote ⁵⁶

All the uncertainty in these topographical relationships — Italy to Sicily, Sicily to Syracuse, Syracuse to Ortygia, supplementary but original part versus younger mainland, Sicily as both destination and watchtower — is generally reflected in the historical and cultural relationship of Syracuse to Rome. Katherine Clarke has observed that Strabo's geographic scheme of the world — inseparable, she claims, from his historical scheme — made Rome the unquestioned epicentre. But as she points out, this scheme still allowed for various cities of the Empire, especially old Greek ones, to stand out as potential cultural rivals to the metropolis. Naples, for example, was ‘a welcome retreat from the pressures of Rome’ (Strabo 5.4.7 C246), where, ‘absorbed in the city's Greek ambience’, Augustus also chose to die (Suet., Aug. 98.5).Footnote ⁵⁷ It was these once glorious subject cities that offered cultural and architectural models to Rome, not vice versa: thus the temple of Aphrodite at Eryx in Sicily was the model for the temple of Venus Erycina near the Colline Gate (Strabo 6.2.6), vowed by the Romans as an act of contrition.Footnote ⁵⁸ Proud Sicily was reduced to being the supplier, the ‘bread-basket’ or ‘treasury’ of Rome, the ‘nurse’ or ‘storeroom’ of the Roman people.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet Syracuse held its own as ‘fairest of cities’. Again, we find the hierarchy between centre and periphery significantly skewed.

Just how seriously, then, should we consider the political implications of the name? Woldemar Görler has put Augustus’ ‘Syracuse’, together with the modern city Syracuse in New York State, at the head of a collection of examples of real or mythological place-names given by the Romans and their successors to special parts of their houses, gardens and colonies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Cicero admired Atticus’ garden Amaltheion, for example, birthplace of Zeus, and wanted one for himself; he built his own ‘Lyceum’ and ‘Academy’ on his Tusculan farm. Hadrian's theme park at Tivoli famously included a Vale of Tempe, a Stoa Poikile, a Canopus, and even, ‘so that nothing was left out’ of this Grand Tour, Hades itself.Footnote ⁶¹ Of course, Görler argues, these names draw on more than topological analogies: they create an imaginary, hotchpotch panorama of the Romans’ cultural heritage. But for him they are ultimately sentimental; he regards antiquity as a time-free zone, a scrapyard of columns and grottoes to be casually pillaged. A more historicized, more politicized reading is offered by Bettina Bergmann, who argues that the Romans’ romantic nostalgia for their cultural heritage is based stickily on the ‘appropriation of another people's past for self-definition’.Footnote ⁶² In real life, these names and their associations were the cultural products of conquered cities: the picturesque ruins of Roman gardens stood on the metaphorical or sometimes real ruins of subject states of the Roman Empire.Footnote ⁶³ Perhaps this is a bit momentous for every landscaped Euripus, every suburban Tempe, but Augustus’ ‘Syracuse’ would appear to be the epitome of just such an ambivalent place: supplementary in a political sense, essential in a cultural one. The name evoked a city ‘annexed’ to Rome but emblazoned with an independent identity and, more importantly, a tyrannical past — harbouring possessions, material and cultural, that were still objects of desire.

In this particular case, however, there is a further historical dimension to consider. It is not just that Augustus was a reader of history, an inheritor of cultural myths. For him, Syracuse was a living place. He had been there at least twice, indeed had played a crucial part in its recent history. We need the two perspectives at once — both Augustus’ inherited view of the historical associations of Syracuse and his own experience of imperium on the ground — to explain the meaning of his city in the clouds, whether or not it was ever a real re-creation and whether, even if it was, we can find traces of it now.

