More about Nymphius the Neapolitan

Plutarch is not the only historian to tell us about Nypsius the Neapolitan. Diodorus Siculus is often mentioned in his stead as the main source of information about this man. But by comparing the different versions of the tale one can extract interesting conclusions about the actual sequence of events during the terrible civil war in Syrakuse.
Plutarch's version by itself already shows, to my opinion, a few inconsistencies, but when we try to mix it with the material I am posting today we will be ready to make questions and find answers.
Let us thus see what Diodorus Siculus tells in his «Bibliotheca Historica» XVI, 18-19:

After this Dionysius dispatched to Syracuse as general Nypsius the Neapolitan, a man who excelled in valour and in sagacity of generalship; and with him he sent merchantmen laden with grain and other supplies. Nypsius then set sail from Locri and completed the voyage to Syracuse.
The tyrant's mercenaries, stationed on the acropolis, as their supply of grain failed at this time, were in dire distress for want of supplies, but for a time endured in good spirits their lack of food; then, when human nature succumbed to necessity and they despaired of saving their lives, they came together in an assembly at night and voted to surrender the citadel and themselves to the Syracusans at dawn.
Night was just drawing to a close as the mercenaries sent heralds to the Syracusans to make terms, but, as dawn was just breaking, Nypsius sailed in with his fleet and anchored off Arethusa. Consequently, now that scarcity had suddenly changed into a great abundance of supplies, the general Nypsius, after disembarking his soldiers, held a joint assembly, presented arguments suitable to the occasion and won the support of the men to meet the perils in store. Now the acropolis which was already on the point of being given over to the Syracusans was unexpectedly preserved in the aforesaid manner,
but the Syracusans, manning all their triremes, sailed against the enemy while they were still occupied in unloading the supplies. Since the attack was unexpected and the mercenaries in the citadel could only be drawn up in confused fashion against the enemy triremes, a naval battle took place in which the Syracusans had the superiority, in fact they sank some of the ships, gained possession of others, and pursued the remnant to the shore.
Elated by their success they offered magnificent sacrifice to the gods in honour of the victory, and, turning to banqueting and drink, with contempt for the men they had defeated, were negligent about their guards.

Nypsius, the commander of the mercenaries, wishing to renew the battle and retrieve the defeat, with his army which had been marshalled during the night unexpectedly attacked the wall which had been constructed. And, finding that the guards through contempt and drunkenness had betaken themselves to sleep, he placed against it the ladders that had been constructed in case they were needed.
The bravest of the mercenaries climbed on the wall with these, slaughtered the guards, and opened the gates. As the men poured into the city, the generals of the Syracusans, becoming sober after their drunkenness, tried to bring aid, but, their efforts being hampered by the wine, some were slain and some fled. When the city had been captured and almost all the soldiers from the citadel had rushed inside the circuit-walls, since the Syracusans were panic-stricken by the suddenness and confusion of the attack, a great slaughter took place.
The soldiers of the tyrant numbered more than ten thousand and their lines were so well marshalled that no one was able to withstand their sheer weight, inasmuch as the din and disorder and, furthermore, the lack of a commander, impeded the Syracusans in their hour of defeat.
Once the market-place had come into possession of the enemy, the victors straightway attacked the residences. They carried off much property and took off as slaves many women and children and household servants besides. Where the Syracusans formed to meet them in narrow alleys and other streets, continuous engagements occurred and many were killed and not a few wounded. So they passed the night slaying one another at random in the darkness, and every quarter teemed with dead.

In another post I will be glad to show you what I found odd by comparing the stories I quoted. Wishing to have tickled your curiosity, I invite you all to that date.

