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Updated: June 25, 2025
Elmo threw his cigar out of the window, and walked up and down the quaint and elegant rooms, whose costly bizarrerie would more appropriately have adorned a villa of Parthenope or Lucanian Sybaris, than a country- house in soi-disant "republican" America.
Of a sudden the dense foliage was cleft; there opened a broad alley between drooping boughs, and in the deep hollow, bordered with sand and stones, a flood rolled eastward. This river is now called Sinno; it was the ancient Sins, whereon stood the city of the same name. In the seventh century before Christ, Sins was lauded as the richest city in the world; for luxury it outrivalled Sybaris.
The dragon of the glittering scales that threatens American youth and maidens may be rather Sybaris by the sea than Arcadia on the hills. It may be also rather the annual half-million of utter aliens that come from other lands, strange to us in everything that fosters a homogeneous national life, rather than the hundreds who come down morally as well as numerically from the uplands nearer heaven.
That state also is liable to seditions which is composed of different nations, till their differences are blended together and undistinguishable; for as a city cannot be composed of every multitude, so neither can it in every given time; for which reason all those republics which have hitherto been originally composed of different people or afterwards admitted their neighbours to the freedom of their city, have been most liable to revolutions; as when the Achaeans joined with the Traezenians in founding Sybaris; for soon after, growing more powerful than the Traezenians, they expelled them from the city; from whence came the proverb of Sybarite wickedness: and again, disputes from a like cause happened at Thurium between the Sybarites and those who had joined with them in building the city; for they assuming upon these, on account of the country being their own, were driven out.
If Sybaris is so sad a name to the memory and who is without some Sybaris of his own? if the image of it is so tormenting and in the end so disgusting, this is not because we no longer think its marbles bright, its fountains cool, its athletes strong, or its roses fragrant; but because, mingled with all these supreme beauties, there is the ubiquitous shade of Nemesis, the sense of a vacant will and a suicidal inhumanity.
Everything done and taught in the fraternity was kept a profound secret from all without its pale. It appears that the members had some private signs, like Freemasons, by which they could recognise each other, even if they had never met before. His doctrines spread rapidly over Magna Graecia, and clubs of a similar character were established at Sybaris, Metapontum, Tarentum, and other cities.
Close to the fire lay Philoinus of Sybaris, a corpulent man with strongly-marked features and a sensual expression of face; he was stretched at full-length on a couch covered with spotted furs, and amused himself by playing with his scented curls wreathed with gold, and with the golden chains which fell from his neck on to the long saffron-colored robe that clothed him down to his feet.
"You have acted very harshly towards me in the past, dear Cairn; but because my philosophy consists in an admirable blending of that practised in Sybaris with that advocated by the excellent Zeno; because whilst I am prepared to make my home in a Diogenes' tub, I, nevertheless, can enjoy the fragrance of a rose, the flavour of a peach "
Take heart, my horned goats, to-morrow I will dip you all in the fountain of Sybaris. Thou white he-goat, I will beat thee if thou dare to touch one of the herd before I sacrifice the lamb to the nymphs. There he is at it again! Call me Melanthius, not Comatas, if I do not cudgel thee.
Sybaris in its time the largest city in Italy exercised dominion over four barbarian tribes and five-and-twenty townships, and was able to found Laus and Posidonia on the other sea. The exceedingly fertile low grounds of the Crathis and Bradanus yielded a superabundant produce to the Sybarites and Metapontines it was there perhaps that grain was first cultivated for exportation.
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