IV ARCHIMEDES AND THE SIEGE OF SYRACUSE

As we have seen, a cluster of connected elements — the idea of retreat from public life, the inventor's workshop and the remote and elevated stronghold — would seem to lie behind Suetonius’ account of ‘Syracuse’ and help to ‘thicken up’ the basic association that Stahr made between Augustus and Archimedes. Yet despite their potential for being dispersed among different personalities and scenarios, all these elements nevertheless find concentrated form in the myths surrounding a particular historical moment, a crucial one in the biography of Syracuse's most celebrated and polymathic son — inventor of the claw, the screw and the sun-reflecting mirrors, astronomer, strategist, engineer, architect, and bathtub mathematician.Footnote ⁶⁴ The story of Archimedes’ death is narrated most vividly by Valerius Maximus. While the Roman general Marcellus was besieging the city during the Second Punic War, his soldiers came across Archimedes while he was obliviously drawing geometrical diagrams in the dust. When challenged to give his name, he refused and said instead to them, demonstrating his single-minded obsession with mathematics, ‘I beg you, don’t disturb me’ (or, translating the original Greek, ‘don’t disturb these circles’, the shapes he was drawing). The appeal fell on deaf ears, and he was brutally murdered, his spilled blood, Valerius adds, obliterating the drawings on the ground.Footnote ⁶⁵ In its context, the story is an exemplum illustrating the wholehearted dedication of the Greeks to intellectual pursuits. Archimedes, practical designer of many of the lethal weapons with which Syracuse and its tyrant Hiero had resisted the Roman siege, is frozen at his moment of greatest abstraction, in the city and yet removed from it, in ‘head in the clouds’ (or rather, ‘head on the ground’) contemplation of eternal mathematical truths. We can draw another conclusion: the name Augustus gave his private retreat is effectively a giant ‘Do not disturb’ sign.

But the story has deeper implications. As Mary Jaeger has shown decisively in Archimedes and the Roman Imagination, Syracuse and its most famous alumnus function as virtual equivalents in the history of the Roman Empire.Footnote ⁶⁶ This Sicilian homunculus, as Cicero affectionately calls him, provided a focus for the Romans to rehearse their guilt and mixed feelings towards the conquest of the Greeks and their colonies, and towards their own claim to a share of intellectual prestige. Indeed, Archimedes plays a large part in Cicero's own self-creation with regard to the Greek past, most famously in an extended digression in Tusculan Disputations, a work in which Cicero plays mediator of Greek thought to a resistant Roman audience, describing his heroic rediscovery of Archimedes’ overgrown tomb in ruined Syracuse, the spot marked by a give-away sphere inscribed within a cylinder.Footnote ⁶⁷ In her sharp reading of this passage, Jaeger shows how Cicero both fashions himself in opposition to the mathematician, enlightened Roman master versus ruined Greek subject, and superimposes himself on Archimedes’ image, inventing himself both as upholder of universal standards of humanity and as indefatigable investigator, whether of intellectual discoveries or, in this case, of the authentic sepulchre of a homo acutissimus under the brambles of a ruined cemetery.Footnote ⁶⁸ In other words, this is Cicero's own ‘Eureka’ moment.Footnote ⁶⁹

The other famous legend of Roman contrition focused on Syracuse is the account, found in Livy and Plutarch, of how the general Marcellus wept while looking over the city from a high place and seeing that the Romans were responsible for destroying it.Footnote ⁷⁰ This unusual case of Roman sensibility has been interpreted as cultural homage to earlier Greek models: it is a sign of Marcellus’ attested philhellenism that he gestures towards a long tradition of weeping by the victorious party, known from the Iliad and elsewhere in Livy, to mark a peripeteia in history, when one cycle of power had come to an end and another was beginning to flourish on the upturn.Footnote ⁷¹ Here, Rome, the central subject of Livy's history, rises, is increased (aucta), by Syracuse's fall, but the moment is marked by generous and spontaneous mourning.

Worse was to follow with the removal to Rome of the city's priceless artworks, the Elgin Marbles of their day, an event interpreted both as a moral and aesthetic watershed and as a curse.Footnote ⁷² Livy implies that, though Marcellus piously dedicated the spoils to adorn the temples of Honos and Virtus, this opened the floodgates for the opportunistic and impious despoiling of Greek sites that was to tarnish the Romans’ reputation as colonists, the same acquisitive and philistine approach Cicero had deplored in Verres, predatory governor of Sicily, whom he had modelled in the image of a Sicilian tyrant.Footnote ⁷³ Plutarch (Marc. 21.1–2) sees the event rather as an aesthetic triumph for the Greeks: the Syracusan spoils civilized Rome and brought about a revolution in the appreciation of art for art's sake. Writers like Polybius (9.10.3–13) saw the spoils as tainted, arguing that they excited phthonos among the disinherited foreign visitors to Rome. And as with Cicero's story, a personal element is involved. Marcellus is said to have kept behind only one looted object for himself, the second of two sphaerae, or orreries, the one made by Archimedes himself, while he dedicated the older, more attractive one in his temple, attempting to ward off hubris in the process.Footnote ⁷⁴ But the Roma aucta launched by Syracuse was already a Rome in moral decline, its downhill progress encapsulated in the general's own post-Syracusan fortunes, with Syracuse seen by Livy as the peripeteia of Marcellus’ own tragedy, which responded to Thucydides’ tragic account of Athens two centuries before.Footnote ⁷⁵