So Fair to Lose One's Head

It is not a mistery that I feel a strong connection with my motherland. It may look odd at least that I am proud of it though its name is always at the heart of unpleasant news.
It is a good and fair land, that bred the most savage beast in the worst conditions: the man.
I am not willing to tame my co-landers: their energy, vitality and skills are, to my opinion, ill-directed by the abuse and the arrogance of those who only leave them one way of leaving: ill-doing.
I am not beginning yet victimist another rant, on the contrary! Campania needs not that, it probably needs some help to stand, but no victimism: it has got everything that's needed to make rich and happy its people, it even has got too much!
It was always like that. It is true that (material and human) garbage today render cugly the landscape to the visitor's and the foreigner's eye, but this is its recent appearence, very much hurting and that will cost years to cleanse, but the effort will feel lighter and more acceptable if we give a look not to the devastated territory of today, but to what Nature provided.
Let us then try and understand how much this territory was incomparably rich in its natural state and let history tell that. Today I am copying an excerpt from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, “Roman Antiquities” XV, 3: it was such a beautiful land that people lost their head for it.

When Quintus Servilius (for the third time) and Gaius Marcius Rutilus were consuls, Rome was involved in grave and unexpected dangers, from which, had they not been dispelled by some divine providence, one of two evils would have befallen her — either to have got a shameful name for murdering her hosts or to have stained her hands with civil bloodshed. How she incurred these dangers I shall attempt to recount succinctly after first recalling a few of the events which preceded.
In the previous year Rome, after undertaking the Samnite war in behalf of all Campania and conquering her opponents in three battles, had wished to bring all her forces home, feeling that no further danger remained for the cities there. But when the Campanians besought the Romans not to desert them and leave them bereft of allies, declaring that the Samnites would attack them if they had no assistance from outside, it was decreed that the consul Marcus Valerius, who had freed their cities from war, should leave as large an army in those cities as they wished to support.
Having been given this authority, the consul placed in the justice all who wished to draw rations and be paid for garrison duty; the greater part of these consisted of homeless men burdened with debt, who were glad to escape poverty and the obscure life at home.
The Campanians, taking these men into their homes, welcomed them with lavish tables and entertained them with all the other marks of hospitality. For the manner of life of the Campanians is extravagant and luxurious enough now, and was then, and will be for all time to come, since they dwell in a plain that is rich in both crops and flocks and is most salubrious for men who till the soil.
At first, accordingly, the garrison gladly accepted the hospitality of these people; then, as their souls grew corrupted by the surfeit of good things, they gradually gave way to base considerations, and remarked when meeting that they would be playing the part of witless men if they left such great good fortune behind and returned to their life at Rome, where the land was wretched and there were numerous war taxes, where there was no respite from wars and evils, and the rewards for the hardships suffered by all in common were at the disposition of a few.
Those who had but an insecure livelihood and lacked daily subsistence, and even more those who were unable to discharge their debts to their creditors and declared that their necessity was a sufficient counsellor to advise them of their interests regardless of the honourable course, said that even if all the laws and magistrates should threaten them with the direst penalties, they would no longer relinquish to the Campanians their present good fortune; and finally they came to such a state of madness that they dared to talk in this fashion:
«What terrible crime, indeed, shall we be committing if we expel the Campanians and occupy their cities? For these men themselves did not acquire the land in a just manner what they occupied it aforetime, but after enjoying the hospitality of the Tyrrhenians who inhabited it, they slew all the men and took over their wives, their homes, their cities, and their land that was so well worth fighting for; so that with justice they will suffer whatever they may suffer, having themselves begun the lawless treatment of others.
«What, then, will there be to prevent our enjoying these blessings for all time to come? At any rate, the Samnites, the Sidicini, the Ausonians and all the neighbouring peoples, far from marching against us to avenge the Campanians, will believe that it is enough for them if we allow each of them to retain their own possessions.
«And the Romans perhaps will accept our action as truly an answer to prayer, ambitious as they are to rule all Italy by their own colonies; but if they pretend to be aggrieved and adjudge us enemies, they will not do us as much harm as they will suffer harm at our hands. For we will ravage their territory as much as we please, turn loose the prisoners on the country estates, free the slaves, and take our stand with their bitterest enemies, the Volscians, Tyrrhenians and Samnites, as well as with the Latins who are still wavering in their loyalty. To men driven by stern necessity and running the supreme race for their lives nothing is either impossible or able to withstand them.»

