than ever
Athens was, or Sparta, or the whole of Hellas. It invented and carried
into effect free popular education,--a gift to the administration of
free government larger than ever Rome rendered. It received and honored
Charondas, the great practical legislator, from whose laws no man shall
say how much has trickled down into the Code Napoleon or the Revised
Statutes of New York, through the humble studies of the Roman jurists.
It maintained in peace, prosperity, happiness, and, as its maligners
say, in comfort, an immense population. If they had not been as
comfortable as they were,--if a tenth part of them had received alms
every year, and a tenth part were flogged in the public schools every
year,--if one in forty had been sent to prison every year, as in the
happy city which publishes the "Atlantic Monthly,"--then Sybaris,
perhaps, would never have got its bad name for luxury. Such a city
lived, flourished, ruled, for hundreds of years. Of such a city all that
you know now with certainty is, that its coin is "the most beautifully
finished in the cabinets of ancient coinage"; and that no traveller even
pretends to be sure that he has been to the site of it for more than a
hundred years. That speaks well for your nineteenth century.

Now the reader who has come thus far will understand that I, having come
thus far, in twenty-odd years since those days of teetering on the
pea-green settee, had always kept Sybaris in the background of my head,
as a problem to be solved, and an inquiry to be followed to its
completion. There could hardly have been a man in the world better
satisfied than I to be the hero of the adventure which I am now about to
describe.

* * * * *

If the reader remembers anything about Garibaldi's triumphal entry into
Porto Cavallo in Sicily in the spring of 1859, he will remember that,
between the months of March and April in that year, the great chieftain
made, in that wretched little fishing haven, a long pause, which was not
at the time understood by the journals or by their military critics, and
which, indeed, to this hour has never been publicly explained. I suppose
I know as much about it as any man now living. But I am not writing
Garibaldi's memoirs, nor, indeed, my own, excepting so far as they
relate to Sybaris; and it is strictly nobody's business to inquire as to
that detention, unless it interest the ex-king of Naples, who may write
to me, if he chooses