iberty. It is almost impossible to trace more than the mere circuit
of the walls of Poseidonia. Its port, if port it had in Roman days,
has disappeared. Its theatre is only just discernible. Still not a
column of the great hypaethral temple, built by the Sybarite
colonists two thousand and five hundred years ago, to be a house for
Zeus or for Poseidon, has been injured. The accidents that erased
far greater cities, like Syracuse, from the surface of the
earth--pillage, earthquake, the fury of fanatics, the slow decay of
perishable stone, or the lust of palace builders in the middle
ages--have spared those three houses of the gods, over whom, in the
days of Alexander, the funeral hymn was chanted by the enslaved
Hellenes.

'We do the same,' said Aristoxenus in his Convivial Miscellanies,
'as the men of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrhenian Gulf. It
befell them, having been at first true Hellenes, to be utterly
barbarised, changing to Tyrrhenes or Romans, and altering their
language, together with their other customs. Yet they still observe
one Hellenic festival, when they meet together and call to
remembrance their old names and bygone institutions; and having
lamented one to the other, and shed bitter tears, they afterwards
depart to their own homes. Even thus a few of us also, now that our
theatres have been barbarised, and this art of music has gone to
ruin and vulgarity, meet together and remember what once music
was.'[1]

[1] _Athenaeus_, xiv. 632.

This passage has a strange pathos, considering how it was penned,
and how it has come down to us, tossed by the dark indifferent
stream of time. The Aristoxenus who wrote it was a pupil of the
Peripatetic School, born at Tarentum, and therefore familiar with
the vicissitudes of Magna Graecia. The study of music was his chief
preoccupation; and he used this episode in the agony of an enslaved
Greek city, to point his own conservative disgust for innovations in
an art of which we have no knowledge left. The works of Aristoxenus
have perished, and the fragment I have quoted is embedded in the
gossip of Egyptian Athenaeus. In this careless fashion has been
opened for us, as it were, a little window on a grief now buried in
the oblivion of a hundred generations. After reading his words one
May morning, beneath the pediment of Paestum's noblest ruin, I could
not refrain from thinking that if the spirits of those captive
Hellenes were to revisit their old habitations