with ease--felled like forest pines? One sees
the mighty pillars lying as they sank, like swathes beneath the
mower's scythe. Their basements are still in line. The drums which
composed them have fallen asunder, but maintain their original
relation to each other on the ground. Was it earthquake or the hand
of man that brought them low? Poggio Bracciolini tells us that in
the fifteenth century they were burning the marble buildings of the
Roman Campagna for lime. We know that the Senator Brancaleone made
havoc among the classic monuments occupied as fortresses by
Frangipani and Savelli and Orsini. We understand how the Farnesi
should have quarried the Coliseum for their palace. But here, at the
distance of three miles from Girgenti, in a comparative desert, what
army, or what band of ruffians, or what palace-builders could have
found it worth their while to devastate mere mountains of sculptured
sandstone? The Romans invariably respected Greek temples. The early
Christians used them for churches:--and this accounts for the
comparative perfection of the Concordia. It was in the age of the
Renaissance that the ruin of Girgenti's noblest monuments occurred.
The temple of Zeus Olympius was shattered in the fifteenth century,
and in the next its fragments were used to build a breakwater. The
demolition of such substantial edifices is as great a wonder as
their construction. We marvel at the energy which must have been
employed on their overthrow, no less than at the art which raised
such blocks of stone and placed them in position.

While so much remains both at Syracuse and at Girgenti to recall the
past, we are forced here, as at Athens, to feel how very little we
really know about Greek life. We cannot bring it up before our fancy
with any clearness, but rather in a sort of hazy dream, from which
some luminous points emerge. The entrance of an Olympian victor
through the breach in the city walls of Girgenti, the procession of
citizens conducting old Timoleon in his chariot to the theatre, the
conferences of the younger Dionysius with Plato in his guarded
palace-fort, the stately figure of Empedocles presiding over
incantations in the marshes of Selinus, the austerity of Dion and
his mystic dream, the first appearance of stubborn Gylippus with
long Lacedaemonian hair in the theatre of Syracuse,--such picturesque
pieces of history we may fairly well recapture. But what were the
daily occupations of the Simaetha of Theocrit