my
mind; now is the "Odyssey" for the first time become to me a living
world.'

But rich as the whole of Sicily may be in classical associations,
two places, Syracuse and Girgenti, are pre-eminent for the power of
bringing the Greek past forcibly before us. Their interest is of two
very different kinds. Girgenti still displays the splendour of
temples placed upon a rocky cornice between sea and olive-groves.
Syracuse has nothing to show but the scene of world-important
actions. Yet the great deeds recorded by Thucydides, the conflict
between eastern and western Hellas which ended in the annihilation
of the bright, brief, brilliant reality of Athenian empire, remain
so clearly written on the hills and harbours and marshlands of
Syracuse that no place in the world is topographically more
memorable. The artist, whether architect, or landscape-painter, or
poet, finds full enjoyment at Girgenti. The historian must be
exacting indeed in his requirements if he is not satisfied with
Syracuse.

What has become of Syracuse, 'the greatest of Greek cities and the
fairest of all cities' even in the days of Cicero? Scarcely one
stone stands upon another of all those temples and houses. The five
towns which were included by the walls have now shrunk to the little
island which the first settlers named Ortygia, where the sacred
fountain of Arethusa seemed to their home-loving hearts to have
followed them from Hellas.[1] Nothing survives but a few columns of
Athene's temple built into a Christian church, with here and there
the marble masonry of a bath or the Roman stonework of an
amphitheatre. There are not even any mounds or deep deposits of
rubble mixed with pottery to show here once a town had been.[2]
_Etiam periere ruinae._ The vast city, devastated for the last time
by the Saracens in 878 A.D., has been reduced to dust and swept by
the scirocco into the sea. This is the explanation of its utter
ruin. The stone of Syracuse is friable and easily disintegrated. The
petulant moist wind of the south-east corrodes its surface; and when
it falls, it crumbles to powder. Here, then, the elements have had
their will unchecked by such sculptured granite as in Egypt resists
the mounded sand of the desert, or by such marble colonnades as in
Athens have calmly borne the insults of successive sieges. What was
hewn out of the solid rock--the semicircle of the theatre, the
street of the tombs with its deeply dented chariot-ruts, the
gigantic