Marcellus’ acts of contrition seem to have set a precedent for later conquerors. Not only did Augustus devote care to restoring the city in 21 b.c., but so, rather puzzlingly, we are told, did Caligula only a few decades later.Footnote ⁷⁶ Hadrian, too, is depicted on a denarius raising a kneeling Sicily from the ground and is described as restitutor Siciliae.Footnote ⁷⁷ ‘Restoring Sicily’, or ‘restoring Syracuse’ in particular, should perhaps be understood less as a practical scheme and more as a symbolic gesture on the part of the Roman emperors, whether considered as an act of penance, endlessly repeated tears of guilt, or as an act of resurgence, one that depended on the illusion of a Syracuse always in recovery, its razed monuments testifying to the overthrow of tyrants by legitimate liberators.Footnote ⁷⁸

If there is one overriding pattern we can extract from these different stories about the siege of Syracuse and its aftermath, it is that their Roman protagonists, Cicero and Marcellus above all, are portrayed each time as wanting to embrace two roles at once: the more easily available one, that of the conquistador, the sometimes compassionate implementer of Roman imperium moresque, and the more elusive and more prized one of human being sans frontières, a role lodged primarily in these stories with the Greeks, whether exemplified in Archimedes’ concern for mathematics or the workings of the universe or in the artistic masterpieces that washed up in Rome or in the civilizing debates they inspired among their new owners. Marcellus’ weeping is a philhellenic gesture; Cicero transforms himself into a Greek-style inventor, staging his own attention-stealing moment of discovery at Archimedes’ tomb.

At the end of the digression in Tusculan Disputations, Cicero offers his readers a stark choice of roles. What civilized human being, he says, would not rather be Archimedes the mathematician than Dionysius the all-powerful but fearful tyrant?Footnote ⁷⁹ The contrast evokes two famous Syracusans, each in his own way supreme, self-absorbed and autonomous.Footnote ⁸⁰ This contrast between (Greek) tyrant and (Greek) mathematician had already been dramatized in a more sensitive Roman versus Greek version in the legend of Marcellus versus Archimedes, and again in Cicero's own self-centred but responsible encounter with Syracuse's past. In all cases, we can see the Romans hovering uncertainly between the two roles. What I suggest here — and this is where Augustus’ ‘Syracuse’ comes in — is that these precedents must weigh heavily in any momentary textual encounter between a Roman emperor (potential successor, after all, to the Sicilian tyrantsFootnote ⁸¹) and a dead Greek genius, and at least raise questions about tyranny versus the life of the mind and conquest versus cultural homage. It is possible that Augustus — like Marcellus, like Cicero — wanted a piece of both. Or, even for those who do not believe Augustus’ ‘Syracuse’ was a real place, that the invention of the name embroiled him in or challenged him with responding to three possible roles available to him through contact with the subject-city: tyrant, conqueror and genius all at once.

Nowhere in her work on Archimedes and Syracuse does Mary Jaeger mention Augustus’ den named for the Syracusan mathematician. Neither does Catherine Connors, in an ingenious paper that links Syracuse much more closely with Augustus.Footnote ⁸² Her hypothesis is that Chariton's first-century b.c. romance Chaereas and Callirhoe, a tale of separated lovers spun in and around Syracuse, is also what she calls a ‘history of empire’; this is a novel that blandly accepts its status as a product of contemporary colonial oppression, ‘being Greek under Augustus’, while legitimizing a past and perhaps also a present history of tyranny in Syracuse. The child born to the couple, temporarily fostered by his mother's first husband, is never named, but Connors argues that he must be called Dionysius after his adoptive father, and thus the end of the novel must look ahead to Syracuse's Golden Age under Dionysius I and tacitly bless the Mediterranean enterprises of Chariton's own emperor, Augustus. In her succinct formulation: ‘For Augustus, as for Chariton, Syracuse is a place where you solve a pirate problem and begin an empire.’Footnote ⁸³ Although Connors does not mention Augustus’ little ‘Syracuse’, she comes closest to my own view in believing that the romanticized locations of Greek novels (and, by extension, those of Roman houses and gardens) have a meaning for those who encounter and reproduce them beyond that of their celebrated and now ruined past.

