The Origin of the Word “Sybarite”

Today we call a sybarite the person who orders wine by asking about the vintage, who cannot conceive of coffee that isn't single-origin, the friend who drives two hours for a ceviche “that's worth it”. A connoisseur of pleasure. What almost nobody knows is that the original sybarite was not a type of person but a demonym: an inhabitant of Sybaris, a Greek city so scandalously rich and so devoted to luxury that its name became an adjective. And its story —rise, decadence and an ending worthy of a fable— is one of the best the ancient world left us.

The city where roosters were banned

Sybaris was founded around 720 BC by Greek colonists in southern Italy, on a plain so fertile between two rivers that wealth arrived almost effortlessly. At its peak it was possibly the most prosperous city of the Greek Mediterranean, and its inhabitants decided that so much fortune deserved to be enjoyed methodically.

The ancient chronicles —written, it must be said, by their neighbors, who were not exactly impartial— tell wonders. The Sybarites banned roosters inside the city so nobody's sleep would be interrupted, and for the same reason they banished blacksmiths and carpenters to the outskirts: the noise of work was an assault on rest. They say the main streets were covered with awnings so the sun wouldn't bother anyone, and that hosts sent out their banquet invitations a full year in advance, so the cooks had time to prepare and the ladies could have their dresses made.

My favorite: if a cook invented a new dish, the city granted him the exclusive right to prepare it for a year, so that the glory and the profits would be his alone. In other words, the Sybarites invented the gastronomic patent two and a half thousand years before intellectual property law.

The man of the rose petal

The most celebrated sybarite was Smindyrides, of whom Herodotus tells that he traveled to court the daughter of a Greek tyrant bringing along —as Diodorus Siculus adds— a thousand servants, cooks, fishermen and bird-catchers among them, just in case the food in someone else's house wasn't up to standard. Seneca, centuries later, turned him into the eternal symbol of softness: Smindyrides complained one night that he hadn't been able to sleep, and when asked why, he explained that one of the rose petals he was lying on was folded.

The dancing horses

So much exquisiteness had to be paid for, and the bill arrived in 510 BC. Sybaris went to war with its neighbor Croton —the city of the famous athlete Milo, who commanded the army in person—. And here the chronicles record one of the most absurd and memorable endings in ancient military history.

It turns out the Sybarites, in their zeal for refinement, had taught their war horses to dance to the sound of the flute for parades and festivals. The Crotoniates knew it. So in the middle of the battle, instead of sounding war trumpets, they brought out flute players. The Sybarite horses, hearing the music, began to dance. The most elegant cavalry in the Mediterranean dissolved into a choreography — and behind it, the city.

Croton was not content with winning: it diverted the river Crathis to flow over the ruins and erase Sybaris from the map. It succeeded so thoroughly that archaeologists didn't find the city until the 1960s, buried under meters of sediment in today's Calabria. Of the empire of pleasure nothing remained but the name — the same Greeks who invented mechanisms as serious as ostracism turned “sybarite” into a proverb, the Romans inherited it, and twenty-five centuries later we keep using it without suspecting that behind it lies an entire city drowned by a river.

It should be said: modern historians suspect that a good part of these stories was propaganda by the victors, exaggerations to justify the destruction of a rival that had grown too rich. Maybe so. But if even half of it were true, the Sybarites would have been delighted to know that, two and a half thousand years later, their name is still a synonym for living well.

References

1. Athenaeus of Naucratis, Deipnosophistae, Book XII, 520c–521a (citing Aristotle's Constitution of Sybaris), trans. C. D. Yonge (Book 12, ch. 19), Perseus Digital Library. perseus.tufts.edu
2. Herodotus, Histories 6.127: Smindyrides of Sybaris, son of Hippocrates, "the most luxurious liver of his day", suitor of Agariste, daughter of Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon. Trans. A. D. Godley, Perseus/Scaife Viewer. scaife.perseus.org
3. Strabo, Geography 6.1.13: the Crotoniates took Sybaris and "conducted the river over it and submerged it". Perseus Digital Library. perseus.tufts.edu
4. Real Academia Española and ASALE, "sibarita", Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed. (online version). dle.rae.es

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