Slayer of tyrants and saviour of Sicily
Jasper Griffin
A CHOICE OF MURDER by Peter Vansittart Peter Owen, £14.99, pp .216 If history were a more moral business, it would perhaps not be Alexander of Mace- don whom we call 'The Great' and name our sons after, but Timoleon, the son of Timodemus of Corinth, a generation before, whom in Sicily they called 'The Liberator'. Not everybody knows about him; but now he has been made the subject of a novel by Peter Vansittart, an extraordi- nary writer. The pedantic reader — and what reader of The Spectator has not a touch of pedantry? — is a little foxed that the author chooses to call his hero Timo, which (of course) is in Greek a woman's name; but Vansittart knows a lot about Greece, imagines more, and tells a remark- able story with energy, style and insight.
Timoleon killed his own elder brother, who had made himself tyrant of his native city. Half admired, half rejected, for an action which so pointedly combined the vir- tuous and the horrible, he passed 20 years avoiding public life, and indeed, says Plutarch, he
spent his time wandering in great distress of mind among the most desolate parts of the country.
Vansittart fleshes out that bleak narrative, Imagining the boy Timo growing up in Corinth, a place of feuds, superstitions, and homosexual passions: a strange place, created with great intensity of detail and feel for colours, smells, and the sharp pangs of fear and desire. The brother is well drawn, glamorous and brutal. Timo saved his life in battle, but he despised him for his lack of charisma and his steady scrupulousness. The outcast life which fol- lows the assassination is provided with a woman and a man: the woman nameless, barely Greek, passionate but not affection- ate, devoted to a mysterious cult which the hero never understands; the man a wolf- like outsider, in grey animal skins, living silently in the wild. These two are perhaps the most clearly romantic of the author's fictions.
Suddenly the hero is recalled to Corinth and sent with a tiny force to help the daughter-city of Syracuse in its struggle to rid itself of a tyrant and fight off the vast armies of Carthage. The career of Timo- leon was one which the ancients themselves found hard to believe: without any obvious assets, helped only by a good fortune which by the end seemed unmistakably divine, he was preserved from assassination, defeated overwhelming enemies, crushed a mighty Carthaginian army, put down the tyrants all over western Sicily, dismantled the great fortress from which the despots had ruled Syracuse, restored a limited democracy, and repeopled the devastated cities left bare by generations of warfare. Refusing the title of king, he grabbed no power for himself; and he died a natural death, ven- erated almost beyond the reach of envy or malignancy, an achievement hard to paral- lel in the long history of that rancorous people, the Greeks. Plutarch mulls over the question of good luck and great qualities in this amazing life, and can only conclude that Timoleon's career was 'a product not of fortune but of fortunate nobility' — both natural qualities and good luck.
The hero is not depicted in the ancient
Sermon
pulp it
Bernard Proctor
sources as obviously cut out for heroism. Sending him to Sicily seems to have been a fluke, and perhaps a prudent man would have declined the job. Vansittart imagines him 'small, perhaps blemished, certainly ugly'. The reader is reminded of Macaulay's William III, with the addition of the good luck which William never had in his battles. He also is less than articulate. Greeks attached more importance to good looks than any other people who have ever existed, and all too many of them possessed the gift of the gab in overflowing measure. To be plain and uneloquent was to suffer from two tremendous handicaps.
Timo cannot even explain clearly to the Syracusans why he will not become king, as, in that age of unbridled will to power, all expected. But Vansittart tries to use, and to make lively and interesting, the motif of Hellenic restraint, that often life- diminishing platitude, 'Nothing in excess', which so fascinated the Greeks. The Great King of Persia offered alliance, luxury, and opulence; Philip of Macedon, Alexander's father, offered blood-brotherhood against the Persians and a share in the conquest and loot of the world. Both offers, tempt- ing as they might be, he declined:
Hellas is small and divided or she is nothing, only a mere portion of the Great King's gild- ed beehive. Our cities face a common task: to maintain diversity without conflict, sharing without subordination. Our liberties are those of selfhood and, like each one of you, must respect limits . . . The conquest of Per- sia would destroy not her but ourselves.
The theme is not less timely now than then. The historical novel is a curious form, open to attack or scepticism at either end, as insufficiently accurate or insufficiently imaginative. A Choice of Murder is a distin- guished example of its much denounced but never despatched genre. It is intensely, at times violently, written, and a battle or a public meeting or a fruit market can carry the reader away. This is a sensual world. And is it true to the Sicily of the fourth century BC? Like Flaubert's Salammbo it is perhaps rather too continuously intense. Life did have its longueurs, after all, then as now. But a lot of it rings true. Not least in Timo's reflections on his own worst action, when he failed to exert himself to save the womenfolk of a defeated tyrant from lynch- ing, the moment which Plutarch calls the `most unpleasing' of his life. Vansittart con- vincingly shows Timo not as a sadist but as depressed, weary, apathetic. Afterwards he reflects gloomily on himself: 'Cruel, venge- ful, capricious, he might indeed be a god'. As for human life: 'They were born, they suffered, and they died'. Not the prurient post-Christian disgust of Eliot, 'Birth, cop- ulation, and death', but the darker wisdom of our far pagan ancestors. And what did Timoleon achieve in the end? Not every- thing, but not nothing, either: it was 20 years after his death before another truly horrendous tyrant arose to rob and kill in Sicily.
Previous page