The Past of An Illustrious Neapolitan Man

The time has come to get beack to a character of a key character of Neapolis - The Siren's Recall: that Nymphius who is mentioned en-passant by Livy about Neapolis' siege as a “princeps civitatis” in Ab Urbe Condita, VIII, 25.
There will be a time to show the mentioned excerpt. This post will rather introduce a Plutarch excerpt where one Nypsios, neapolitan, an expert man-at-arms, appers. You might believe that the latter character has nothing to do with the former, apart from an apparent similarity in their names and the fact of being both from Neapolis.

What a Woman Taught

The historical times of my novel Neapolis - The Siren's Recall were perhaps one the happiest for the thinking minds, if we take into consideration the differences and difficulties back then. Greek society was expressing the most advanced fruits of Western thought for the next eighteen centuries: the philosophers.
Among all, Socrates had marked such a strong turn that we distinguish Greek philosophers in pre- and post-socratics, just a bit different from what we do with BC and AD dates.
Socrates did not write anything on his own. All we know about him comes from his disciples, Plato being the first among them.

A Multilingual Land

Campania always was a meeting point for different cultures, and in IV century BC things were not different.
Oscans/Samnites were perhaps the most numerous people, but next to them we could find Greeks (mainly in Neapolis), the Romans who had started to enter the territory (indeed, Acerra had been annexed to the Mescian and Scaptian tribes by the very Quintus Publilius who is so importanto in Neapolis - The Siren's Recall, but Cumaa and Puteolis as well had been taken from the Samnites, and the wealthy Capua literally gave herself to Rome), the Etruscans, the Auruncans, the Volscans…
Any of these peoples spoke its own language, used its own writing, sometimes borrowed the alphabet from others. Is it surprising if Neapolitans gesticulate so much? :)
While writing my novels I also want to face this aspect: how would one live in a land where different ethicities with different languages lived so close together?
I admit that the reply was easier for me who lived in three places where still today there is a situation very similar to the one described.
Right now I live in the area of Barcelona, Spain, Catalonia's capital, where next to Spanish there thrives the Catalan, what remains of a language that, despite its numerous variations, was common to a wide territory from Valencia to Alghero in Sardinia. Influence of Catalan is nowadays recognizable in many spoken languages and dialects well beyond the borders I mentioned, and it would be silly to deny that, but its use has become the matter for political confrontation I don't want to meddle with. From the linguistical point of view, its codification makes it suffer, according to my external and humble opinion, of all the sicknesses of the so-called “dead languages”: lack of spontaneity, expression rigidity, little innovation, fonetical prejudices, etc.
I have also lived for two years in the Netherlands where, next to the official Flemish language, everyone talks a decent English. Foreigners have no problems in asking information or beginning their life in the country, and Dutch people are always nice to the foreigners and try to understand them.
Finally, the third place is Campania itself, an Italian region where, next to Italian, survives with no fear to be forgotten, even with no official economic support, Neapolitan. It survives as a local language, passed by the everyday's life as it is able to express directly, in full, concisely, the ideas of Campanian people.
Stamped for years as “vulgar” (according to the worst of the meanings), it is the language that expressed a first-class musical and opera traditions. Among the first songs coming to mind of foreigners speaking of Italy are 'O Sole Mio and Torna a Surriento; how shocking for them to learn that those are not Italian songs: they are Neapolitan!
Gifted with these experiences, it was easier for me to imagine that the open attitude of the Neapolitans towards foreigners always was the one you can experience while walking along the decumani (the narrow alleys of the historical center): they try to speak, to communicate at all cost, and if they can't use language, they help themselves with gestures, hands, which is a trait that makes you spot an Italian throughout the world.
It is not a little thing, some still see it as a lowly and vulgar thing (“Do NOT gesticulate!” keep on teaching “well-to-do” parents to theatrical sons), but it is a further communication channel, and a further possibility to know different people.
I am not proposing romantic sentences: there are scientific studies on the language development in human babies at different ages, and they show that younger children try to communicate with gestures as well as with sounds, and they finally drop the gestures channel only when they manage to successfully comunicate through speech. It is therefore natural to infer that where gestures language offers expression richness and immediateness, it may easily thrive.
Will you find all of this in my novels? In another post I will explain how I technically faced the problem to let my characters use different languages. In the meantime, I wish I titillated your curiosity on the topic.