V AUGUSTUS AND SYRACUSE

Augustus’ personal experience of Sicily is something that we can track throughout the Suetonian Vita, starting in the second chapter. Scraping around for a distinguished ancestor for the emperor, Suetonius records the following fact: Augustus’ great-grandfather served in Sicily as military tribune under Aemilius Papus in the Second Punic War, while his grandfather was content with municipal office in a small Italian town.Footnote ⁸⁴ This is what other people write, says Suetonius: Augustus in his autobiography (now lost) wrote merely (nihil amplius quam) that he had come from an old equestrian family and that his father was the first member to become senator (this in the face of taunts from Antony that his great-grandfather was a freedman and a rope-maker from near Thurii, his grandfather an argentarius, and his maternal grandfather an African who kept a baker's shop in Aricia). Whatever the truth about the great-grandfather, Augustus’ silence about him is interesting and might, I suggest, be connected with a later event in his life. Some time before 54 b.c., his sister Octavia, trophy wife par excellence, married Gaius Claudius Marcellus Minor. With that marriage, Augustus’ connections with Sicily took a leap up the social scale; indeed, they gave him, from childhood, instant access to the aristocratic hall of fame. Through his brother-in-law, then through his new nephew and adopted heir (also Marcellus), he acquired the most famous ‘Sicilian’ ancestor of all: the glorious conqueror, the conscientious objector, the philhellenic Republican general M. Marcellus, the one who wept tears of contrition and historical sensibility at the same siege of Syracuse. Later generations of the Marcelli continued to live off that Marcellus’ reputation: as a result of their family name, they enjoyed the same quasi-Hellenistic ruler cult (including the annual games, the Marcellia) among the Syracusans in perpetuity.Footnote ⁸⁵ In other words, Octavia's marriage into that particular family brought with it a special relationship with Syracuse.

Marcellus died tragically young in 23 b.c., but it is clear how hard up to that point Augustus was working to cement the relationship and intertwine the two family trees, first by marrying his henchman Agrippa to Marcellus’ sister Claudia Marcella in 28 b.c. and then Marcellus himself to his own daughter Julia in 25 b.c. (just as he would work hard to bind his family to the Claudii when he took Tiberius as his heir).Footnote ⁸⁶ Can it be a coincidence that 21 b.c., when he visited Syracuse to start the symbolic restoration of the city, was the same year that, following a decent interval after Marcellus’ death, he cut his losses and made Agrippa marry Julia? Did this make the visit an act of continued pietas or one of subtle infiltration? This is, again, speculative, but could it be that he allowed himself to represent the Marcelli that year and enjoy the festival held in their honour? In other words, in real-life Syracuse, just as in the imaginative one, Augustus might have been playing at being Marcellus quite as much as he was playing Archimedes.Footnote ⁸⁷

Was there in any case more overlap than we might think between the two roles, just as we saw there was between Archimedes and Dionysius? Plutarch's ‘Life of Archimedes’ is a miniature inset into his Life of Marcellus: the two are paradoxically merged, two unique, great-hearted, Greek-biased men, head and shoulders above their peers.Footnote ⁸⁸ They are connected in other ways as well. It has been argued that the theatre built in Marcellus’ honour in Rome was a concrete representation of celestial and terrestrial hemispheres (reproducing Archimedes’ spheres). We learn that the tutors Augustus provided for Marcellus were an Academic philosopher and a specialist in siege-warfare, both Greeks. No wonder that it is hard to tell whether Virgil's famous contrast at Aen. 6.847–53, between the cerebral and artistic achievements of the Greeks (Syracusans, and Archimedes in particular, Jaeger suggests) and the imperial achievements of the Romans, entirely excludes the two Marcelli who appear in the subsequent procession from any tinge of philhellenic paideia.Footnote ⁸⁹ In reality, Augustus’ imperial treatment of Syracuse was pragmatic, striking a careful middle path between veneration and oppression. Any neo-tyrannical tinge to his activities could be masked by the republican aristocratic model made available to him by the Marcelli. But his private fantasy may have been of sampling all the various kinds of megaloprepeia, high-mindedness, offered by the city's earlier protagonists.

