MY VISIT TO SYBARIS. FROM REV. FREDERIC INGHAM'S PAPERS. It is a great while since I first took an interest in Sybaris. Sybarites have a bad name. But before I had heard of them anywhere else, I had painfully looked out the words in the three or four precious anecdotes about Sybaris in the old Greek Reader; and I had made up my boy's mind about the Sybarites. When I came to know the name they had got elsewhere, I could not but say that the world had been very unjust to them! - O dear! I can see it now, the old Latin schoolroom, where we used to sit, and hammer over that Greek, after the small boys had gone. They went at eleven; we - because we were twelve or more stayed till twelve. From eleven to twelve we sat, with only those small boys who had been "kept" for their sins, and Mr. Dillaway. The room was long and narrow; how long and how narrow you may see, if you will go and examine M. Duchesne's model of "Boston as it was," and pay twenty-five cents to the Richmond schools. For all this is of the past; and in the same spot in space where once a month the Exam iner Club now meets at Parker's, and discusses the difference between religion and superstition, the folly of copyright, and the origin of things, the boys who did not then belong to the Examiner Club, say Fox and Clarke and Furness and Waldo Emerson, thumbed their Græca Minora or their Greek Readers in "Boston as it was," and learned the truth about Sybaris! A long, narrow room, I say, whose walls, when I knew them first, were of that tawny orange wash which is appropriated to kitchens. But, by a master stroke of Mr. Dillaway's, these walls were made lilac or purple one summer vacation. We sat, to recite, on long settees, pea-green in color, which would teeter slightly on the well-worn floor. There, for an hour daily, while brighter boys than I recited, I sat an hour musing, looking at the immense Jacobs's Greek Reader, and waiting my turn to come. If you did not look off your book much, no harm came to you. So, in the hour, you got fifty-three minutes and a few odd seconds of day-dream, for six minutes and two thirds of reciting, unless, which was unusual, some fellow above you broke down, and a question, passed along of a sudden, recalled you to modern life. I have been sitting on that old green settee, and at the same time riding on horseback in Virginia, through an open wooded country, with one of Lord Fairfax's grandsons and two pretty cousins of his, and a fallow deer has just appeared in the distance, when, by the failure of Hutchinson or Wheeler, just above me, poor Mr. Dillaway has had to ask me, "Ingham, what verbs omit the reduplication?" Talk of war! Where is versatility, otherwise called presence of mind, so needed as in recitation at a public school? Well, there, I say, I made acquaintance with Sybaris. Nay, strictly speaking, my first visits to Sybaris were made there and then. What the Greek Reader tells of Sybaris is in three or four anecdotes, woven into that strange, incoherent patchwork of "Geography." In that place are patched together a statement of Strabo and one of Athenæus about two things in Sybaris which may have belonged some eight hundred years apart. But what of that to a school-boy! Will your descendants, dear reader, in the year 3579 A. D., be much troubled, if, in the English Reader of their day, Queen Victoria shall be made to drink Spartan black broth with William the Conqueror out of a conch-shell in New Zealand? With regard to Sybaris, then, the old Jacobs's Greek Reader tells the following stories: "The Sybarites were distinguished for luxury. They did not permit the trades which made a loud noise, such as those of brass-workers, carpenters, and the like, to be carried on in the heart of the city, so that their sleep might be wholly undisturbed by noise. . . . . And a Sybarite who had gone to Lacedæmon, and had been invited to the public meal, after he had sat on their wooden benches and partaken of their fare, said that he had been astonished at the fearlessness of the Lacedæmo nians when he knew it only by report; but now that he had seen them, he thought that they did not excel other men, for he thought that any brave man had much rather die than be obliged to live such a life as they did." Then there is another story, among the "miscellaneous anecdotes," of a Sybarite who was asked if he had slept well. He said, No, that he believed he had a crumpled rose-leaf under him in the night. And there is yet another, of one of them who said that it made his back ache to see another man digging. I have asked Polly, as I write, to look in Mark Lemon's Jest-Book for these stories. They are not in the index there. But I dare say they are in Cotton Mather and Jeremy Taylor. Any way, they are bits of very cheap Greek. Now it is on such stories that the reputation of the Sybarites in modern times appears to depend. Now look at them. This Sybarite at Sparta said, that in war death was often easier than the hardships of life. Well, is not that true? Have not thousands of brave men said it? When the English and French got themselves established on the wrong side of Sebastopol, what did that engineer officer of the French say to somebody who came to inspect his works? He was talking of St. Arnaud, their first commander. "Cunning dog," said he, "he went and died." Death was easier than life. But nobody ever said he was a coward or effeminate because he said this. Why, if our |