About Love

From Preface to Neapolis - The Siren's Recall

One last, needed note, about love. In this novel a few stories intertwine. They are naturally seen and lived through the eyes (and the heart) of the author, though modulated through the requirements of the historical frame.
They are stories from another time, from a culture and a society very different from our our own, and that will hurt the susceptibility of many. Yet, if anyone would try to directly extrapolate by these stories the ways of feeling of the author, he/she would make a big mistake and would use a reading key at least misleading.
[…]
The characters you will know live the feeling abandoning themselves to it, not trying to drive or control it, because when they try that, they miserably fail. Just like we, the present-day and advanced western civilisation, are failing, trying to put a price tag or to give some usefulness to something that doesn't have them by its nature.
For this as well, if I managed to think about this topic in this way, I have to thang Naples, her soul of condescending mother for the juvenile loves of a son, of passionate and jealous lover, of sublime and refined poetess.

Livy Tells the Neapolitan War

As I already anticipated, our main source of information about the war between Rome and Neapolis is an “enemy” writer: Titus Livius (Livy). In this post I am commenting those excerpts where the Roman author tells how the Bellum Neapolitanum started.
Let us begin with the second part of “Ab Urbe Condita”, VIII-22:

Cicero tells…

When one wants that the most innocent sentences are historically sound, historical investigation becomes very crafty. Seldom I found myself reading texts apparently totally unrelated with the topic I wanted to verify, but these are those texts that, en passant, mention the key witness.
This happened with an apparently secondary character in Neapolis - The Siren's Recall, Herennius Pontius. At that time, Herennius was one of the most reknown and respected Samnite chiefs, indeed one of his people very different from the stereotype that history (written by the Roman winners) gave us about Samnites.

Parthenope's Face

Parthenope is not the most known of the Sirens.
The myth regarding the Sirens gives them different name depending on the author: Pseudo-Apollodorus mentions Peisinoe, Aglaope and Thelxiepeia, others name Terpsichore, Melpomene and Sterope or Chthon, Homer does not give them any name. Their very number varies between two and five. The myth naming them as Leucosia, Ligeia and Parthenope (“virgin-voice”) is thus just one among many but, as it happens, is the one I am most interested in.
In my novels Parthenope herself tells her tale. It is worth noticing that, with her sister, she was transformed in a bird-woman (not a fish-maiden as the medieval traditions tell) by Demetra's wrath, as she was unable to protect her daughter Persephone from Hades' lust. Actually Hades even behaved as a gentleman: he was really in love with Persephone, he married her and made so that she could not have stayed far from him. At any new fall the maiden has to get back to her husband, whilst she could spend spring and summer with her mother to till the fields.
The temptation to explain here the chtonian meanings of the myth is strong, but this is not the time. If you wish so, I will be glad to prepare another post. Now I have to get back to Parthenope.
So, a bird-woman. Do we have images of that?