In chapter 85 of his Vita, Suetonius gives us another tantalizing fact: that among Augustus’ (now lost) literary works was a short poem in hexameters called ‘Sicily’. We do not know if its subject matter was past or present: Augustus himself, Sicily itself or the deeds of his newly-acquired ancestor. Augustus might have chosen to relate his own exploits against Sextus Pompeius or have somehow claimed kin by telling the res gestae of the adopted ancestor Marcellus (as Cicero's Marius had enabled him to claim kin with that other famous nouus homo). Either way, it is dismissed as dabbling, a half-baked attempt (‘poetica summatim attigit’). According to Suetonius’ account, Augustus’ real-life Bellum Siculum was a lacklustre affair, drawn out by storms, shipwreck and famine — for a long time arguably the low point of his rise to power, the occasion when it seemed that Octavian, as he then was, would meet his Waterloo. Eventually, in 36 b.c., he defeated Pompeius at Naulochus, north of Syracuse. But Suetonius tells us something strange about Octavian's behaviour before the final battle. Apparently he succumbed to a catatonic stupor, such a deep sleep that his friends had to wake him up to give him the signal, and even then he spent some time just lying on his back staring up at the sky.Footnote ⁹⁰ Antony was ready with his jeers again; and from the perspective of a military rival this does look more than a bit eccentric. From another point of view, however, it is possible that Octavian was basing his posture self-consciously on legends of Greek, especially Sicilian, thinkers and their remembered moments of ‘time out’: Empedocles stumbling into the volcano, the Epicureans focused on long-distance views, or even Archimedes himself. Octavian's eyes are directed away from the surrounding terrestrial conflict (Suetonius puns on acies, battleline and line of vision) and fixed on the larger movements of the heavens. His supine, upward-gazing posture complements rather than reproduces the bent form of the homunculus fixed on his drawings. But Archimedes is described by Livy as an astronomer, a ‘unicus spectator caeli siderumque’, and was associated with high-up places, like Silius’ tower.Footnote ⁹¹ What is most remarkable here, however, is the shared element of abstraction, special homage perhaps to the Sicilian location. The episode curiously mimics a legend about Octavian's childhood: that he once mysteriously disappeared from his cot on the ground floor of the house and was found at the top of a tall tower, staring at the rising sun.Footnote ⁹²

We could add to this another possibly ‘Archimedean’ framework in Augustus’ life: the context given for his other attempts at literary composition. He is said to have composed epigrams ‘at the time of the bath’. Maybe it is too far-fetched to see the bathroom setting as specifically Archimedean, but Vitruvius does tell us memorably how Archimedes rose naked from his bath-time experiment and ran shouting ‘Eureka Eureka’ through the streets of Syracuse.Footnote ⁹³ It is clear, at least, that Augustus, or his biographer, considered Greek-style nakedness an appropriate condition for the occasional activity of philhellenic verse composition. But once again, the question of biographical influence is complicated. Another well-known anecdote, about Augustus’ aborted tragedy Ajax — which committed suicide, according to his own bon mot, by falling not on its sword but on its sponge — has a more plausible Syracusan model in the grandiose but unsuccessful literary efforts of Dionysius, an earlier royal writer of tragedies.Footnote ⁹⁴