Anabasis Alexandri

The Alexander's Expedition, by Greek historian Arrian, is the most ancient tale we have about the expedition undertook by Alexander The Great to conquer the Persian Empire.
Written in II century AD, it is a chronicle, thus devoid of any introspection: it is a collection of events with no explanation of their reasons; as such, it is a very objective work.
While the events in Neapolis - The Siren's Recall happen, on the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean a young leader educated by a philosopher (no less than Aristotle) subjugated, in historic battles, the greatest empire at that time.
One of the main characters in my novel is linked with the macedonian leader, and I had thus to learn what could historically have happened to him to later tell that from his point of view.
The excerpts from the “Anabasis” I referred to are tho paragraphs from the first tome

Presentation

Welcome!
In this blog I am introducing the historic novels that kept me busy with most of my writer activity since 2009. I am not a writer, so the novels are not the fruit of a pre-confectioned idea, but of a feeling towards the town of Naples I feel so tied with. Here I just want to share the experience collected to get to the books in their final version.
You can see this blog as The making of…
Here I am collecting the historical sources I accessed, their critics, there will be short excerpts of the text here and there… I believe it will be a merry and intriguing experience, and I count on the readers' contribution to progress on this adventure.
Yep, you know: appetite comes by eating (as we say in Italy), I loved so much to close these stories, and I found so many more hints for future ones, that I already feel ready to begin another one!
But, first things first, let's do the things as they should be done, and let me stay with my feet on the ground: at this time all I have is enough to write about these two novels: Neapolis - The Siren's Recall and Neapolis - The Horsemasters, and I can assure it is hot stuff. Are you curious? Well, you just need to start reading these pages: it is all history, real history, just a bit forgotten.

Philogelos

He who knows one's own limitations also knows that those limitations do exist. If he is gifted with goodwill, he can try and exceed them.
I don't think I am extremely “brilliant”: I am more an introverted and more prone to deep meditation than to laughter. My grandpa, who was a writer in Neapolitan language as a hobby, was gifted with a precious comedian style, infinitely stronger than mine! Yet, while writing Neapolis - The Siren's Recall, I felt the desperate need of that very comedian style.
Why?, one might ask. Can one find hilarious moments in a story as violent as the one a siege?
As a matter of facts, the Neapolitan spirit could find any moment good for laughter.
And I had a problem: I wanted to imbue that spirit in the story I wanted to tell, but I missed that very spirit. What to do?

Dedication

To Susy, the Weaver,
to Arianna, the Web.
For there's no Web without its Weaver,
nor there's a Weaver without a Web.
For with no Weaver and no Web
there is no Story to be read.
And with no Story, who am I
If not another passer-by?

Foreword

This blog is the English version of the one I have been editing since 2012 in Italian and that was intended as a logbook describing the work-in-progress of my historic novels about brilliant, little-known moments of the ancient Naples' history.
With time I grew conscious of the quality of the work done, and thought about expanding the readers' base to the English-speaking world, in search for the opportunities that this step would bring: English language publishers, movie writers, tourist trip organizers, you name it.
The blog covers different parts of my creative process, starting from the analysis of the Greek and Latin historical and literary sources all the way to the introduction of excerpts from my novels. The reason for such a wide approach to the novels is that my novels are really the fruit of all this massive work: the Greek and Latin sources often give conflicting versions of the events they report, and seldom they conflict with the reality of the times or places reported.
My novels are thus the result of the attempt to be inspired by those chronicles, give them a coherence, produce a novel that satisfied my taste. This whole work was a growing up and gratifying experience.
Of course, this whole effort was much stronger than what strictly needed to write the novels, not all that I found and read could find its way into them, nor it could be explained there: the novels are a plece where to tell one tale, not the history of Greek/Roman Neapolis. This blog is also the chance to recollect all that material for the curious reader, for he who wants to know more about it.
For such a reader, the main page is thus the one listing the bibliographic sources.
Next to this, to titillate your curiosity and wishing that you will appreciate it, there is a page of excerpts from the novels.
Another page describes the temporal evolution of this project.
I wish that you will like this setting and wish to know your opinion about it. Write in plenty!