Dionysius is a more likely ancestor, too, for another of Augustus’ areas of inventiveness, in the sphere of words. The Sicilian tyrant was notorious for his proto-Saturnalian puns, such as menekratēs (‘Menecrates’ / ‘staying-power’) for a column, iacchos (‘Bacchus’ / ‘squealer’) for a pig, and mustēria (‘mysteries’ / ‘mouse insurance’) for mouseholes.Footnote ⁹⁵ Both of Augustus’ names for his hideaway are Greek, the second of them, technophu(i)on, a hapax, whatever the word might actually be. Suetonius tells us that Augustus, despite initial enthusiasm and the best tutors, never did master Greek proficiently, but we do see in his letters many similar examples of playful neologism and, in his case, bilingual code-switching: he invented a new word betizare, ‘to wilt like spinach’, a Latin variant of the popular Greek adaptation lachanizare; he coined a new place-name, Apragopolis, ‘Lazyville’, caricaturing those who went to find la dolce vita on Capri; he also wrote extempore comic verses in Greek; and his letters are peppered with playful Grecisms.Footnote ⁹⁶ This capricious, even satirical engagement with the lower end of Greek culture (Suet., Aug. 98.3: ‘nullo denique genere hilaritatis abstinuit’) might make us suspect that Augustus only ever positioned himself as a mock-Archimedes or an off-duty Dionysius (I return to this idea later).

Of course, the emperor made more serious attempts to master the Greek world, though it is hard, again, to say whether these are more easily interpreted as Archimedean or Dionysian (or Marcellan).Footnote ⁹⁷ The word Pliny uses of Augustus parcelling up his empire, descripsit (sometimes discripsit), is the same word Livy and Valerius use of Archimedes drawing geometric diagrams in the sand.Footnote ⁹⁸ Both tyrants and mathematicians could be regarded as geometers, chorographers or mappers of space. Strabo's geography affirmed a world centred on Rome, a world, in Katherine Clarke's words, ‘constructed with a periphery and a primary centre’, and much of the time emperor and capital city did coincide geographically.Footnote ⁹⁹ But despite his extraordinarily methodical division of the known world into provinces, regions and so on, which includes his division of Sicily into five coloniae and one favoured municipium, Messina, Augustus was as wilful as any Greek tyrant or later Roman emperor where his own location and locomotion were concerned. He took a fancy to Capri when a moribund tree sprang into life the moment he landed there and managed to persuade the Neapolitans to let him have it in return for another island.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He turned up late to official banquets and snacked in his carriage instead; he went to the Esquiline to be ill, to Campania to relax, and to Naples to die.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Rather than sitting at the centre of his cosmopolis and keeping to routines, he took the voyage out or sideways, went in search of the source. According to Suetonius, Augustus had excellent first-hand knowledge of the whole of his empire. There were apparently only two provinces he never got to: Africa and Sardinia. In both cases Sicily was the stepping-stone, where he was stranded by storms and prevented from jumping off.Footnote ¹⁰² One might say that Augustus’ ‘Syracuse’ allowed him to play at drawing his own shapes on the ground and at telescoping his empire into his own city, even into his own house, by incorporating a Sicilian colony known to be offshore, rebellious, magnificent, but always ruined and no longer at its cultural height, into a private fantasy. On his map of the empire, Syracuse was merely an annexe or a suburb.

Did Augustus set any precedents with his private room? We might see Tiberius’ withdrawal to an entire favourite island, Capri, ‘approached by one tiny harbour and cut off by steep rocks’, as the unacceptably permanent and transgressive exaggeration of Augustus’ retreat to ‘Syracuse’ (or of Augustus’ own occasional visits to Capri).Footnote ¹⁰³ Caligula held a banquet in a rural tree-house and called it his ‘nest’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Hadrian's so-called ‘Maritime Theatre’, an island retreat within his retreat at Tivoli, came with a retractable drawbridge for supreme isolation (inspired either by ‘Syracuse’ or directly by accounts of Dionysius’ Syracusan island retreatFootnote ¹⁰⁵). The emperor Pertinax led his assassins a merry dance through his palace, past the area called Sicilia et Iouis cenatio, ‘Sicily and Jupiter's Dining Room’ (the first was probably the name given to the peristyle adjoining the second, complete with pool and central island; Iouis cenatio was the name Domitian gave his grandiose dining room), and then to the inner parts of his house, where he was killed.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ We learn, significantly, that Pertinax was a reluctant ruler, one who shunned imperium and imperial trappings of all kinds and wanted to return to private life,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ despite the fact that he inherited rooms with names that suggest overweening power.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Claudius, another shrinking emperor-to-be, had been plucked from behind the curtains in another inner room with a name, the Hermaeum.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Alexander Severus called a suite of rooms after his mother, Mamaea; popularly and tellingly misheard as Mamma (the emperor returning to the womb in the bosom of his house?)Footnote ¹¹⁰ Thus, the naming of rooms or favouritism in rooms is connected with intimacy in both senses. (Pliny says effusively of his diaeta, ‘It's my pet place, I set it up myself’.Footnote ¹¹¹) But it is linked just as much with self-determination, not ruling the world but ruling oneself. Statius likens Pollio's attic room to the high citadel (celsa arx) of the mind, philosophical self-sufficiency.Footnote ¹¹² Montaigne, who based many of his personal habits, including his diet, on those of Augustus, wrote of his beloved tower, with its bookcases and open views on all sides: ‘It is my throne and here alone I am ruler of myself.’Footnote ¹¹³ Jung built a very similar-looking ‘spiritual’ tower at Bollingen in Switzerland, to symbolize the configuration of different layers of the human psyche.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Those who were not autocrats could rule their own world in such isolated spaces as these; for those who were, it offered an alternative kind of autonomy. Bachelard quotes an aphorism from Baudelaire: ‘There is no room for intimacy in a palace.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ But the Roman emperors prove him wrong: these intimate spaces were a necessary supplement to palace life.

VI AN AUGUSTAN JOKE?

To sum up: I have claimed a great deal for the interpretative possibilities in the name of Augustus’ ‘Syracuse’, arguing that it conjures up associations not just with the scientist Archimedes, but also with Sicilian tyrants who courted solitude and feared death and Roman conquerors torn between possessing Greek culture and nobly renouncing it. I suggested that it played the Romans’ longing for escapism and transcendence off against their practical imperialist ambitions and Augustus’ desire for isolation off against his dynastic strategies.Footnote ¹¹⁶ I also noted a further complication: that the Republican, aristocratic model of a Marcellus was always there to interfere with more obvious tyrannical parallels with Dionysius or the milder Hiero. ‘Syracuse’, in other words, has the potential to be understood as the workshop of a cultural bricoleur, a hothouse of imperial ideas (appropriately enough, when Pierre Grimal calls Sicilian history in Cicero's hands a ‘political laboratory’Footnote ¹¹⁷). Yet in the end we must wonder just how serious and complicated it was all meant to be, or rather, whether the room was not meant to be a carefully calculated venue for non-seriousness. Augustus did not exactly do nothing in ‘Syracuse’ (agere is the word Suetonius uses).Footnote ¹¹⁸ But it is as likely as not that whatever happened behind those closed doors was framed as an alternative to public affairs and standard routines: something more contemplative, more experimental, a change of perspective induced by a change of scene (‘si … proposuisset’ suggests ‘scheme-generating’ itself, or at least the abandonment of normal activity).

A running thread in Suetonius’ Vita is not just Augustus’ playful side, but his distinctive amateurishness: the unfinished poem ‘Sicily’, his incompetence in Greek, his game of ‘dead lions’ in the middle of a sea-battle. In that context, ‘going to Syracuse’, to an inventor's studio or a tyrant's lair, looks like just another Augustan joke. Compared with the giants of the past, Augustus had no apparent technē to practise in his technophu(i)on; he had no overt pretensions to tyranny, paideia or scientific expertise to win him honorary citizenship of Syracuse. Which might have been the whole point: to be an unthreatening Dionysius, a reluctant Marcellus, or an inept Archimedes.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In a famous letter to Livia about what to do with Claudius, Augustus worries that the boy is behaving meteōrōs, in a ‘head in the clouds’ (literally ‘suspended’) way, rather than being diligens: he needs to be brought down to earth and learn the proper routines.Footnote ¹²⁰ Meteora is now the name of a famous group of suspended Byzantine monasteries in the mountains of Greece. ‘Syracuse’, Augustus’ house in the clouds, might have been the ancient equivalent in more ways than one: a place where a man who deliberately did not identify himself with tyrants or geniuses took time out to hover superficially in the shadow of the greats and where his unprecedented power could be abdicated, domesticated or played down to become a charade of almost absurd ordinariness, just a quick trip to the tree-house at the end of the garden or a bit of ‘do it yourself’ in the shed.